During our Grow Your Business With Confidence last
week, one of the attendees commented that he is searching for a way to grow his
business without having to hire any staff.
Ever found yourself uttering a similar thought
yourself?
Hard truth is though, if you want to grow a great
business you won’t be able to do it on your own.
The headaches involved with the hiring talent,
holding onto talent, managing talent and growing more talent are very common in
the SME sector. And whilst the subject is in and of itself way too large to
cover in one blog, I would like to focus today on just one small change that
can help get your team aligned and also tap into and leverage the collective
intelligence of the whole team to drive your business forward.
That small change is Team Meetings. For some, the very
mention of team meetings will have you cringing but I have witnessed not only
in my clients businesses but also my own that meetings that are correctly
structured and have clear outcomes can both be interesting, enlightening for
your team and game changing for the business.
In any growing business one of the main arguments
for not having meetings is the time they take. I would argue that not taking
that time is costing you far more time across the business because of a lack of
communication, understanding in which direction the business is moving, and the
plan for how you intend to get there.
For some a team meeting is seen as a way of having a
quick catch up or chat together about last night’s football or other
interesting events that have taken place. The point of having a meeting is
being totally missed and provides the biggest excuse I hear for why meetings
don’t take place “I am always here with my team and it’s only a small team so I
don’t need to have formal meetings,” yes you do.
There are four key elements to holding a great team
meeting:
1.
As the business owner you need to be
very clear about the purpose of the meeting.
2.
Have a very clear agenda for all meetings.
3.
A time limit for the meeting. Most tend
to be an hour but in actual fact, the same result could be achieved in much
less time.
4.
Limit the amount of attendees. It’s not
about having the whole team sitting there with you. It’s about having the right
people sat in the meeting and making sure that these people cascade the message
throughout their departments.
There are in actual fact four kinds of meetings that
you need to be considering within your business:
1.
The first being the daily huddle. This
is a quick stand-up kind of meeting, taking no more than 5-10 minutes to
outline the wins from the previous day and the expectations for coming day.
2.
A weekly meeting. Normally a tactical
meeting to discuss the operational stuff within the business. Keeping abreast
of KPI’s and the movement towards the businesses priorities.
3.
A monthly strategic meeting. Based in
and around the 90 day plan (you do have a 90 day plan?)
4.
The quarterly meeting. Which I would
highly recommend is held off site so that you can really get your heads down to
planning the next quarter’s priorities for the business, look at what could
have worked better in the previous quarter and the one that most businesses
forget identify what it is you are going to stop doing in the forthcoming
quarter.
This might sound like a tall order for most of you
but remember, if you spend a great deal of time fire-fighting, if communication
is a problem in your company, if people are making the same or similar mistakes
time and time again, or maybe your team are not doing what you want them to do
so thus never reaching the potential you would like to see, this is by far the
most valuable and quickest intervention you could undertake as a business
leader.
A great question to ask yourself every time you plan
a meeting. “What do I want my team members to be doing as a result of attending
this meeting?” you will surprised how much clarity and focus it will give you
within the meetings. The biggest plus will be how the whole process will
accelerate the progress of your company.
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