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10 Steps to Improving the Effectiveness of Your Team Meetings

Everyone has heard the funny stories or have seen spoofs on NBC’s The Office…

You know… those lame team meetings and brainstorming sessions.

Team meetings are an absolute essential part of the success of an organization, if and only if, they are effective.

Otherwise, they can be one of the biggest and most ineffectual drains on your store resources.

To help you make your meetings a little more effective, I have compiled a list of meeting “must-haves”.

10 Steps to Improving the Effectiveness of Team Meetings

Appoint a discussion facilitator

Make sure there is someone overseeing the entire discussion. Otherwise, you will have an absolute free-for-all. If no one is in charge, then everyone is in charge, and that leads to chaos.

Agree to the objective of the discussion

When your team enters a meeting it is helpful to have extreme clarity on your objective. Not only do you have to know what you want to accomplish, but you have to be able to tell your team in eight words or less so they can follow.

Decide on the decision making mechanism

Choose how you will reach your final decision before you get to decision time. If there is going to be a vote, good, let them know first. If you are getting feedback and opinions so that you yourself can make the decision, good, let them know ahead of time. If your team puts in a bunch of feedback with certain expectations in advance, and that is flipped on them, they will frustrated and ignored.

Insist that everyone contributes

Team meetings are just that, team meetings. The power of your store resides in the collective whole, or the combined brainpower of your team. There may be some members of your team that have great ideas but they’re just not as loud or outgoing as others. The job of the facilitator is to make sure that everyone is contributing.

Capture all relevant information

If you write ideas down as they come to you, you won’t miss a thing. Many a team member has come up with great ideas, only to lose them because the moment of genius was never captured.

Be creative

When you enter a discussion on a certain topic, remember to be creative and free. Some of the best ideas come when you think completely outside of the norm. Genius has never been copied from the “same-old, same-old” so encourage your members to be bold. Being creative means there are no bad ideas.

Be critical

Make sure that you promote healthy argument in your team meetings. Nothing ever gets accomplished and you never grow if you’re surrounded by yes-men. If your team member’s ideas are good enough, then they should be able to defend them.

Review your discussion to date

At the start of every meeting, review past discussions if your topic is an ongoing one. Some members may have missed the last meeting and often times a quick refresher can spark instant creativity.

Apply decision making process to what you know

Now is the time to take all of the ideas, thoughts, and data, and put them through the ringer of your decision making process. Pair down all of the ideas into bullet points that are simple, clear, and direct. That way the final product will be easier to achieve.

Review, confirm, and adapt the decision

After you have reached the decision, open it up to review and constructive criticism. Once the ideas have made through confirm them and put an action plan into place for speedy implementation.

Now stir, cool, and eat:)

I hope this list has given you some good tips and ideas. Happy meetings!

Josh Long