Are you looking for a better strategy and plan for staff team meetings? Imagine being a part of an organization and a team where your meetings are helpful, engaging, efficient, and productive. Perhaps you have never even seen a meeting like this before, but it is possible!
A primary key to leading amazing meetings is to schedule different kinds of meetings for various purposes. Try to accomplish everything in one (way too long) weekly staff meeting, and you will find that it just does not work. You can’t do training, short-term planning, project management, and long-range planning all in one weekly meeting. At least you can’t do all these things well.
How can you lead compelling meetings? What kinds of meetings are helpful to greater team unity and productivity?
Here are four types of meetings that will help you lead your team to unity and achievement:
Team Meeting One – Weekly Connect
A weekly staff meeting is an essential building block for communication and team progress. Once a week, gather your team together to look back, discuss, and evaluate the past seven days. Then look forward and plan the next 7-10 days. The key to success in a weekly connect is to keep the discussion short term. Save your longer-term planning for the meetings that follow.
Here are two keys to Weekly Connect Meeting success:
- Keep this gathering to a maximum of 90 minutes. If you stick to short-term issues, you won’t need to meet for longer than 90 minutes.
- Schedule this meeting immediately after lunch. 1-2:30ish. I never recommend doing staff meetings in the morning. Mornings are ideal times for focused work, strategy, writing, and projects. Afternoons work well for meetings because they take less concentration than writing, planning, and strategy.
Also Read: It’s Time to Put an End to Miserable Meetings
Team Meeting Two – Monthly Strategic
Once a month, in place of the weekly Connect meeting, schedule an entire afternoon for a monthly strategic meeting. I recommend 1 PM to 5 PM. At the monthly strategic meeting work on things that are happening in the next 1-3 months. The monthly strategic is the place to tackle the longer-term strategy, larger projects, and team training. Resist the urge to do long-term planning in the weekly connect and save it for this monthly strategic meeting.
Team Meeting Three – Bi-Annual Offsite
Getting your team offsite twice per year for 24 hours facilitates team building, long-range planning, and strategic collaboration beyond what shorter meetings often accomplish. Twenty-four-hour offsite meetings allow you to work together on large projects with longer timelines and spend time together building trust and relationships. Not sure how to plan your offsite meetings? Consider splitting your time between planning, playing, praying (for those of you in church leadership) Planning includes long-range strategy and projects. Playing involves spending time together having fun and building team relationships.
One-On-Ones – 1-2 times per month
The final component of a holistic team meeting strategy is one-on-one meetings. Every other week works well for these meetings. One-on-one meetings are perfect for coaching and caring for members of your team. Ask questions like What is going well? Where are you struggling? Where are you making progress? How can I help you? Then listen more than you talk! Every person on your team needs one-on-one time with you to be reminded that you believe in him and are there to support him. These one-on-ones are critical for maintaining team morale and helping your team members grow as leaders.
It’s time to put an end to miserable meetings. Get started today!
