#1 Growth Mindset meets Collaboration: Startup Take on Mastermind Meetings
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Once a startup grows beyond the cofounders’ core, it slowly breaks into functional sylos: sales do their sales-y stuff, marketing woo their followers and so on. Kudos if you have weekly (Monday) review meetings to recap results, celebrate small & bigwins and get a motivation booster to rock the week.
However, what usually happens is that the active idea exchange stops. We might deal with small issues on the day-to-day basis but there is no process to work towards a big picture: company vision, interdisciplinary projects, etc. Sounds familiar?
One of potential solutions I’ve tried is Team Mastermind meeting.
TL;DR version: meet once a week for 30mins, someone presents, it’s a continuous strategic get-together.
- Who attends? Team leads / department heads
- Who presents? One team lead per meeting
- How often? I’d suggest to try once a week per team / department
- How long? 30 minutes (although it sometimes stretches to 1h)
Content of Mastermind meetings
The goals this get-together should achieve is for each team lead to:
- share about their strategy, achievements, learning, issues (PPP* on a bigger picture scale, approximately 2-month timeline)
- answer questions from other departments
- get feedback & find cooperation opportunities
A single session would look something like this:
- 5min — strategy, achievements & learning
- 5min — issues
- 10min — questions from the team
- 10mins — brainstorming on ideas for the team (collection of and elaboration on ideas only — no evaluation) and cooperation opportunities
Prep needed:
- Presenting person: a mini presentation on strategy, achievements, issues
- Others: read the presentation beforehand and prepare questions, feedback and ideas
And that’s all. Try it for one full round and review the results. It might not work for all company sizes but do experiment and find a structure that works for you.
* PPP — stands for Progress, Plans, Problems. Weekdone cofounder explains PPP in his Quora answer.
I suggest you to read this short article on mastermind groups by Lifehack.
Buffer has been experimenting with their 1-on-1 structure and came up with personal progress masterminds; it’s a good short read. And also this article on coaching.
More Pineapple a Day growth bites on Teamwork:
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