After teaching, coaching, and consulting to thousands of leaders around the globe, it’s pretty clear what makes a great team meeting. Here’s what you must do in your leadership team meetings to create the best results.
Arrive Early to Connect: Not just via the meeting link. This few minutes of unstructured time may be all you will get with your team this week. Don’t squander it. Take a few minutes for chit chat about other topics and connect with your team.
Spend Wisely: Add up the salaries of the people in a 2-hour executive team meeting and the company is spending thousands of dollars an hour. So, shut off your phone, close your email, and make a good expenditure of all that money. If people are “not needed” for most of the meeting, then you obviously have the wrong agenda items. Or the wrong people in the room.
Talk Straight: When meetings are not being productive, speak up! If someone is talking too much, tell them you’d like to hear from others. If you have a better idea, offer it. Don’t rely on someone else, like your leader, to create a team of distinction for you. Create it with them.
Be Open: The research is clear. Diverse companies outperform industry averages. Be open to people with different backgrounds and to new points of view that come up in team meetings. It is the lifeblood of innovation.
Rotate Leadership: Top teams don’t defer agenda creation to the admin, minutes to the same person each week, and meeting facilitation to the leader. To create energetic meetings where people act like owners, rotate all these roles each month. People will come more committed and interested. You’ll be surprised at how much your team meetings improve.
Check In Before You Check Out. Executives spend up to 50% of their time in meetings, yet executives consider 67% of their meetings a failure! Reverse the trend and use the last 3-5 minutes of your team meeting to discuss “how was the meeting? What can we do to improve next time?”
Do everything here and your team will be excited when they see the team meeting scheduled in their calendar.