Part 8 – How to have a Management Team meeting people want to attend
This post is based on a lesson excerpt from How to incrementally improve your Team course
Management Team Meeting
A Management Team meeting, if you do not already hold one, is essential for managing and developing your team. The meeting needs to be an important event in your diary, ideally not to be missed or rescheduled. I found that the best time of day to schedule this meeting was at 4.00 pm, as this allows for an open-ended finish time which encourages everyone to prepare beforehand, focus more during the meeting and to be brief and to the point. These things not only make for a much better meeting experience, but they also enable the meeting to finish quickly.
High-Performance Team Meeting format
I have found that the best meetings, and again ones that people want to attend are those that are largely unstructured, meaning that they follow a High-Performance Team meeting format with no Agenda or Minutes. At the beginning of the meeting the Chair reminds the attendees that their contribution should ideally cover:
Customer satisfaction levels
Service Delivery (including Metrics, Process, Backlogs and Managed Services)
Strategic Business Projects
Staff satisfaction levels
IT Spend
Team development activities
Other business
Meeting process
The format of the meeting is then quite simple. Each person talks in turn to their items and issues but only from a perspective of telling the others things they ‘need’ to know. Questions are then asked, actions are agreed and noted by the person who has taken the action and when all questions have been answered the next person talks. This process continues until everyone has spoken. The last action is by the CIO who gives out specific tasks that he/she has, noting down to whom and when the task is given. The attendees understand that the CIO allocated tasks have a high priority and are to be actioned asap.
It is assumed by all that actions taken will be dealt with as a priority unless otherwise agreed. A mature team does not need to minute or track an individual’s actions, accepting an action is the same as making a commitment to do it, being trusted to do it with no need for follow-up.
Meeting tips
Have the last person to arrive for the meeting take on most of the CIOs allocated tasks.
Do not allow war stories or discussions about similar experiences that don’t add value.
Ban the use of laptops, they are distracting, and the laptop user does not take on board the same quantity and quality of information as the non-laptop user. (It’s a fact, ban them, see previous post).
An option that is used by mature teams is to stand during the meeting rather than sit. This saves considerable time, increases focus and shortens the meeting length.