One of the most powerful capabilities you can instil in your team is effective stewardship - how you run your meetings and manage your work. Effective stewardship can take a lot of pain and noise out of the system, removing hours and energy wasted in unproductive meetings, poor decision-making and confusion around who is doing what.

Run great meetings

When a group of intelligent people come together to talk about issues that matter, it is both natural and productive for disagreement to occur. Resolving those issues is what makes a meeting productive, engaging, even fun.

Patrick Lencioni

Meetings get a bad rap, and rightly so as they are often long, tedious and without a purpose. Veteran leadership coach Patrick Lencioni believes bad meetings reflect bad leaders. He says meetings can be productive, even energising, if leaders ensure they have:

• Drama, by nurturing the natural and healthy level of conflict that should exist.
• Context and purpose
• Commitment on the part of the leader.

A good meeting will have clear guidance, starting with a clear purpose. Why is the team getting together? 

The frequency and duration of the meeting will clarify an appropriate cadence and time to devote to the meeting. It is important meetings start and finish on time.

Each meeting should conclude with the outcomes, decisions and actions captured in the ADAPT Platform. These are then reviewed in the next meeting, ensuring team members are accountable for their work.

Meeting Behaviours

If you want your team to be effective, you need to define meeting behaviours and agree on how to use them. Having agreed behaviours you consistently enforce can significantly improve how your team solves problems and makes decisions. They ensure preparation, focus and dealing with bad habits that may have crept into the team.

Some example behaviours include:

• Turn your phone off
• Be present
• Come prepared – complete any pre-work
• Complete work you committed to finishing
• Contribute
• Arrive on time
• Don’t talk over people. Listen when others are talking.

Standard Agendas

You cannot underestimate the power of a good agenda. Using a well-crafted standard agenda is a deceptively simple but very effective way to ensure a great meeting. The agenda reinforces the purpose of your meeting. It allows people to prepare and gives clarity and assurance they will have ample opportunity to contribute and have their input and issues considered. For the most productive use of your resources, make sure meetings start and end on time.

There are standard agendas captured in the ADAPT Platform.

Check in and check out

In his book The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande talks about his attempts to implement a series of surgical check-lists through the World Health Organisation to reduce the incidence of surgical errors that have been contributing to ever-increasing numbers of avoidable death and disability.

Giving people a chance to say something at the start seemed to activate their sense of participation and responsibility and their willingness to speak up.

Atul Gawande

As part of this checklist, one of the activities with the highest impact on the program’s success was for each surgical team member to introduce themselves and state their role in the team before the surgery took place. The check-in process supports the notion everyone has not only the permission to speak and participate but also the responsibility and willingness.

All teams can apply this practice. Ask team members to begin meetings with a check-in, expressing how they are arriving. Is there something that inhibits them from participating? Some common ones include using the ‘I-We-It model’ or posing questions like: ‘What is the biggest win you have had since we last met’ or ‘What do you see is the greatest challenge in the next quarter?’

Make sure the meetings conclude with clear next steps and accountabilities. Ask people to rate the effectiveness of the meeting. Can we innovate the process and was it a valuable use of time?

Manage team work

For teams to be effective, they need a common view of their work. This work should be visible to all so team members can see who is working on what, the status, and when it is due to be completed. This information should be readily available and up to date.

Managing the work is something we see teams struggle with a lot. They try to solve it by having regular status meetings, where everybody gives their updates verbally and everybody else loses the will to live. No wonder meetings get a bad rap.

Kanban originated in Japan, most famously in the lean-manufacturing car assembly lines of Toyota. In 2007, David Anderson tailored the Kanban method to provide a simple way to manage knowledge work.

To make this information transparent, we use a simple Kanban and its seemingly too-simple principles of:

• Make the work of the team clearly visible.
• Limit the amount of work-in-progress.
  
  

Resources:
Tips on Running an Effective Meeting
Develop Effective Stewardship Run Sheet
Meeting Check In
Effective Meetings PDF
Decision Making Ideas
How to Run an Effective Meeting