How to Run a High-Performance Team Meeting
One of the most common complaints voiced by members of low-performing teams is that too much time is spent in meetings.
No one likes meetings, but as a manager, one of your challenges is to get team members to ‘want to come along to your meetings because they have real value. High-Performance Management means holding meetings that team members want to attend because they are productive and efficiently make use of the team members’ time. Every meeting is focused, timely, and necessary and is used to solve problems, make decisions, disseminate information, and enhance team member skills. These things make for a much better meeting experience.
One of the most common complaints voiced by members of low-performing workplaces and teams is that too much time is spent in meetings. The real issue is not the time but the content of meetings. High-Performance meetings, on the other hand, address only those topics that need the team’s collective, cross-boundary expertise, such as corporate strategy, enterprise-resource allocation, and how to capture synergies across business units. They need to steer clear of anything that can be handled by individual businesses or functions, not only to use the team’s time well but also to foster a sense of purpose.
Meeting Structure and Content
High-performance meetings are ones people want to attend because they stick to specific content and are unstructured, meaning that they do not use an Agenda or Minutes. A high-performance team does not need to minute or track an individual’s actions as accepting an action is the same as making a commitment; therefore, there is no need for follow-up.
Contributions are focussed on fixed content; for example, this content suits most situations:
1. Corporate strategy.
2. Enterprise-resource allocation.
3. Business unit synergies.
4. Customer satisfaction pains and gains.
5. Staff satisfaction levels.
6. Service Delivery.
7. Resolution of competing ideas with new innovations.
How to run the Meeting
1. Each team member talks in turn to their items but only tells other team members things they ‘need to know.
2. Questions are then asked, and answers are given.
3. Finally, actions are agreed upon and are noted by the team members who have taken the actions.
4. The next team member talks until everyone except the manager has had a turn.
5. The last person to speak is the manager, who delegates tasks they have captured during the previous week.
Unless a task must be given to a specific team member, the manager asks for volunteers to take on a task. Team members understand that the manager's tasks have a high priority and are to be actioned asap.
High-Performance team members do not just action or take on tasks that relate to their management discipline or field of expertise, rather they take on any task. Doing this extends their management abilities and their subject matter knowledge and helps them to understand the management accountabilities of their peers. It also goes a long way towards preparing them for more generalised management roles and future leadership positions.
Meeting Protocols (Or Rules if you like)
1. Humour is encouraged.
2. Everyone should offer an opinion.
3. Team members are patient, they listen, and they do not interrupt others.
4. Team members are truthful.
5. The team’s effectiveness is discussed.
6. Team members critique each other’s ideas; they never criticise an individual. (This is best done during meetings where ideas are being flown around, having team members comment on the relevance and likely success or failure of an idea.)
7. When a problem, error, or failure occurs, blame is never assigned; rather, an autopsy of the event is carried out to work out how it happened and, more importantly, how to avoid it happening again. The same applies to successes, there is an autopsy about the actions that led to success along with follow-up steps on how to repeat those actions in the future. e.g., By updating a process document.
Shared Leadership
Shared leadership is when the manager shares their decision-making rights with all team members by promoting the interests of the team members and by practising social equality. During the meeting, the manager ‘shares leadership’ by not speaking until the end. Sharing leadership calls for a great deal of personal initiative from individual team members and is a vital quality of high-performance leadership. Shared leadership invigorates the team members to deliver exceptional outcomes in the workplace and achieve synergies in their results by working collaboratively with all team members.
During the meeting, the manager remains as silent as possible, allowing the team members to jointly make decisions and agree on actions, thereby sharing the leadership. Another aspect of shared leadership is when the team leadership role is taken up by various team members according to needs at the time. An example of this is the leadership of a major or strategic activity where one team member is a subject matter expert and will lead the team (including the manager) much as a project manager would.
How to tell if your meetings are effective
If your meetings are working well and collective consciousness is developing, then team members will exhibit several defining characteristics.
1. There is a sense of real energy being released during the meeting.
2. Everyone on the team talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short and sweet.
3. Team members face one another, and their conversations and gestures are energetic.
4. Team members connect directly with one another, not just with the manager.
5. Team members carry on back-channel or side conversations within the team.
6. Team members periodically break, explore outside the team, and bring information back.
7. Team members praise each other.
8. No one is in a hurry to leave.
Strengthens the team
A team meeting activity will develop interpersonal and organizational skills to instil a sense of togetherness and commitment.
Promotes collaboration
Collaboration generates a circle of knowledge. Team members working in collaboration with each other will always have an opportunity to learn from each other’s successes and failures.
Discussions link back to the Team Vision
Every meeting should have a Team Vision context to keep team members aware of what they are doing and what they have to do for the growth of the company.
Meeting tips
1. Do not wait for all team members to arrive before starting the meeting; always start exactly on time.
2. Do not allow war stories or discussions that don’t add value.
3. Discourage the use of laptops; they are distracting and severely limit the amount of information that the laptop user takes in. Multiple studies have proven that manual notetaking is far more effective in terms of remembering and analysing new information compared to the laptop user due to different cognitive processes being used between the two.
4. For a short, sharp meeting, consider standing rather than sitting. Psychologically this makes team members more focused and more spartan with their involvement and saves considerable time. This approach works equally well for face-to-face and virtual meetings.