I bet you have several team meetings every day. Let me give you 4 tips on how to improve the meeting outcome. We have tested these tips over and over inside Trembit and it works!
Assign a Facilitator for the meeting
It’s a common problem when meeting participants don’t know what is the goal of the meeting, what problem do they solve. It’s simple as that if there is a fuzzy goal than you won’t be able to reach it.
A good practice is to create a facilitator role who prepares the meeting agenda, describes the goal and delivers that message to everybody beforehand. When the meeting starts facilitator should remind participants about common objectives and guide the team forward.
[Diversity] Compose a right team for the meeting
Take a thought, who are these people we usually call to join the meeting?
One of our brain’s tricks is to link a sympathy level, to a particular person, with his professional expertise. It’s not even worth mentioning, that this is quite a falsy way to select meeting members, which will greatly reduce the quality of a meeting itself.
You have to abstract from personal sympathies and gather a strong team of diverse participants. A discussion has to consist of different points of view. Leave your comfort zone. Team diversification is more powerful than you think it is.
Push everyone to participate
Have you ever seen meeting participants who sit silently at the whole meeting? Many people feel safe just observing, preferring passive participation. In other words – playing “watcher”. This may be due to one’s introversion, or a bad mood because of failures at work or whatever.
Our goal is to get everyone involved in the discussion. The easiest way to do so is to introduce a rule when all participants express an opinion. But in which order? Let’s discuss it next.
Keep in mind the influence between team members
The problem of the distribution of authoritative opinions in a diverse team can also affect the productivity of the meeting. When we don’t feel confident or consider our specific skills to be not good enough – we can be easily influenced, or even manipulated by others. We are also inclined to seek and accept other opinions if we are not well versed in the topic. Since we strive for diversity inside a team, the influence of stronger specialists or informal group leaders on the majority is difficult to avoid. How to solve it?
We need to create such conditions, under which each team member can clearly formulate his point of view, while others will listen and hear. For instance, an excellent way is to create a “communication hierarchy” based on seniority and expertise level, but starting from lower ones. Thus, we have an opportunity to hear non-obvious and alternative solutions (opinions), as well as avoid authority dominance.
Companies spend plenty of resources on team meetings and often struggle to get desired results. I hope these tips will help you. Hold your meetings right!
