I'm hosting a free live webinar this Thursday, October 22 at 2:00 PM ET: Why Decisions Get Stuck in Meetings and How to Move Them Forward​

In this week's newsletter

• Meeting rhythms after a reorg: Use the Four Rs to decide what stays and what changes
• Info on more free upcoming webinars​
• Warm-up and check-out questions you can use in a newly reorganized structure
• Your weekly bird break

Priorities are shifting, maybe there's been turnover, or the external landscape has changed. Whatever the reason, you’ve decided to restructure the team in response. You work with HR to rewrite job descriptions, draft your comms plan, and begin rolling it out to the organization...but what about the meetings?

• Are people supposed to go to the standing meetings on the books even if the structure changes?
• Are you supposed to awkwardly kick people out of meetings they don’t belong in anymore?
• Will people in new roles have to advocate for their invitations to existing meetings?
• If your team doesn’t exist anymore, should you just cancel the team meeting?

Standing meetings are part of an organization’s social and collaborative fabric, so canceling one or being uninvited can mean losing valuable working relationships and critical information flow, not just what was on the agenda. When the reorg doesn’t include meetings, you can quickly end up with ballooning calendars or silos or both.

Here’s what to do instead:

This work starts with the executive team and flows down: executives set the organization-wide priorities and norms, function and project leaders determine what rhythms their teams need, and meeting owners reset individual meetings.

Ideally, meetings flow from the priorities of the organization. What needs to be done by when and shared with whom? Who needs to build relationships? Who needs regular opportunities to collaborate, share information, make decisions, and solve problems?

Next consider: Based on what the organization needs to achieve and the teams responsible, which groups need to be meeting regularly? How often? Who owns each of these meetings? What’s their purpose?

Once you're clear on what needs to be in place in the new structure, then map existing recurring meetings using the Four Rs:

Before canceling meetings you plan to Retire or Rebuild, consider:

• How will the people from this legacy meeting know what one another is working on moving forward? Should they?
• What might be lost (relationships, information sharing, collaboration) and how might the organization meet those needs in the future?
• How might you use a final meeting to reflect on your work together and/or how you’ll stay connected in the future?

Use these reflections to thoughtfully sunset and design meeting and operating rhythms for your new paradigm.

For meetings you Rebuild or Reset, be especially intentional about your housekeeping during the first few months. Set temporary norms and use warm-up questions to help the group build new working relationships.

Co-creating norms is ideal (see warm-up below for example), but it takes time. If you’re reorganizing during a budget shortfall or major deadline, the meeting leader might propose a set of norms and say, “These are the meeting norms I want us to adopt for the next two months as we get used to our new structure. Then we’ll have a retreat to reflect on how it’s going.”

Even meetings you Retain should adjust to the new organizational context. Create space for questions, encourage team members to connect their agenda items to the new org strategy or share what they’re learning about new teams’ working norms.

Tip: In Your Best Meeting Ever, Dr. Rebecca Hinds advocates for a “Meetings Doomsday: full calendar cleanse” periodically, whether you’re going through a reorg or not. In this cleanse, you cancel all recurring meetings and no one can add them back for two full days. Then, only add back the ones you need. A reorg can be a natural reason to do a full cleanse at your organization. Then use the Four Rs to decide which meetings come back and which should stay off the calendar.

Meeting Minute

Use these to start and end your meetings this week

​Warm-up question​

When you start a recurring meeting with a new group of people, you can co-create meeting norms. This gives the group an opportunity to be explicit about expectations and how you’ll work together, and to proactively work through any differences in expectations people may be bringing from a previous team culture. If you're integrating new folks into an existing meeting you might amend this question to include, "Or one established norm that you value, why?" as well.

​Check-out question​

This question reinforces the purpose of the meeting and gives the group feedback about how well the meeting served it. If the group has enough psychological safety, reflect on the responses together: “I see several sideways thumbs. What is one thing we could do differently next time?” Make it clear that the goal is to improve the meeting. Alternatively, you could follow up 1:1 with people and say, “I noticed you gave a thumbs-down. What’s one thing we could do differently next time?”