Team Time
How much time should you spend with your direct reports (and their reports)? How much time do you actually spend with them? How do you ensure it is the most productive use of both of your time? How do you ensure that the team is furthering the vision that you have?
Below is a summary of the recurring meetings that I have scheduled with my team, my executive peers, CEO, and board members. But what do you do (please leave comments below).
The Journey
I started at my current company and had to figure out what our team needed to focus on, how to focus them, and how to make sure they were working on the things that they cared about (aligning experience and passion). I started slowly scheduling a few meetings with the team to avoid meeting-fatigue and then quickly realised I was doing more ad-hoc meetings to realign or put out fires, instead of having a regular enough cadence of meetings that would allow the team to understand, clarify and plan on how to execute the vision, and of course discuss their career development ambitions and plans. So, I threw out the conservative approach and scheduled the meetings. At first there was some resistance to the number of meetings, but at the end of each meeting I would ask do we need to meet more frequently or less frequently around this, and we came up with the final calendar below.
My Team’s Meetings
Project team huddles (15mins/day)
- Purpose: what did you do yesterday, what will you do today, are there any barriers
- Each dedicated team has their own huddle
- I started attending these to get the culture established, but stopped as I was adding no value and spending too much time in the minutiae.
Leads huddle aka “huddle of huddles” (15mins/day)
- Purpose: alignment across teams (summary from each team lead base on their project team huddles, and then they provide feedback to their teams afterwards, either informally or at least in the next day’s stand-up)
Roadmap review (1hr/week)
- Purpose: review status of what we are working on now, what is coming next, and what is being considered later
- With all the team leaders
Direct report 1:1 (30mins/week)
- Purpose: what is working, what needs improving and supporting people’s careers
- With each team leader / direct report, and any star performers
Sprint Review (1hr / 2 weeks)
- Purpose: review the past sprint demos
- Everyone (so we can see what everyone has been working on, and contribute ideas to improve)
- These are every 2 weeks since a sprint is 2 weeks which is enough time to get usable code
Sprint Planning Meeting (2–4hrs / 2 weeks)
- Purpose: plan the coming sprint
- Each project team does their own
- I do not attend these
All Team Huddle (1hr/month)
- Purpose: review past month, review longer term plans, what can we start/stop doing
- Everyone attends and we do an ice breaker to keep the relationships fresh across the entire team, then focus on where we are going and pick one thing that we will either start or stop doing then report back on that at the end of the month.
Skip Level 1:1’s (30mins/quarter)
- Purpose: chance for me to hear from the front line team members, and clarify direction individually
Team Builders (2–4hrs/quarter)
- Purpose: we are all people who want to get along in order to achieve more.
Peer Meetings
Week planning huddle with peers (1hour/week)
- Purpose: what were the top three goals from last week and status-update, the top three things for this week, and any important ideas for open discussion
Huddles with peers (15mins/day)
- Purpose: update on the what is the biggest goal for the day
1:1 with peers and CEO (1hr/week)
- Purpose:tighter alignment and brainstorming
Board Member meetings
Meetings with board members (3–6hrs per month)
- Currently adhoc meetings that can cover any topic but try to focus on the biggest strategic initiatives for the company and progress around therm
