Lisa Haneberg of Management Craft has a great guest blog over at Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching on why, and how, we need to reinvent staff meetings. She even has a meetings haiku:
The Staff Meeting Haiku
Another Meeting
So bored, my heart’s stopped beating
Wake me when we’re done
Then she suggests we transform staff meetings into staff collaboration meetings:
Imagine a typical team of 7 peers. They each have too much to do and are faced with multiple daily challenges. They have neither the time nor the energy to be creative or proactive. That’s where the collaboration meeting comes in. Once per week (instead of the staff meeting), the group gets together for the purpose of providing or seeking input, ideas, and support. Each week 3 of the 7 team members brings a challenge, problem, or opportunity to the meeting for discussion. For 15 minutes per topic, team members will offer ideas, concerns, thoughts, and feedback. That’s not a lot of time, so the team members need to be succinct. Team members rotate bringing topics to the meeting for collaboration, but any member can request to bring a topic to the team if needed. The topic to be discussed is totally up to the team member - the department manager should not assign topics.
I love this idea! I'm going to propose that we try it out for our weekly editorial meetings, but it might be tough. Since we're all telecommuters, this is our once-weekly chance to get caught up face-to-face, and we often have a lot of general housekeeping kinds of things to talk about. But this could certainly be a component, if not the entirety, of our meetings.
Lisa Haneberg of Management Craft has a great guest blog over at Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching on why, and how, we need to reinvent staff meetings. She even has a meetings haiku:
Then she suggests we transform staff meetings into staff collaboration meetings:Imagine a typical team of 7 peers. They each have too much to do and are faced with multiple daily challenges. They have neither the time nor the energy to be creative or proactive. That’s where the collaboration meeting comes in. Once per week (instead of the staff meeting), the group gets together for the purpose of providing or seeking input, ideas, and support. Each week 3 of the 7 team members brings a challenge, problem, or opportunity to the meeting for discussion. For 15 minutes per topic, team members will offer ideas, concerns, thoughts, and feedback. That’s not a lot of time, so the team members need to be succinct. Team members rotate bringing topics to the meeting for collaboration, but any member can request to bring a topic to the team if needed. The topic to be discussed is totally up to the team member - the department manager should not assign topics.
I love this idea! I'm going to propose that we try it out for our weekly editorial meetings, but it might be tough. Since we're all telecommuters, this is our once-weekly chance to get caught up face-to-face, and we often have a lot of general housekeeping kinds of things to talk about. But this could certainly be a component, if not the entirety, of our meetings.