
Making your favourite pastime at the office even better.
You are likely also thinking about meetings, right?
Let’s join a meeting with Charlie and their team. Here the are having a sync meeting to help them track and keep focus on a large project.
“I think this is done”, Charlie’s eyebrows go down and closer to each other.
“How about the next item” Sam scrolls to the next item.
“Robin was out last week, I’ll check with them later. I think this is still relevant” Alex quickly answers.
“Hopefully yes. Mark this as red, at risk. I’ll follow up with Robin when I see them.”, Jay says rapidly
“Ashley, The next one has your name on it and it looks like it’s been in progress for the last 3 weeks.”
Sam looks around the room and doesn’t spot Ashley.
“They are still on holiday and it doesn’t look like they didn’t send a representative for their team. Ashley is back next week though. Ah, also I need to leave at half-past I have another meeting booked.”, Alex adds
“What about this, we said last week this should be solved.”
“Yeah, Morgan isn’t in today. I don’t know.”
“We are out of time so see you all next week.”, Sam closes their laptop and runs to the next meeting
Sound familiar?
We have all been in meetings like this. Meetings like these may have great reasons why they exist. They could be trying to address many things. Charlies’s team aims to accomplish the following through this weekly sync meeting:
- Update of the project tracking tool
- Identify and solve dependencies
- Talk about risks
- Keep momentum on the project
- Assisting in keeping people aligned
- Know who is doing what
The current format doesn’t accomplish all that it sets out to accomplish. Namely the Above list. It only allows for the very first bullet to be addressed. The rest of the bullets doesn’t get addressed.
The current meeting format is as follows:
Charlie and their team’s current meeting format:
Walk through the project tool and update.
I am pretty sure if we ask the team how they would rate the meeting in terms of its effectiveness they would rate it low. The entire current meeting is spent updating a tool together. A lot of time are spend in Charlie’s meeting talking about unimportant things. I’d risk saying that by spending time talking about whether Ashley may or may not have been be doing something for the past 3 weeks aren’t really that important if no one cares enough to follow up outside of this meeting. I’d like to see people take responsibility of keeping the tool they use up to date outside of this meeting. This could give them the opportunity to talk about important risks rather than doing admin in a meeting.
This got me wondering. What could happen if we change the format a bit? I’m thinking about a format that tries to address all of the items that the team needs to accomplish in the meeting.
I had the opportunity to share these thoughts with Charlie’s team. They agreed that they could get get more out of this time spent together. I worked a little bit with the team to come up with the following format for their sync meetings.
The following is a format that’s been working well for me in some of these sync meetings.
Charlie and their team’s new meeting format:
Start with the agenda
Remind people of the purpose of the meeting:
- It is a meeting to about risks identified in the project tracker tool that is updated outside of this meeting.
- It helps us keep momentum on the project.
- It assists in keeping people aligned.
- It helps us to hear what’s on each other’s mind.
- It give us time to talk about topics.
- It gives us an opportunity to solve small issues right on the spot.
- Identify actions that need to happen outside of the meeting.
Check that you have the right people in the room
Invite anyone to ask questions at any time in the meeting. Be mindful of time. If an issue comes up that can’t be solved within a couple of minutes, take an action to solve it outside of this sync meeting.
Start with a round of questions where each person answers the following:
1. Something I need to tell you
2. Something I need to know
3. What is keeping me up at night in the context of this project
Add Topics
Discuss topics
End with a round of actions or intentions by answering the following
What actions am I taking out of this meeting?
Now I want to invite you to listen in to a part of this week’s meeting with the new format:
“Something I need to tell the group: We finally got feedback from the provider. Something I need to know: I heard Charlie talk about a new delivery and that was news to me. Is there something I need to do? What’s keeping me up at night? I worry that we still don’t have live customers using our product” Sam concludes
“Something I need to tell the group: Nothing new. Something I need to know: I heard something similar from Charlie. I am also not quite sure. Let’s add that as a topic to the board to discuss? What’s keeping me up at night? I saw on the tracking board that the team’s deliveries are at risk and I don’t feel like we are setting them up for success”
“I added that as a topic” Robin interrupts Alex. “I saw the same thing”
After the round of questions, the team discusses topics. A couple of topics goes into too much detail and the people involved take an action to solve it outside of the meeting. Some topics get solved during the meeting. It turns out Charlie’s team was working on something that was a lower priority. Luckily they caught it in time and Charlie’s team seems to be more aligned again.
The meeting ends with a round of actions taken from this meeting. The team goes around the room in the same order they started. Sam first: “What actions am I taking out of this meeting? Alex and I need to update the TPS impact report. Ah, and I need to start planning our next planning.”
“You forgot about syncing with me about the budget” Robin adds. “That’s my action too. I already booked a slot in your calendar.”
Alex: “As per Sam, the TPS report.”
I checked with the people in the meeting to ask them how this compared to a couple of weeks earlier. The feedback that I got was that this format is much more engaging, it helps with focus and the team felt that they were talking about the right things. The attendance at the meeting is now better because of the clear expectations and repeating who need to be there. Some people explained that they are missing hearing an in detail view of what others are doing. I suggested they bring up a timeline of the project in their next meeting before answering their 3 questions for everyone to glance over.
Here are some things to think about if this resonates with you and you want to try to change something:
What are the needs that you are trying to address with this meeting?
What is the purpose of the meeting
Is the format helping you address these needs?
What can you do to amplify the good parts and dampen the bad parts?
What have you done to make meetings more engaging?
Thanks Fiona Siseman for helping me think about meetings and Gary Niemen for helping me think about words
