How you kick off weekly meetings is crucial to your success as a leader and the success of your organization. Whether it’s in-person weekly team meetings or a scrum with your remote teams, the following list of tips is a great way to ensure effective weekly team meetings that are primed for success the next time you need to take center stage and address your staff.

A 2022 article from Harvard Business Review titled “Dear Manager, You’re Holding Too Many Meetings” states that, “While there was a 20% decrease in the average length of meetings during the pandemic, the number of meetings attended by a worker on average rose by 13.5%.” Any relief gained from the perception of less time spent from this trending “decrease in duration” pales against the potentially disruptive effects of higher frequency engagements that teams are asked to part take in. It’s for this reason that leaders and managers have a duty to ensure that they facilitate effective team meetings that are productive, with clear action items, and that are built on the value of team spirit.

7 Leadership Practices For Effective Weekly Team Meetings

Articulate The Purpose Of The Meeting

Some meetings I’ve run have felt more like a more successful team meeting than others. The ones that did feel like a win all had one thing in common — the why of the meeting was articulated at the very beginning. Whether it’s training your team on a new standard operating procedure, an accountability meeting with an individual, a brainstorming meeting to overcome a specific challenge, or a team building meeting to develop rapport and cross-departmental understanding— leaders and managers put their best foot forward when they start off by relaying the importance of why the meeting is taking place.

Outline The Agenda

Whether you’re a professional that likes the rush of addressing your team impromptu or someone who prefers to have a strict timeline and list of items to cover, the fact of the matter is that we owe our teams a sense of structure and clear understanding of how we’ll be investing theirs and our time during a meeting. An agenda that you can share, whether that’s on the virtual screen, via a link through your company’s project management software, or handouts helps provide everyone the confidence that there are specific things to cover, that the time has been properly allocated, and most important, that the meeting will not be a waste of time. The next time you kick off a meeting, start with the why and line out the agenda. You’re team will know that you’ve put the proper preparation into making this engagement worthwhile.

Meeting Time

Let your team know how long the meeting will be. This serves to hold both you as the facilitator and your stakeholders accountable to operate within the specified time frame. It also shows that you as a facilitator prioritize and respect everyone’s time as a valuable commodity. When you start to stack each of the tips into a sequence you can start to see a very powerful script begin to unfold.

Endorse Each Person’s Presence In The Meeting

I once led a corporate relocation project. The whole team of ad hoc stakeholders was comprised of staff from several departments. This task force was formed to help meet the objective of migrating from one physical space to a new location. One of the most important lessons I learned about meetings in my Masters Program at Pepperdine Graziadio School of Business was the power of endorsements. As a leader our endorsement of a subject matter expert, whether we like to admit it or not, holds influential power. It’s incumbent on us as project leads and meeting facilitators to capitalize on this tool. Taking the time to line out why each person or department has been called to a meeting gives their presence an identity, a role, a perceived understanding of the impact that they can contribute. This is powerful and simple to do.

Define What Success Looks Like For The Meeting

The final tip for effective weekly team meetings is to define what success looks like for the meeting or by the next meeting. This means painting a clear understanding of what a successful end result is. Whether that’s 100% accuracy in execution, quality, and consistency for a training-based meeting, or a solution that addresses 3-root cause issues currently impeding a particular product’s performance. By defining the conditions of a win you galvanize your team behind a common and easy-to-conceptualize purpose.

Status Updates And Next Steps

Progress is an important motivator. In their 2011 book, The Progress Principle, Professor Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer wrote about its power. They observed 238 professionals from 26 different project team spread across seven major industries and correlated the positive effect that stacking small consistent wins had on people’s creativity, productivity, engagement, and work relationships.

As a team lead it’s important to indicate progress concisely and consistently. A great time to do this as part of your meeting kick off script. By providing a high level summary of what the team has achieved since last time, and where it’s sights are set next sets a trend for accomplishment. It reinforces that meaningful work is being done, people’s time and efforts are moving the needle, and gives the team the confidence that they’re always rowing towards stacking that next victory.

On top of providing these status updates to the team, an even better action as a leader is to empower your team to provide concise and meaningful status updates in the meeting as well. It’s like coming to a potluck with something delicious for the dinner table.

End Of The Meeting Recap

How we end a meeting is as important to its success as how we start. If staring is about saying the right thing to tune the team to the optimal wavelength for getting great work done, ending the meeting is about reinforcing the plan. I like to recap key points discussed, call out all the action items that were discussed and who’s responsible, let the team know what and who their resources are if they need support accomplish those items, and finally thanking everyone for their time and their energy.

Example Script For Kicking Off Effective Weekly Team Meetings

Below is a script for a meeting introduction that someone might be able to use for a training style meeting. This is just an example based on my personal voice and the best way to build an intro script for effective meetings is to tap into your authentic self. As a team leader, more good comes from this approach and your entire team will respect the genuineness. Use this as a guide and jumping off point.

Can you spot each of the tips in practice for more effective weekly team meetings that were mentioned above? Whether it’s a training meeting, an accountability meeting, or a project kick off meeting anyone can use the tips above to form a powerful meeting introduction. The result of preparing an introduction is you increase your chances of your team’s engagement, passion. Going into a change initiative, project kick off, or team training with the right mindset will increase your probability of success.

Good afternoon team,

I want to thank each of you for taking your valuable time to be a part of this meeting today. We’re here because of the new standard operating procedure that was just rolled out. Because several teams have an integral part to play in the overall process we wanted to supplement a written SOP and present the information in this meeting format in case it resonates with some of you better. We’ll keep the meeting concise; to 30 minutes.

For our agenda items, we’ll start by reviewing the top 3 areas of the process where the most collaboration and attention to detail are required for the overall process to be successful.

I’ll answer some important questions that were submitted when we first presented the updated SOP.

We’ll reserve the last 10 minutes for open Q&A.

Each of you are here because you are either someone who executes a critical step in the process or you are responsible for quality assurance at one or multiple steps in the process. Success for this meeting is all of us, as a cross-departmental team, understanding the criteria for successfully executing this workflow and me being able to answer any clarifying questions that each of you have. Let’s begin!

Closing Thoughts

If you are reading this and ever interested to discuss the best way to optimize your approach to leading your team through engaging and productive meetings, send me a message at aalmazanblg@gmail.com. I’m always happy to help professionals hone their public speaking or written skills, especially when it comes to helping you make a significant impact with your teams.

Best,

Andrew