Do Team Meetings Matter?

For many, team or staff meetings can seem like a necessary evil -- required, but an undesirable experience and unnecessary use of your time. If YOU are the exception to this oft-voiced complaint we hear, then stop reading right now! Or, read on to explore some new information to share with your co-workers.

"Who called this meeting anyway?" Pretend for a moment that it doesn't matter, and consider instead a revolutionary idea from David Whyte* to help re-think and re-shape your team meetings:

"The twenty-first century will be anything but business as usual. Institutions must now balance the need to make a living with a natural ability to change. They must also honor the souls of the individuals who work for them and the great soul of the natural world from which they take their resources."

If you'd like more meaning and results from your team meetings, along with a very different experience of how you "spend" your time, I offer these provocative questions for you to consider and discuss:

1.  What could be the value of our personal connection times (meetings) if they were designed to be mutually empowering, mutually enhancing experiences? Have you and your co-workers (that includes the boss, of course) thought and shared about how each member could benefit, and could contribute their best? Have you taken time to discuss what each one's best is? What really matters to each in this shared workplace?

2.  What if the ways we connect, interact, and communicate together are more powerful and important than the "TO DO LIST" at our meetings? Have you explored what processes, both for the meeting and the communication itself, would be most productive, rewarding, and useful? That would be the first step prior to listing out what content you need to cover. Yes, it's a revolutionary idea! And it produces energized, accountable people who come to work to contribute their best -- and have permission from one another to do so.

3.  What if the bigger picture is more important to examine than the little parts and pieces of the picture? Are you ensuring that this time spent together is a reflection of the values and mission of the practice? Are you speaking your mission, purpose, or vision at each meeting and sharing examples of where it has been demonstrated lately? Are you talking about how the decisions and actions you are making relate to the real purpose of your work together, and the real purpose of the practice?

4.  What if the meeting guidelines and agreements we craft together, and continue to invent and re-invent, are the real work and the real results we produce? Have you co-developed the rules of engagement for this valuable and creative time you spend? Have you determined together what your guidelines should include? What shouldn't they include? What is the meeting really for? What is it definitely NOT for? What shared agreements will give us the best experience and the most efficient use of our time, energy, and talent? What promises can we depend upon and hold ourselves and one another accountable for? How do we successfully facilitate the meetings and still have every voice count? And what about note taking and follow up? How do we share it, and have it contribute to our sense of self-defined success and overall satisfaction in our work?

If you haven't yet developed your meetings with these four key components, it's not too late! You could start with this fifth and final key component:

5.  How can we be certain everyone comes to every meeting with the same great stuff I do? The same level of ownership and commitment? Come to each and every meeting with a plan to practice appreciation and acknowledgement. Find at least one thing, no matter what, that you could say that would reflect another's very best in front of everyone present. You don't necessarily have to say it out loud, you can just think it, feel it, believe it. And don't forget yourself!

* The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, David Whyte, Published by Doubleday, 1994.