You are the leader of your team, or department, or functional area and you need to know what’s going on. So you hold a weekly staff meeting and have everyone report out their status. They report out their status even though everyone is not working on the same thing and many times there is no overlap in the work.

But, you figure, you need the update and it’s good for everyone to know what’s going on, right?

I know, I’ve been there. Especially with traditionally run projects the project manager or leader needs to get status somehow. With Agile methodologies like Scrum it’s a little easier because the information is more transparent. Depending on your level of leadership you also may be a part of the daily Scrum updates. If you’re not part of the updates you may again feel the need to call a weekly staff meeting for updates.

You, the leader, are getting status. Are you getting all the info you need though? What about everyone else in the room? Is anyone benefiting from the status of others if their projects don’t overlap or there are no dependencies?

You already know the answer to that.

Don’t despair! This is a common problem and many people have tried different approaches. One I like is from Kevin Crenshaw, author of the book Neverboss: Great Leadership by Letting Go.

The Neverboss approach to meetings is as follows.

Check-Ins

The premise is that in order for a meeting to be effective it has to be exciting and have useful information in it. The Neverboss approach has everyone update a shared document at the start of the meeting. Each person, under the title Check-Ins, adds their name and their project or area, and then lists their accomplishments and activities for the week. Everyone then reads the list on their own, in parallel. No round-robin status updates.

Burning Issues

The next step is to make a list of “burning issues.” Team members add items to the Burning Issues list that need to be discussed. If someone saw an item on the Check-Ins list that they want to be discussed, it goes on the Burning Issues list.

70% Buy-in Rule

The each item is discussed in turn. The team discusses, brainstorms, and determines action items to resolve the issues. When there is disagreement, they find a way to get everyone to agree at least 70%, with the promise that the action will be monitored for results, and reviewed at the next meeting. If a different decision needs to be made, it can be made at the next meeting. That is, if you can agree 70% to a proposed solution, “vote yes.” This fosters buy-in of the proposed solutions and allows actions to move forward, even if everyone isn’t 100% onboard with the idea (because they have enough information and have had enough questions answered to agree at least 70% to the proposed solution/action).

Decisions Made

The last section of the shared document contains the header Decisions Made. All action items and other decisions are recorded here. (Don’t you wish you had that to refer back to at a later date!!)

Score the Meeting

At the end of the meeting, ask everyone to post a score in the shared document for how exciting and effective the meeting was. Everyone will enter a number from 0% to 100% and the average will be calculated as the score for that meeting. The idea is to make each meeting more exiting and effective than the last.

A Tweak for Even More Engagement

Front-line team members – the ones doing the coding, engineering, drafting, testing – are not always aware of how their work fits into the larger picture, or they are not aware of how impactful their part is. Let’s say your team is working on three different projects. You as the leader are (hopefully) clear on how the work fits into the goals of the organization, and the impact of each project or activity. As the leader, there’s an easy way to communicate this information to your team.

In the shared document described above, create a table. The first column is for the update, and then the second through n columns are for impact. You’ll need to figure out what’s important to communicate, but let’s say revenue, customer experience, quality, and team environment/efficiency are important to you. For each update, score the impact for each area. At a glance, the team will be able to understand the high level “why” behind each project.

I could also see the columns being organizational goals. Each update would be scored against how much it contributed to one of the goals of the business. These could include safety, team building/communications, revenue, etc.

I have to be honest and tell you I have used the Neverboss approach to meetings successfully*, but I haven’t tried this tweak yet. I conjured up the idea after talking to a fellow Q2 Leader about his weekly staff meeting. The challenge in this meeting wasn’t that the team members didn’t know how their work fit into the goals of the organization, but rather when an accomplishment was communicated it was difficult to know how impactful that accomplishment was. Was this a big deal to complete or a fairly standard activity? Should we throw a party or just say, “Nice job!”?

Revenue is not the only thing that should be considered for impact. What if the work being done is to prevent issues down the road? Or to keep current with new technology or security guidelines? Or to make the development or implementation more efficient? Or to improve how the customer experiences the product or service? There are a lot of factors that make an organization successful, so consider these when choosing impact areas to score.

If this approach resonates with you and you decide to try it, let me know how it goes!

engineer your life

  • If your team has weekly staff meetings, and you are the leader, try an on-the-fly agenda creation approach like the one described above for a few weeks and see how you like it. Note if your meetings are more exciting and/or more effective.
  • If you are a team member, you could run the idea of the Neverboss approach to meetings past your manager to see if you can get them to give it a try.

* In general the teams I have worked with have been receptive to creating the agenda at the start of the meeting and the meetings are more effective. For whatever reason, the different teams I’ve tried this with end up changing the Burning Issues heading to just Issues. Also I haven’t gotten the scoring to stick.