Head or Gut telling you “Our Meetings Suck”?

As a leader, have you ever noticed yourself saying… ‘we need to have a meeting’ as a proxy for what you really mean….

“I think this is important and I need to make sure it compete’s with all the other stuff going on right now. Because that’s what we do around here in lieu of determining how to prioritise attention. ”

— All of us at some point

Here are some examples of the Embertree approach to ‘our meetings suck’ and what we get curious about. Our secret sauce is to help you where to focus your effort to ensure meetings are an enabler of productivity and great performance for your team. We do this by observing the following:

Rhythms & Routines: 

What conversation design (yeah, its a thing - take a look at Daniel Stillman’s Conversation Design OS) for inclusive contribution and perspective share will elevate the insight or actions taken next?

Information Management: 

How accessible, and what is the user experience for those this information was intended for - are we treating information as power in this team or broader?

Priorities:

Is this team clear on what the broader business bottleneck’s are? Have we appropriately sequenced our priorities to focus and complete the things that matter?

Performance:  

Do we have acceptable tolerances of performance before escalation is needed?  How do we learn from variance?

The Work: 

Thanks to the Centre for Transformative Work Design - Is that effort that contributes to the performance designed to be Stimulating, develop Mastery, provide Agency, Relational and have Tolerable Demands? Oh, and do we really need a meeting to make sure people have looked at the information?

Authority: 

Before we talk about accountability, please are we clear who is Authorised and what inputs (data and intuitive) should be informing decisions?  Are our decision rights clear?

OK - Then What?

Observations > Filtered into targeted insights > Enabling pragmatic action tailored to your context