-
3.4 | What have you learned from / observed around making your meetings more effective?
-
My team overall just has too many meetings. I’m realizing that the main cause of this is the lack of “holding each other accountable” in a scalable way. We often have meetings to set priorities and dole out tasks, but rather than having some kind of asynchronous way to update online items and keep each other accountable, we often hold another meeting to sync up. Not only is this time-consuming, but it also stretches out the time for handoffs because we don’t necessarily get an update until all parties can accept the meeting invite. Though we have slack for some of these update conversations, we do need a better way to generally communicate across dependent tasks and groups, so progress can be made without a meeting.
Also, I really love holding a moment to take a collective breath at the start of meetings: It really helps establish presence and purpose for the meeting at hand and allows my teammates and I to come to the topic fresh and relaxed despite whatever else has been going on in our day.
-
On the face of it effective meetings seems so simple – plan, execution, follow up. But there are so many ways that it can go awry. Thinking about our weak spots – I land upon the consistency follow up, or the inconsistency. There are periods of time when I/we do very well with identification of action items and ownership, but then it can so easily fall off the map if not reviewed at the next meeting. Here I am specifically thinking about our senior management team meetings, and just as I write this see a change in the agenda that could help create discipline here. And also just as I write this I remember why I stopped being conscientious about including follow ups – how to best respond when things consistently don’t get done. More thinking to do here. Discipline.
Log in to reply.