Running an effective team meeting

 
A bird's eye view of two people meeting around a laptop computer like they are in a meeting.

Running an effective team meeting

 
A bird's eye view of two people meeting around a laptop computer like they are in a meeting.

The ability to lift a team meeting from an unproductive event to one that fosters an environment of candour is just a few steps away, says private practice owner Gregory Goh.

How did your most recent team meeting go? Was the discussion full of life, energetic and challenging or was it more like the feedback given to a practice owner I know—dreaded, uncomfortable, disengaged and not relevant?

As leaders, we inherently know the value of team meetings in providing direction and tactical support for our teams.

Yet 71 per cent of senior managers say meetings are unproductive and inefficient (Geimer et al 2015), while a poll of 757 workers showed that most would rather go to the dentist or talk politics at a family gathering than suffer through a bad team meeting (Martin 2020).

How, then, can we run better team meetings that are effective and engaging?

Apart from the usual practicalities of running a team meeting, such as adequate preparation and having an agenda, I believe there are three key components required at every team meeting to elevate it from boring to engaged and from a waste of time to effective.

These three key components are trust, candour and accountability.

Trust

A high level of trust within a team is the cornerstone of running an effective team meeting.

In his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni writes that teams with a lack of trust ‘…conceal weaknesses and mistakes, hesitate to ask for help, jump to conclusions about the intentions of others, hold grudges and dread meetings’.

In short, low-trust teams don’t believe other team members have their backs and so will resort to protecting themselves first.

In meetings, this shows up as disengagement, disinterest, unwillingness to share opinions for fear of rejection and, at worst, team members making unconstructive or snide comments during or after the meeting about others.

When there is high trust in meetings, team members are willing to participate in the discussion, engage in healthy debate and buy into shared group decisions. Building trust takes time and intentionality.

Start with crafting situations where your team can build connections and get to know each other better outside of the work they do.

Team members deepen their empathy, connection and ultimately trust when they better understand each other holistically.

Gregory Goh.

An exercise that can help strengthen trust within a team is to go through a list of 36 questions based on a study conducted by psychologist Arthur Aron (Aron et al 1997).

The questions are split into three sets of 12 and they increase in depth with each set.

You can start with a mixture of questions from each set, but how you run this exercise at your practice will depend on the level of trust already established within your team.

You can find these questions in the New York Times article ‘The 36 questions that lead to love’, here.

Candour

Pixar is well known for its creative genius in creating classics such as Toy Story, WALL-E and Up. What you might not know is that much of its creative juice comes from its Brain Trust meetings.

The Pixar Brain Trust is made up of Pixar team members not directly involved in a current project, who have the sole responsibility of providing constructive feedback on the project’s progress.

Brain Trust meetings encourage those attending to openly share their opinions without judgement by fostering an environment of candour in which people are willing to be forthright about issues, concerns and ideas.

An environment of candour is vital if you want to have productive meetings.

It encourages your team to engage in open dialogue and healthy conflict so that collectively you can make the right decisions.

When your team is operating with high trust and candour, you can get to the heart of issues much more quickly and come together to resolve them effectively.

To cultivate an environment of candour you need to regularly and deliberately remind your team about the importance of open dialogue and that feedback and opinions are welcome and won’t lead to retaliation.

At your next team meeting, make a point of drawing out ideas from each team member before giving your own. Then have the team decide collectively which ideas are best to wrestle with and pursue.

Accountability

When you have high-trust and candour-rich team meetings, where issues are identified, debated and worked through, the final step is putting your solutions into practice.

At the end of every meeting, each issue raised should have someone assigned to it as the point person responsible for running with the agreed on solution.

This helps ensure that issues are dealt with appropriately while providing a layer of peer accountability within the team, which further strengthens trust and underlines an environment of candour.

It is important to remember that this is an exercise in delegation, not abdication.

As a leader you will still need to support your team members to complete any assigned tasks.

At subsequent team meetings, dedicate some time to having each point person report on their progress.

This helps to maintain accountability, allows the team to support them as needed and works to build trust.

A high standard of accountability within the team is what makes meetings effective and productive. In the words of Stephen Covey, ‘accountability breeds response-ability’.

Team meetings are a valuable and important part of running a successful practice.

Done well, team meetings help keep your team aligned to the practice vision and collective goals by identifying and removing roadblocks.

This can only be achieved through building a high level of mutual trust within the team, cultivating an environment of candour and openness and setting a high standard of accountability.

Consider how you can pursue these three key components to make your next team meeting more engaging, fun and effective.

Virtual meetings are here to stay

Business meetings are an integral part of any organisation’s daily schedule but they can also eat up a lot of time. This is particularly true if you’re holding an online meeting and the participants are in different locations.

Despite advancements in communication and technology, it’s still a challenge to conduct effective online meetings, because participants can experience connectivity problems and communication delays.

They can also have difficulty holding the meeting in a structured manner if multiple people start speaking at the same time.

With remote working arrangements here to stay, most businesses will see an increase in online meetings in the coming years.

Here are seven tips to help you conduct more productive online meetings:

•    have a well-defined agenda
•    appoint a meeting moderator
•    prepare your system in advance
•    set time limits
•    minimise distractions
•    conclude with specific action items
•    share meeting notes afterwards.

>> Greg Goh APAM is an experienced physiotherapist with a private practice, Back In Motion, in Mount Barker, South Australia. Greg is also a leadership consultant and is passionate about developing the next generation of leaders within the healthcare industry.

References

Aron, A., Melinat, E., Aron, E. N., Vallone, R. D., Bator, R. J. (1997). The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedural and Some Preliminary Findings. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, April, 23 (4), 363-377.
Martin, M. (2020). Meeting Statistics: The State of Meetings 2020, Better Meetings 2022. Retrieved from: https://bettermeetings.expert/meeting-statistics/
Geimer, J. L., Leach, D. J., Desimone, J. A., Rogelberg, S. G., Warr, P. B. (2015). Meetings at work: Perceived effectiveness and recommended improvements. Journal of Business Research, September, 68 (9), 2015-2026. DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2015.02.015


 

 

 

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