Feel like your team is stagnating? Here's how to build confidence into your leadership team meetings.
So that make the most of the experience around the table and align the team around achieving collective results.
After a week’s holiday in Lala Land, I’ve finally recovered from a combination of jet-lag, social exhaustion, and catching up with my client work. I was fully planning on writing while I was away but realise I need to accept that I just won’t take my holiday (or airplane) time to write.
Anyways, I was recently on a call with a founder/CEO who stated:
“I used to have team meetings with my (global) team but no one (i.e. him) found them to be any good, so I stopped them and now just have 1:1s with everyone.”
A lot to unpack there.
I’ve observed a few leaders who take one 1:1 leadership styles vs a 1:many.
They focus on building individual rapport instead of prioritising team cohesion.
As a leader, are responsible for ensuring your team plays well together, and you want to ensure that your team meetings are a super-effective, engaging and productive.
I asked him if he would be open to bringing leadership team meetings back on the table if we worked together on trying a new approach. He agreed and fast forward to now, they successfully having team meetings, where the effectiveness and outcomes of the meeting is a shared accountability and not the responsibility of one.
Here’s our playbook:
The Basics
The process I’m about to walk you through assumes you have set clear business priorities for the company. Not department-led goals but business-led goals. DM me if this distinction is not clear.
And, just so we are all on the same page, here’s what we want to gain from a great leadership team:
Help the leadership team align on priorities
Promote healthy and sometimes heated conversations about priorities and how we are going about working on them
A discussion on trade-offs and resources in order to * actually* prioritise
A chance to align on company internal and external comms to ensure you’re all singing from the same hymn sheet
Create a company-wide team health check and check-in on how you are doing as a leadership team
They should not be status updates that could have been an email.
The next time you’re in a bad leadership team meeting, cost it up.
These meetings are expensive.
($ hourly salary x # of people x # of hours of meetings).
So ensure they have ROI by doing the following:
Share accountability by having a rotating chair, give freedom to allow the chair to add their “flare” as they see fit as long as you achieve the outcomes
Set some rules of engagement, like; no phones, laptops, distractions. If an emergency comes up, you let the team know instead of splitting your focus. As much as we think we can, we can’t actually listen and do something else at the same time.
Note keeper - do not assign to the person that puts their hand up (probably a woman, and probably in HR) and do not put those that say “you’re so much better at note-taking than me” off the hook. This is your LEADERSHIP team, if they are in the room, they should be capable of capturing notes. However, provide a note-taking framework so that the notes have consistency.
Set some pre-reading and pre-engagement so those that don’t like being asked to make a decision on the spot can review the information in advance and you as a team will get better at making data driven decisions. And no, it doesn’t have to be 8-pages long ;)
The Process
Here’s how we set up effective team meetings for our clients. This is based on an OKR process but applied to any goal-setting framework.
I suggest a top of the week check-in call and an end of the week check-out call.
The Pre-work
Let’s assume you have aligned on top-level company goals - no more than 5, but preferably 3 to make it uncomfortable, yet focused. You then need to set up a confidence scoring sheet that is completed in advance of the meeting.
You can take a copy of OTL’s here.
*A note here, company level priorities means as a business this is our focus to move towards our strategy, if a department isn’t reflected in those top 3, it does not mean they aren’t important or they don’t do any work. That department’s priorities should reflect what they are doing to ensure business priorities are being met.*
We want to get everyone at a leadership level to be running on the same playbook. They collectively serve the ultimate goal of moving the company forward, that comes before their own drivers and motivations.
Before every team meeting, each member of their team scores their confidence in the company’s ability to meet each goal.
🟢 GREEN - on track!
🟡 YELLOW- with some tweaks and course correction, I think we can make it work.
🔴 RED - Without any significant changes, this is absolutely not happening.
You can set the definition of your own colour set but you get the gist.
The meetings…
Start of the week…
In this meeting, since it’s already been completed in advance, you jump straight to the “red” and discuss “what would we need to do to move a red to a yellow” and thus an engaging conversation usually ensues.
If you find that you’re seeing a lot of green, before you pat yourselves on the back, ask yourselves if you’re playing it safe. If I was in the room I’d say that goal isn’t stretchy enough and to make it more ambitious.
Here’s a google template of our confidence scorecard.
If these discussions take up too much air time, move any bigger discussion into an action to set a meeting specifically to address that and use the rest of the time to check that you’re not burning people out or compromising quality. Share what each priority is for the week.
End of the week…
This meeting aims to shift the mindset of your team to “progress over perfection” by creating a ritual that celebrates small wins and thus builds confidence and optimism.
It is as simple as:
Part 1: Progress
What have we achieved?
What has been completed?
Demo time if required
Part 2: Team Vibes
Who did we make happy this week?
What made us proud this week?
Shout outs and thank yous (either in the team or from the whole business)
It might sound and feel a bit cringe, but it’s in these meetings where I have seen the most transformation happen in a team.
Don’t sleep on this.
The biggest, most consistent impact this framework achieves in teams is: better communication.
I’ve often witnessed how “yellow’s” quickly becomes “greens” after a quick clarification of comms or context. I have not found a framework that uncovers miscommunications (which are 99% responsible for team conflict) than this one.
It’s not perfect, it can feel onerous, but;
Trust me and trust the process.
Make it yours.
Whenever we introduce a framework like this to our clients, 3 outcomes tend to happen:
1) The team follow it by the letter,
2) The team cherry pick the parts of the process they like and shape it to work better for them…
3) Old behaviours kick in and the team go back to running bad meetings.
You are free to do what works best for you, but I would urge you to empower your team to shape the meetings that create engagement, effectiveness and drive you towards the outcomes you need to deliver.
I dare you to try it for a whole quarter and see what happens.
At the end of the day, you run your meetings how you want to, but just remember:
Bad meetings are a time and money waster,
Good meetings are a temperature check and facilitate healthy discussion,
Great meetings leverage all the experience in the room and excel you forward as a team and therefore, as a business
You got this.
Don’t get me started on board meetings…...