How to Hold a Team Meeting

One of the signs of a bad meeting is when people "combine in a single grueling meeting administrative issues, tactical decisions, creative brainstorming, strategic analysis, and personnel discussions". No wonder people complain about meetings. They hate meetings and want fewer of them.

Good Meetings

To hold good meetings, you need to strive for high clarity and focus.

How to do this? First of all, think about holding different meetings for different issues. It will be better if you do not minimize the number of meetings per week. That is not the best option, but it is better to try to hold the right meetings and make them effective.

Secondly, the outcome of a good meeting should be a feeling that people, by attending these meetings, are doing real work, and in the end they feel satisfied.

For team meetings to work, preparation is necessary. Here are a few steps for preparation:

The first thing to do is to bring together the people who matter.

Preparing for these meetings helps build trust among people outside them.

You want them to feel happy to engage in productive conflict, meaning they can reasonably disagree with each other without looking like jerks. You can do this by providing examples of healthy and constructive conflict. You can fabricate or model these conflict moments for your team. Eventually, conflict will become a more familiar and expected way of behaving at meetings.

The second point in creating effective meetings for your team is setting the agenda at the beginning of the meeting.

Please don't bring a prepared agenda to the meeting and don't send it out in the calendar invitation. Instead, you set aside time, say 5-10 minutes at the start of the team meeting, to create the agenda for that meeting, which will be relevant and current in real time.

As a first step, you go around the room and ask people to share two or three key things that they consider to be their top priorities for the week.

The second step is that each team member rates these items as green, orange, or red. Red will be the highest priority for discussion, orange second, and green for what is not a priority at this stage at all.

You want to invite discussion on how to rate the items. For example, you ask the COO to comment on hiring an art director. The COO might say: "Hiring an art director is a red priority because we won't be able to meet the soft launch benchmarks if we don't have someone managing this process," and so on. Then the team can comment on those statements about priorities and engage in this healthy conflict.

And as a final step, the meeting chair should form the agenda from the red and orange items.

The beauty of this agenda building is that different people will influence each other's decisions based on their perspectives. You will get a multitude of different comments on the company's current and priority issues.

And, importantly, leaders always learn a lot about what's happening in the team when they hear colleagues' assessments of various priorities.