Rotating meeting themes for fun and profit

If you’ve ever found that your meetings tend towards shallow status updates, you may want to make a change that we trialled with our Leadership team at Pusher recently.

Rather than ask people in turn what their team has been doing we recently switched to a rotating pool of themes that we tackle each fortnight. Each theme has a series of questions that the facilitator of the meeting (usually me), can use to steer the discussion.

Our motto here is to have variety within regularity. The regular meetings maintain our cohesion, but there’s a lot of variety to allow us to dig deeper into topics that we might otherwise forget about.

One of my great fears is of meetings or rituals that we do because we’ve always done them. To avoid this trap takes conscious effort. We often use variety of content to avoid getting stuck in a rut.

I’ve included some of the themes we use below. Because it’s our leadership meeting, it tends to be about cultural or structural questions that go across departments. There are lots of opportunities to use a similar system for a more focused area.

My process for selecting them was to choose the important things that sometimes slip off the radar. We’re always open to putting more topics into the funnel or removing ones that don’t work.

I’m interested in learning if anyone else has tried similar mechanisms. Let me know how you get on if you try it out with your teams or if you have suggestions for new topics you use in your company. Reach me on twitter at @maxthelion.

Example Template

Company/team values/behaviours

• How well are the values understood by you and your team?
• Do you find it easy to hire for our values?
• Are there any people in your team who may be struggling with some of the values?

Customers

• Which customers have you had interesting recent experiences with?
• What trends are you seeing in the types of customers we are interacting with?
• What kinds of customers are having problems with us?
• What could we be doing in your department to make our product/company more delightful to customers?

Training Leadership

• Where would you like to receive more training?
• How could we best deliver that?
• What has worked in the past?

Training contributors

• In what areas should members of your team get training on?
• What are you currently doing to uncover these skill/knowledge gaps?
• To what extent can people be pushed towards learning more?
• How can you assess peoples’ training needs on a regular basis?

Reporting/transparency

• How would you like to see reporting from other teams improve?
• Do you feel we send too much or too little?
• Do you think our content is sufficiently emotive/exciting?
• How do you feel your own reports could be improved?

Planning / Strategy

• How much time do you and your team dedicate to planning the best activities to meet your objectives?
• How well do you work backwards from clear goals to concrete next actions?
• How well do you follow the plans that you’ve created?
• How much time to give yourself for standing back and observing the context you operate in?
• How much analysis of your context are you able to do?
• Are there analysts/planners in your teams who could be more empowered?

Our 15Five questions

• What questions are working for you?
• Which questions are asked in each one?
• Which questions do people struggle with?
• What other aspects of 15 five do you use?
• Do you drop in more thought-provoking questions?
• How much standardisation should we have?
• Are there people who fail to engage? Why?
• Should we have a different set of questions for n00bs?

Feedback loops

• What kind of opportunities do you give your team to provide feedback on how things are working?
• Are there retrospectives?
• Are improvements actioned?
• Do people feel they have the power to enact change?

Story-telling

• How well are we telling the stories of the company internally?
• Do people understand the journey we are on?
• How clear is your own teams’s story? Can you recite it?
• Do people in your team understand their story?
• Are we making our stories emotive and exciting?
• What should we be doing to make this better?

1 on 1s

• What kind of tools do you use for digging more deeply with your contributors?
• What are some of the questions you use to drive conversations?
• Do you have a clear idea of how everyone in your team wants to develop personally?
• Do you derive actions for people and follow up on them?
• How do you stop conversations from becoming a status update?
• Do you vary the types of conversations to break out of a routine?

Wiki/ knowledge-bases

• How well are the processes of your team documented?
• How well is the culture of your team documented?
• Do you have simple overviews that summarise things?
• Where do you feel you need to apply extra thought?
• How can the team be utilised to improve your knowledge base?
• How much stale information do you have?

Onboarding

• Are you happy with the state of our current company onboarding processes?
• Are there things you would change about them?
• How are the onboarding processes within your team?
• Is the first week well planned out?
• Is the first month well planned out?
• Do you onboarding processes scale?

Socials

• What could we do to encourage more socialising in the company?
• How well do your team socialise?
• Are there any specific issues with social activities we could fix?

Rituals

• What kind of regular rituals do you have in your team?
• How often do they occur?
• Do people find them valuable?
• Is there anything you feel you could be making more regular?
• What ways do you have for varying your rituals to keep them fresh?

OKRs/contributor goals

• How are you setting contributor goals?
• Are they sufficiently long-term focused?
• How do you follow up on them?
• Are you challenging your people to get out of their comfort zone?
• How regularly are you assessing people’s goals?

Thought leadership

• What are you doing differently in your team that we could tell the world about?
• What processes are working extremely well?
• What lessons/failures have you learned that you can warn others about?
• What do you think the leaders of other teams could be doing more to tell the world about?
• How much time are you dedicating to thinking about this?
• What help can we provide to make this happen?