Making Meeting Work
giving more output with less input
The success of any team is determined by the way they collaborate together when they meet.
Do your meetings:
- Move at speed and achieve more than the individuals
- Allow all members to contribute
- Release the energy of team members
- Adjust their talent to individual situations
- Encourage creativity and innovation
- Satisfy their stakeholders
Meetings need
- Clear aims-the big picture
- Defined roles and responsibilities
- The tools to do the job
- A common language- team talk
- A framework for making decisions
- Clearly assigned work to members
- Ability to get things done
- Supportive and integrated working environment
- A transparent way of measuring performance
Our framework provides the tools to move your meetings up a gear
Our Approach:
The Set Up:
The first step is to define what each meeting needs: is it 2 hours of uninterrupted time or a quick gathering in which everyone remains standing.
“Every meeting is unique in its agenda, culture, and its outcomes. These dimensions become more critical as meetings become more complex.”
Next start thinking about who needs to be at the meeting; team roles are an important tool to help unravel this complexity.
Meeting roles will also help by facilitating the allocation of work within the group.
Fail to plan and we plan to fail: every meeting needs an agenda, but there are many other issues to consider before people can meet. Establishing a clear contract of how a meeting will work is essential to its long term success.
Quality Of Communication:
The next step is to manage the team’s talk. We use interactional analysis to explore the group dynamics along with team role analysis to provide feedback on specific team behaviour.
It is often valuable to re-examine the meetings ground rules at this stage to try and adapt team behaviour.
Most meetings are concerned with making decisions and looking at individual decision making styles along with the decision making process always yields dividends.
The Scrutiny Process:
All meetings need feedback and this should be planned in advanced. If the meeting is a forecasting meeting then the team needs feedback on how accurate these predictions are: if the team is a management team it needs to monitor how successful it is at achieving agreed actions. Without this feedback groups that meet regularly will always drift back into the work that they are most comfortable with!
Scrutiny can start with self-assessment but eventually must use some form of external audit.
Benefits:
- Better prepared for focused discussions
- Everyone involved which increases commitment
- No wasted time or frustration
- No game playing
- Clear assignment of responsibility
- Ability to adapt quickly to change
- Good meeting etiquette
How Your Organisation Can Use It:
Option 1:
Observe your managers facilitating meetings and provide an interactional analysis
Option 2:
Provide a course in Making Meetings Work
Option 3:
Draw up a profile for each meeting and use us to benchmark performance
Option 4:
Use team role analysis to explore the meeting dynamics
Allow us to help you see your meetings more clearly
Work with us to improve your decision making
Help every team member contribute
“It helped us differentiate our meetings and develop a different structure for each. It has for instance helped us develop our new strategy. We now regularly look for feedback on the different forums.”
Wayne Operations Director; Servomex