MOMENTUM PERFORMANCE COACHING BLOG

 How to get the most from your team meetings…..set the rules!

When I ask business owners the reasons why team meetings are at best infrequent events in their business typical answers I get are ‘Don’t have time,’ ‘To time consuming,’ ‘They’re just not productive,’ or even the golden nugget ‘Death by meeting.’

In the corporate world it is known for managers to have a meetings about meetings so they have pre-meetings and the management becomes locked into the meeting merry go round.

So it’s easy to see why meetings can get a ‘bad press’ yet if you look at really successful teams and businesses, meetings are an integral part of why they are successful in the first place. Which poses the question ‘What are they doing in their meetings that makes them such a success?’

I believe that most owners/managers deep down understand the value of having meetings the challenge is that most turn into at best a chat that has little or no value. Because of the lack of value team members will offer excuses why they can’t attend leading to meetings being cancelled which leads to the belief that they are waste of valuable time.

The best meetings however will align the focus of a team, build trust, drive commitment which will lead to peer to peer accountability and a much bigger focus on the business results.

So how can you hold effective meetings?

Two things that need to be in place to hold effective meetings are:

• A clear understanding of the purpose of the meeting. What is it you want people to do after the meeting?
• Clearly defined rules. There is a presumption that people should know the rules after all its common-sense problem there is common-sense isn’t that common. In the absence of rules people will make up their own.

My focus in this blog is on ways of establishing rules that will lead to more successful and productive meetings.

A simple discussion about agreeing the ground rules is all that’s needed to get the subject out in the open. Here are few areas that will to be considered:

• What are the starting and finishing times of the meeting?
• Who needs to attend the meeting? Who doesn’t need to attend?  
• Who is accountable for recording the minutes and outcomes of the meeting?
• What are the rules regarding laptops, tablets, mobile phones etc?
• What are the toilet break rules?
• What are the rules around interruptions during the meeting?

Bearing in mind that one of the purposes of holding effective meetings is to build trust amongst the team lets look at a typical scenario:

A meeting is booked to start at 10:00 that means that everybody should be in their seats ready to go at 10:00. It does not mean top your coffees up because we are about to start or if need to loo now’s the time to pay a visit or if you have any calls to make now is the time. Two things need to be considered here is how much respect is being paid to those who are organised, arrive on time, bring all the relevant information and are seated ready to go at the assigned time? If this continues to happen what will it do to trust? Also If someone who is vital to the meeting arrives late by ten minutes and there are six other attendees you have just lost one man hour.

What to do next

With your team discuss the rules and the reasons for the rules. Get buy in from the team (not consensus). Ask what will happen if rules are not met. Have the rules drawn up and published to everybody. Revisit them regularly. Make sure that you have 100% participation in sticking to the rules that includes the owner!