Have you ever felt frustrated working with your team, and just feel they aren’t as cohesive and motivated as you would hope? Yes? Then it is very likely that you haven’t tried all four of the essential meetings I am sharing in this article.
These four meetings are the reason why many within my team are just so intense and passionate, in fact excited, about what they do together.
There’s nothing like pure communication and this is what it is all about. Getting your learn to share their honest feedback. Once I could understand what was missing for them to really feel like they could accomplish what they’re out to do, I felt so much better. Using these four meetings, I am now certain that we’re aligned and we’re all rowing the row boat in the same direction, so to speak.
So without any further, let’s jump into the four essential meetings you need for managing a successful team.
Daily standup
The first one is the daily stand up. Every morning, depending on if your team’s international, that is with employees all over the world, figure out what time zone works the best for the majority of the people and the ones that can’t make it they just send in a quick email to the team with an update, however it’s a stand up meeting.
I got this idea from the agile development methodology, however it’s really just three questions that everyone answers, in turn. Those three questions are;
What did you do yesterday?
What are you doing today?
Are you having trouble or hit a roadblock?
It takes less than two minutes per person, so for a 15 person team, it would be a maximum of 30 minutes. In larger teams, you can do it by department, however just a daily stand up to create a heartbeat for everybody to feel like they understand and communicate is critical.
It’s straightforward; I update and let them know here’s what I’m working on, and here’s what I did yesterday, here’s what I plan to do today. If I’m blocked on a major task that somebody else is working on, I want to let them know in front of everybody else and it creates a peer accountability structure.
So that’s the first meeting, and the most important one, in my opinion.
Weekly meeting
Next up is the weekly meeting. This meeting is number two, out of the four essential meetings you must have to build a strong team. So with every department or team, every week, you need to sit down and review how you are going, what’s stopping anything and what are some of the major initiatives or accomplishments they’ve had done.
This gives your team a chance to delve deeper into any issues, share notes from the frontlines and really celebrate any wins you’ve had, as well. This is a great employee recognition method. So that’s the weekly meeting.
Quarterly retreats
The third meeting is the quarterly retreats. So maybe it’s three times a year, or even just twice a year, however for me I like quarterly. These meetings are where I grab the senior management of the company and we go away and we talk about everything strategic.
Because many times you’re so busy just executing, getting crap done, you don’t take time to take a step back and really evaluate how we’ve been doing, you know are we on track? Do we feel like this is the right direction to be going in? So on a quarterly basis ideally you’re getting the team away to discuss this face to face.
Now if you want to do it virtually, that’s cool. However at minimum one day, ideally two days and honestly, it works better in person. I bring in others sometimes as well, a sales trainer, a small business coach, a motivational speaker; whatever works. That’s how I’ve always done them. When I’ve had a team distributed across the world, we do them 2-3 times a year, instead.
We would pick a cool location that we’d all want to go to, and check it out. Maybe it’s a ski place, or a mountain range, whatever we do in our meetings and we allow some extra time for having some fun as well.
Yearly planning day
The final meeting is the yearly planning day. Once a year, you wanna sit down and do what’s called the yearly plan. So really ask yourself what did we do this year? Were we on goal? Where are the opportunities to improve? And do debriefs on all the major projects.
However, also for the next year ask yourself what are we gonna do that’s exciting? What’s our good, better and best goals? As a team, discuss and figure out where is the business going? How are we going to get there? Introduce new information, take customer feedback and that’s your yearly planning meeting.
Summary
So those are the four meetings that are essential for growing a solid business with a cohesive team. Again, they are
- the daily stand up;
- the weekly meeting;
- the quarterly retreats, and;
- the yearly planning day.
Do all four of these, and your team will love you for it. Best of luck!
