Leveraging team meetings for engagement & performance
Recurring team meetings are huge points of leverage for managers, when done well.
Today I'm sharing quick ways to impact your team's engagement & performance via your team meetings.
Here's what we're covering:
Strong meeting kickoffs
Increasing agenda engagement
Co-creating clarity
Strong Meeting Kickoffs
You have ~3 minutes when everyone dials in to set the tone for the meeting.
Are you multitasking and responding to a few last pings? Or are you playing music and saying hello to each person personally?
Are you quietly waiting for everyone to dial in? Or are you taking turns sharing a highlight of your morning?
See where I'm going with this?
What's the tone you want to set? What helps you achieve that tone? Start there.
Once you're clear on your intended vibe, I suggest shifting your thinking about icebreakers.
Typical icebreakers:
What's your favorite childhood cereal?
Who is someone famous you'd love to meet?
What's the next song on your playlist?
More powerful icebreakers:
Round robin: The quality I see in you and admire is…
If you knew you wouldn't fail, what would you do?
If a crystal ball could tell you anything, what would you want to know?
The difference?
You're moving from surface level to increasing vulnerability.
Vulnerability breeds trust.
Trust breeds people feeling seen and heard.
Feeling seen and heard is one pathway towards greater engagement.
Pro Tip: if you have team members who value feeling prepared vs surprised or put on the spot, share the question ahead of time.
Increasing Agenda Engagement
What % of the time are you the one talking in your team meetings?
I'd dare to say if it's more than 50%, you're likely talking too much, and engagement could be at risk.
I view team meetings as having 5 core objectives:
And, I simplify my meeting agendas this way:
You'll notice, not all of these must be owned, or spoken about, by the manager.
Yes, the manager is likely the main person for Cascading Information, and what opportunities do you have to re-think who is leading each discussion?
Ways to mix it up:
Rotate who is owning, and what is done for Connection
Ask a team member to share a recent hack they've discovered, process they've mastered, etc
Make Accountability more fun with rotating Goal Update deep dives where a team member asks for team input on one particular element of challenge
Pro Tip: build the habit of leveraging 1:1s to mix up your team meeting agenda. For example, in a 1:1, a team member tells you how they got creative and made a solid workaround for a common challenge. Rather than letting that simply exist in your 1:1, ask if they'd be willing to share with the team in the next meeting.
Co-Creating Clarity
As you've read in the past, Clarity is one of 3 critical conditions for team success.
Clarity within a team is knowing what we're doing, why we're doing it, and understanding how we're going to get there.
The strongest of leaders lean into a co-creation process to maximize clarity.
Imagine this…
In a team meeting, you're reviewing KPIs for the team and you proceed to facilitate a discussion using questions like:
What's feeling good about where we are with this KPI?
What would strengthen our ability to succeed?
What's a blindspot we're not considering?
What's still feeling fuzzy/unclear?
By pulling them in, asking the questions, listening to their contributions, and then facilitating team agreement on actions and adjustments, you've made them co-creators.
Co-creators have greater skin in the game.
Co-creators are more bought in because they helped create the plan of action.
What opportunities do you have to co-create additional clarity within your team?
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That's it for this week!
What resonated most?
What action will you be taking?
