☀️ Weekly Team Meetings Summer Series ☀️

Each week this summer, I'm answering reader questions about weekly team meetings. New here? Click here to read the series kick-off issue​

In this week's newsletter

• Q: How do I use a regular team meeting to foster collaboration the rest of the week?
• Warm-up: building cross-team fluency
• Check-out: homework to keep the collaboration going
• Your weekly bird break

Q: How do I use a regular team meeting to foster collaboration the rest of the week?

A: Without intentional effort and strong existing collaboration practices, the weekly meeting can start to feel like a bunch of short, public 1:1s with you, becoming stale and performative over time. With intention, they can be a key collaboration driver, keeping your team aligned, unblocked, and solving problems on their own.

There are three levers in a weekly meeting for fostering collaboration. (And if you don’t lead the meeting, there are some tips at the bottom for you, too!)

1. Jointly set collaboration norms that apply both during and outside this meeting
2. Make collaboration expectations clear and reinforce them through the meeting structure
3. Design the meeting to build the relationships and context people need to collaborate

1. Jointly set team norms

​Set meeting norms. Setting norms for how you collaborate in the meeting is a great training ground for making norms more explicit outside of meetings, too.

Build a living team charter. Use a whole team meeting (or two) to co-create a living document that outlines your values, norms, metrics of success, and standards of quality.

When a question or disagreement comes up in the meeting, discuss it in the context of the charter. Either apply your previous agreements to the topic at hand, or update your charter based on the discussion.

2. Explicitly state and reinforce collaboration expectations

Clearly name what this meeting is and what it isn’t. Help your team understand the meeting’s purpose (and the purpose of other meetings and comms channels) through how you structure the agenda and redirect questions in the moment.

What this sounds like:

• “This meeting is for discussion and decisions, not for status updates. For those, please refer to the tracker beforehand. If you have questions or need support, please bring to the meeting.”
• “I already have 1:1s with all of you, this is an opportunity for you to engage your teammates, not update me.”
• “Ted, why don’t you and Claudia follow up about this in your next 1:1”
• “Next time, I’d like this kind of update shared in the team Slack before this meeting, so we all have the same context”

3. Build relationships and context to seed collaboration

Structure the meeting for direct communication among team members:

• Split people into pairs or small groups to get them talking to each other.

Design the meeting to build fluency across the team:

• Use the warm-up question to build this muscle (see one example below).
• Periodically set aside 15 minutes to put someone in the "hot seat." Everyone else gets to ask them any questions about their work.

Distribute meeting leadership:

• Assign two team members to bring a topic to the meeting together. This forces collaboration on the task at hand, and makes meeting leadership more collaborative as well.
• Rotate leadership: you might ask different team members to bring the warm-up question or actually rotate who leads the whole meeting.
• Assign someone to cover leading the meeting when you’re out of the office. This communicates there is still value in them coming together without you.

And if you’re not leading the meeting?

• Ask a colleague if you can grab coffee to hear more about the project they mentioned in the meeting
• When you bring a topic to the meeting, structure engagement for full team participation
• Suggest a team norm, “I’ve realized I’m not always clear on what kind of input from me would be most helpful. When a topic comes up, could we try naming whether we’re looking for questions, input to challenge thinking before deciding, input to support a roll-out, etc.?”

Ask yourself

Have a question about your weekly meeting?

Reply and I might answer it in a future issue.

Meeting Minute

Use these to start and end your meetings this week

​Warm-up question​

This is great when team members have a habit of not recognizing how their work is interconnected. Before asking, name the catch out loud: "The trick with this question is that your teammates might disagree with you, and that's OK. We want to surface where your work touches theirs more than you may realize."

After each person answers you can say, "raise your hand if you think what they shared does touch your work." Use this option with teams that have enough trust to disagree visibly.

Otherwise lead with open Q&A: "What questions do you have about what your colleagues shared?" "Based on what you heard, what support might you offer? How do you want to be kept in the loop and why?"

​Check-out question​

You can assign pairs or let team members choose for themselves. If your org has budget, you can offer gift cards to facilitate. A few weeks later, start a meeting with a warm-up question to harvest what came out of these conversations: "What's one thing you learned from your coffee?"