Your regularly scheduled staff meeting may not be an event that your staff anticipates. Some employees might prefer having a root canal. At least with a root canal, pain medication is provided. You can lead better staff meetings, and quicker too, and here’s how.
There are good meetings, and there are long meetings, but there aren’t many good, long meetings. Why are many staff meetings hated and what can you do about yours? Based on Agile’s Daily Scrum, this procedure encourages self-advancing teams to meet briefly. Time-boxed to 15 minutes in duration, you may also call it a daily stand-up, a weekly roll call, or a monthly huddle. This approach assuredly provides better staff meetings.
Have a Clear Purpose and Scope for Your Staff Meeting
People complain that they remain uncertain about the purpose of their staff meeting, even when it has concluded. Many managers assume that staff value developing an understanding of WHAT other staff members are doing. Many managers assume that staff will support one another when someone needs assistance. You know what happens when you assume.
Does Your Staff Meeting Leave You Going in Different Directions?
Since the purpose of the normal staff meeting rotates around sharing, emphasize WHY sharing is important. It’s not that we want bright and informed employees, so much as we want employees making more informed decisions. We seek decisions that support one another to help us reach our goals and objectives. We seek to change behavior when the meeting has concluded, to further enhance our efforts to excel. Be clear that you are seeking change, NOT simply information exchange.
If nothing has changed, then your staff meeting could be a waste of time. If something has changed, let’s ensure we understand WHAT has changed, and more importantly, WHY. Build consensus around the rationale supporting the change, not only the change action itself. If something needs to change, it may be optimal to have it change much sooner than when you schedule your regular staff meeting.
The 3-Question Approach
Use the trivium formula of “yesterday, today, and tomorrow” (past, present, future) to modify the questions listed here for your needs.
The classic three questions (with alternatives) are as follows:
1. What did you complete yesterday? (What did I accomplish yesterday?)
2. What are you focused on today? (What will I do today?)
3. What impediments are you facing that we might help you with? (What obstacles are impeding my progress?)
Here’s a motivational version:
1. What did you do to change the world yesterday? (What did you accomplish since we last met?)
2. What are you going to crush today? (What are you working on until our next meeting?)
3. What obstacles are you going to blast through that may be unfortunate enough to be standing in your way? (What is getting in your way or keeping you from doing your job?)
Convert Your Staff Meeting into a Standing Meeting
The original idea of a meeting that repeats itself the same date and time weekly, monthly, or quarterly, made that type of meeting to be called a “standing meeting.” The term originally does not only imply that it stands at the same time on the calendar, it also implies that there is no need to sit down.
People should stand at most staff meetings, and get done faster. The depth of information sharing requires that we all understand WHAT each other is doing. However, we probably don’t need to know HOW it’s going to be done. When someone goes ”deep into the weeds” they are probably talking about HOW, not WHAT they plan to do.
We need to know for example that you “are going to pay the bills” but we don’t need to know that you are writing cheques or sending electronic funds transfers. We rely on you to execute the best way to get it done. Keep in mind the difference between WHAT and HOW is relatively simple. What you do (e.g., “pay bills”) remains abstract while HOW you do it (“write cheques”) becomes concrete.
When you impose the standing (rather than sitting) rule for your staff meetings, more people will stop talking when they have covered WHAT they are doing. They will spare us the gory details and time wasted about HOW they are going to do it. For the rare circumstance when sharing the HOW is important, participants may freely ask (“How are you going to do that?”). But as long as participants remain standing, people will stay focused, and your staff meeting will provide the change you seek, only much faster than you currently realize.
Develop Consensually Agreed Upon Output from Your Staff Meeting
Did you ever leave a staff meeting and ask “What did we agree on in there?” Worse yet, have you experienced more than one answer to that question? Perhaps contradictory answers?
Do not assume that your staff has extracted the same learnings and takeaways. Do something to facilitate and confirm that we are all agreeing on the same change and a similar course of action. All too often people leave a staff meeting and begin acting in ways that contradict one another. WHY? Because we have done nothing to facilitate and ensure common understanding.
Build an agreement at the end of your staff meeting that reflects new actions learned as a result of the staff meeting. Again, if the new actions are thin and far between, perhaps we need fewer or quicker staff meetings. That brings us to our final point . . .
Final Comments
Use the same technique for your weekly, biweekly, or monthly staff meetings. Although not exhaustive, scope creep is prevented when progress reports are restricted to yesterday (past), today (present), and obstacles (future). Additionally, standing rather than sitting ensures that staff meetings remain brief, discourages wasted time, and keeps participants in scope.
NOTE: This approach does not provide the time and place to solve problems. Rather, the Staff Meeting makes the team aware of what people are working on. If detailed support is required, a separate meeting with appropriate participants is arranged after the meeting. Topics that require additional attention should always be deferred until every team member has reported.
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Don’t ruin your career by hosting bad meetings. Sign up for a workshop or send this to someone who should. MGRUSH workshops focus on meeting design and practice. Each person practices tools, methods, and activities daily during the week. Therefore, while some call this immersion, we call it the road to building high-value facilitation skills.
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Terrence Metz, MBA, CSM, CSPF, PSP01, HTTO1, is the Managing Director of MG RUSH Facilitation Leadership, Training, and Meeting Design, an acknowledged leader in structured facilitation training, and author of “Meetings That Get Results – A Facilitator’s Guide to Building Better Meetings.” His FAST Facilitation Best Practices blog features nearly 300 articles on facilitation skills and tools aimed at helping others lead meetings that produce clear and actionable results. His clients include Agilists, Scrum teams, program and project managers, senior officers, and the business analyst community among numerous private and public companies and global corporations. As an undergraduate of Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) and an MBA graduate from NWU’s Kellogg School of Management, his professional experience has focused on process improvement and product development. He continually aspires to make it easier for others to succeed.
