Make Meetings Relevant and Keep Them That Way
High performance teams aren’t by accident: they’re planned, contracted and continually reassessed.
Discipline’s 2 Practices for High Performance Collaboration
Of the six Practices of High Performance Collaboration referred to in previous blogs, there are two Practices associated with the Discipline Imperative. The first of them is called Activate Ways of Working. At Mars, people talk about team processes like decision making and meetings as ways-of-working, hence the name of this Practice.
When was the last time you went to a meeting and said to yourself, “Why did I say ‘yes’ to this meeting? What am I supposed to be doing here? I don’t feel like this meeting is giving me any value, and I’m not providing any value to this meeting.” This is what happens when a team hasn’t figured out how its processes should align with what matters, when they haven’t been specific about the work they share, and therefore who needs to attend meetings when those topics are discussed.
Activate Ways of working
Activate ways-of-working is as simple as aligning team ways-of-working with the team’s Inspiring Purpose and with the work they have decided to share in Crystallize Intent. This is how you make sure your meetings are built around what matters to everyone on the team.
Meetings are just one of the disciplines in Activate Ways-of-working. We talked a bit about decision making in the podcast dedicated to Discipline. Just as with meetings, decision-making ought to line up with your team’s Inspiring Purpose and the Radar Screen exercise. For instance, for work at the center of your Radar Screen, you may want to ensure that the total team has a role in making decisions related to that work.
Then there is the matter of connectivity, using technology to keep the team connected between formal meetings. I used to stress that discussing connectivity is important for groups that don’t sit in the same office or plant. Now, given the Pandemic of 2020, the question of how best to use technology to stay connected is important, even pressing, for every team suddenly forced to work remotely.
Ask yourself, “What tools and techniques are most appropriate for the team to use, given our shared work? Should we be using WhatsApp? What about Skype or Zoom?” You pick it. Technologies abound. Also, ask what rules will govern your connectivity. Will you allow yourselves to send emails to each other at 3:00 AM? How will you share documents? Via email or using a shared drive? There are a host of other questions but you get the gist.
Establishing working rules and simple disciplines helps teams, as I like to say, to keep the factory running; the gears of collaboration need to mesh and keep turning as the team does its work. You don’t want to have to stop and design an agenda every time you have a meeting. Instead, create standing agendas focused on the things you’ve agreed are important. Agree to a few, standardized decision making protocols so that when it comes time to make an important decision, you already know how that will operate. Things like these will help the team manage its time and energy effectively.
sustain and renew - the 2nd practice of the discipline imperative
The second Practice associated with the Discipline Imperative is Sustain & Renew. This Practice is about the team learning together. The key is making learning a team habit, establishing what I refer to as a rhythm of learning. It’s about – no surprise - making learning a team discipline.
Once you’ve done Inspire Purpose and Crystallize Intent, after you’ve made agreements in Cultivate Collaboration and Activate Ways-of-working, you will need to stop occasionally and ask, “Is this serving us?” “Is our purpose the right purpose a year later?” “Are our ways-of-working still aligned with the stuff we said we had to do together?” Some of the work you agreed to share when you last worked on your Radar Screen will have ended. You will need to remove those tasks and add other work that’s come up since then and then realign the other Practices to this revised Radar Screen.
If teams don’t pause, reflect and inquire at least occasionally, they get out of step; their agreements about working together no longer match the work they are currently doing. Addressing those inevitable misalignments is what Sustain & Renew is about.
Pause - reflect - inquire - plan - act
By the way, in Lessons from Mars I recommend a simple process for doing this. Pause-Reflect-Inquire-Plan-Act. These steps are nothing new. At Mars, the big challenge was to get people to Pause and take time to Reflect. If you are a busy person as my colleagues at Mars were, pausing and reflecting feels unproductive. Of course, it’s not but when there’s a lot going on pausing for even 15 minutes can feel like falling behind. The goal of the Practice as we designed it was to provide ways to make pausing to learn feel like a useful, goal-oriented habit of success.
So, what can you do to make Sustain & Renew work for you? Build learning into your standing agendas, the ones I suggested you create as part of Activate Ways-of-working. Every month or every quarter commit to stop, inquire, reflect and improve. Connect your learning sessions to specific areas that you want to enhance, even to specific on-going work that could benefit from the lessons learned. That’s the heart of Sustain & Renew as a discipline.
about renew
One last thought. As we were thinking through and playing with the names for the Practices, the word, “renew” felt important to me. We worked so hard at Mars. We were going flat-out all the time. We loved our work but would become weary, even if we didn’t always admit it. A person working that way needs to pause once in a while to renew themself. It’s an internal, individual renewal as well as a renewal for the team. Sustain & Renew; that last word is so important.
That’s it for these two Practices. Next, I want to step away from the Practices and explore a more general concept – team learning. I’ll do that in the next blogpost.
