Your Team Is Waiting for You to Fix Your Meetings

Your team already knows the answer. They're just waiting for you to figure this out too. It sounds harsh, but if you ever feel like the bottleneck in your own business, and most business owners are at some point, I would bet real money that your meetings are a part of the reason why. Not because you meet too much, but because the meetings you are having aren't designed in a way that's getting you the results that you want. A meeting done well can create clarity so your team can move forward without you and you without them. But first, we've got to have the meeting, and that's what we are going to fix today. Listen, meetings have earned a bad reputation. We have all sat in a meeting that could have been an email or a Slack message. Look around the room of your next meeting. What is it costing your company to host a bad meeting? In fact, 71% of people have said that, ugh, Meetings are bad. However, 68% of people say we still need meetings, but we need them to be done better. That's a lot of meetings not doing their job. But the problem isn't the meetings, it's the meeting design and the meeting structure. No purpose and no follow-through. And when things are moving fast, your instinct may be skip the meeting, just keep going. But that is the wrong Answer: When we skip meetings when we're too busy, that's likely going to only fuel the feeling of busy and chaos and the frenetic energy that sometimes comes up when we are doing big things in our companies and working on new projects and moving fast. A meeting is a decision-making machine. Every good meeting should give you 3 things: a decision, an action, and who is going to be executing on that action, and a date. When does this need to be done by, or when will we follow up on it again? If none of those things happen, we just had a conversation and it might have been great, but it likely wasn't serving the purpose we need it to serve. So let's get super practical and look at what actually works as you are rethinking your meeting culture and just check in on that because If you're still wondering, do I need to rethink my meetings? Do I not need to rethink my meetings? Oftentimes how we structure and run a meeting is a reflection of how our company and our culture operates. Is it working for you? If not, listen in because you've got some strategies here that you're likely going to be able to implement very easily and start to get some fast traction. Number 1, right-size your meeting schedules. Too many meetings oftentimes end up being on our calendars when it could have been just that email. On the flip side, if you have no meetings at all, you're likely missing out on some important touchpoints. Most growing businesses need, uh, some version of these 4 meetings. Number 1, a weekly team check-in with your core team members. Not an all-company hands meeting, but a core check-in. With those people that are driving execution on your business in key areas and may also be meeting with other teams and departments on their own. So one weekly check-in. Second, you may need one-on-ones with your direct reports. Now, this may be every week, this may be every other week, this may be once a month, and it may vary on frequency based on what you have going on in the business. At any given time, but those one-on-ones are really gonna give you an opportunity to build rapport and get closer to the heart of what may be working and what may not be working in any given area of the company so that you can make improvements and stay well connected. Third, a quarterly planning session. We always wanna check in and make sure we have focus on what we are moving toward over the next 90 days. And third, you may have ad hoc decisions that need to be made or ad hoc meetings that need to happen based on what is happening in your business right now. You may bring a small group of people together to focus on one very specific thing. Other people may meet even without you to focus on different things, but we would just want to have an intention so we know what decisions need to be made so we're clear in those meetings. Before you schedule any meeting, ask yourself these 3 questions. What decision needs to be made? Who actually needs to be in the room? And I'm going to tell you more about that in just a second. And third, could this meeting just be an email? And if you say, yeah, actually this doesn't need a whole big thing, then make it an email. So if you're not clear on those three things, don't schedule the meeting because again, we don't want just extra meetings on our calendar, which often happens. Give me a call. Hey, we should meet on that. Can we talk about that later? I'll book in with you. Oh my gosh, your calendar just bloats and bloats and bloats and bloats, and we want to bring it back and we want to be super intentional. Number 3, as you think about redesigning your meetings, keep attendance lean. Here's what happens when you get over 8 people in a meeting. People start to social loaf. It's not a fault. It's not something that anyone is doing wrong. It is just the nature of a large group setting. I'm in a large group setting, there is someone who's likely thinking what I am thinking. I may let them ask the question. We don't wanna talk over each other. I don't need to everybody say the same thing. That's just gonna eat up minutes. So I'll just let that person speak. When it's a small group of people, let's say it's 4 to 6 people in the room, it is less likely that I'm just gonna be able to sit back and observe and listen. I'm probably going to need to contribute something. So everybody comes to the meeting. Prepared to share their