The effectiveness of a team is its ability to execute on its decisions
The biggest decisions that your team will make take place during its meetings. But there’s so many problems with the way teams meet today. We have meetings to schedule meetings. We invite the wrong people. We solve outdated problems. hence, we walk away with underwhelming results. Only to have those problems we thought we already solved pop back up a few months later.
The first thing we want you to understand is that we’re not out here to codify the old ways of meeting. We all know it doesn’t work. Just building software that amplifies problems isn’t innovation, it’s a dead end. We’re different. We’re here to share with you a transformation in the way people can meet. And that means letting go some of the old rote ways of doing things. If a team’s effectiveness is a function of its decisions, then the quality and quantity of those decisions will have a dramatic impact on the delivery of results.
What is wrong?
When a team has the wrong people in the room, it’s not a surprise that we spend so much energy debating decisions that we ultimately have no authority to make. How many times have you had to juggle calendars to schedule a meeting 2 weeks out to solve a problem you’re experiencing today? By the time you get to it, that problem is a few weeks old.
It’s no wonder we’re solving constantly outdated problems. And on top of that, this problem has gone unsolved for a few weeks. Maybe it wasn’t so urgent after all? Did it actually need solving? You kind of have to wonder if those overflowing calendars are actually filled with outdated problems.
Or maybe your team schedules meetings on the fly. Does it feel like you’re constantly putting out fires? When you’re in it, firefighting can feel like loads of work. But the problem is, your team isn’t actually getting anywhere.
When the needle doesn’t move, disempowerment materializes, trust is lost, and participation wanes. And in turn, the quality of decisions declines. Action declines. An enormous amount of time evaporates into the ether.
But here’s the crazy thing
Your team actually wants to solve problems, that’s why they organized. So we want to enroll you in running a new kind of meeting. Not a technology, a methodology. A process that solves all of these concerns at the same time. And yes, we’re a technology company, but the technology simply augments the technique. We’re the accountability, the rails that keep you on track.
A new way of meeting
A meetings.io meeting is scheduled just once. It occurs at the same time and at the same place every week. There’s no prep work. You show up on time and you bring with you only a completed todo list and gracefully allow your team to hold you accountable. You will monitor your team’s priorities and metrics each week and if you veer off-track, don’t dive into the minutia just yet. Instead, you should add them as a topic to potentially discuss later.
Topics live inside of your meeting and persist from week to week. These are the problems and opportunities, and you can’t solve them all at once, you shouldn’t even attempt to. Instead, the team decides in real time what you’re going to tackle for the week. And instead of calling a meeting every time a problem arises, you will simply just add it to your topic list. If it’s truly important indeed, if it’s the most important thing for your team to address, then it will become prioritized and then it will be solved. And hey, if it’s not important, maybe you will get to it next week or maybe it will become irrelevant and you can glow in the realization that you haven’t committed any energy for pointless things.
To make your decisions concrete requires action. You and your team will take tasks to crystalize the decisions you’ve made. This commitment to your team is sacred. Without completing your tasks, your decisions do not get implemented, there’s no action, and it’s the same outcome as if you had made no decision at all. So it’s important that your commitments to tasks be held in the highest regard.
Moving the needle requires action and action requires capacity
No more scheduling, no more fire fighting, no more pointless meetings, just one weekly meeting overflowing with empowerment, measurement, decisions, and action. Remember there’s only so many hours available to your team in a week so it’s pointless to go about generating more tasks than can be completed.
There’s a better alternative. Instead of producing an endless list of tasks through an endless number of meetings, you will want to calibrate the duration of your weekly meeting so that, on average, the topics you address generate just the right amount of tasks to match the team’s capacity. If your plate is full with commitments that you’ve made to your team, then don’t go around committing to more tasks throughout the week. As a team you have already decided on the most important things, and it must respect its own capacity. And likewise, the owner of a task should only commit to things that they intend on completing.
Decisions are not a democracy
The best decisions must be the winner, for the greater good of the team. Larger teams call for endless debate. And while it’s important to have a variety of opinions, it’s more important that the team fiercely decides and energetically executes.
You will want to keep your meetings small with people who are authorized to make decisions. People who are willing to be held accountable for their outcomes.
So if you’re tired of preparing agendas, if you’re over meeting minutes, and done with irrelevant, inconsequential meetings, if you’re tired of spinning your wheels, then sign up for meetings.io today and have your best meeting ever.
Written by
Clay
Check out how meetings.io works for an engineering team as well in this blog post.