brilliance, share their expertise, call out when things are working or not working, or we may want to think about a different angle here. If everyone is invited to the meeting, no one is accountability, and we're naturally just going to drop in effectiveness of that meeting the more people that are in the room. Now, does an all-hands meeting from time to time still need to happen with more people? Oh, absolutely. But that serves a different purpose. That's more of a forum. It's more of a presentation than it is a collaborative meeting. Next, use a standing agenda. This is really gonna help because if there is an agenda in a meeting, we are clear on what we need to move through. We're clear on what we need to decide on and what we need to discuss to walk out of that meeting being a success. An agenda also allows you to pace the meeting because if you are only halfway through that agenda and you only have 5 minutes left in the meeting, you know that you're either going to need to ask for more time with the meeting attendees if they don't have conflicts following this session, or you're gonna need to schedule some follow-up items. So that agenda is really important to ensure that we are moving forward on the things we need to be moving forward on. But you could also have a rolling agenda where every week, especially if it's your weekly small team meeting, if it's a one-on-one that you have on a regular basis, here's what we talked about last time. We need to follow up on those things. How are we progressing? Do you need any help? Are there any roadblocks or any obstacles? And here are the things that are coming up because it is clear and you have an agenda that you're just updating and building upon each week. It's going to make it much easier to walk into that meeting ready to go and your prep work or someone on your team's prep work before that meeting is going to be reduced, which is going to just buy us all back a little bit more time, and I am in for that. Next, in meetings, I want to invite you to consider this as a point in time to build rapport. Not a ton of time, but when we are working on projects remotely, like so many people are right now, and when we are working with a group of people who are bringing in awesome, unique, Diverse perspectives. I'm going to be more likely to speak out and say something that's a little bit against the grain of what the room might be thinking or how I'm reading the room. If I have a rapport with you and the people in the room, and I feel comfortable speaking openly about my perspectives, but how does rapport get built? It gets built through getting to know someone and over time. Now, if we were in an in-person office, rapport gets built by walking by someone in the hallway, by overhearing something and congratulating them. But hey, did I just hear it's your birthday? Happy birthday. Those little things build. I heard your construction project. So-and-so mentioned you've got a construction project going on. I do too. We build rapport. We talk about those things we have in common. We go deep on things that matter to us as humans. And that comfort is built over time as we're opening up and sharing and being a little bit more vulnerable. That is going to convert to those meeting times. And you want those diverse perspectives, and you want people to feel comfortable sharing their expertise, especially if you are working on something in your company that is important to you. You want people to share when they see something that, oh, I don't know if I do that. So you've got to take just a little bit of space and time to check in. If you've got 4 people in the room, that's going to be a lot easier to do at the beginning of every meeting than if you have 20 people in the room. And lastly, end every meeting with what did we decide, what actions are we taking, and who's doing it, and when are we following back up. So we begin, we end where we began. And this might not be something that you can go through in its entirety because maybe you worked through a lot in this meeting, but it may be something that you have in the rolling agenda so we can say it is all here. We have captured it, or we'll send some follow-up notes so we know who's doing what when, and we can follow up on all these things when we meet again next week. So at least you've called out what the next steps are and when we will meet again. So if things are moving fast in your company and in your world right now, this could feel like you are slowing down, but this little bit of slowing down to get intentional and reset is going to buy you so much runway. In fact, when you're moving fast and there is fast growth on the horizon, it does not necessarily mean you need less structure. You likely need a tiny bit more so that everybody knows what they need to be doing, and the chaos and the frenetic energy that may be out there is brought back into focus, and everybody gets on the same track, moving in the same direction. Without this, bottlenecks emerge. Without this, people leave the meeting wondering, I don't know. What, what do you, I don't know. Decisions from last week will still be in progress. Same questions will keep coming up again and again and again, and you can't step away without things potentially falling apart. Your team is waiting for you. So go forth, fix your meetings, and let us know how it goes. You are right on time to make some small tweaks because if you just start implementing these things little by little, you're going to notice a drastic shift in how your company operates. Both within the meetings and outside of the meetings. I can't wait to see how this works out for you. You're right on time.