☀️ 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 first issue in this series​

In this week's newsletter

• Q: How can I convince my manager we need a regular team meeting?
• Warm-up and check-out questions you can use this week
• Weekly Bird Break

Q: How can I convince my manager we need a regular team meeting?

A: This question assumes a team meeting is needed, and it sounds like your manager doesn't share this assumption. Let’s start there, then explore a few ways to make your case.

It's common for managers with a wide scope to lead exclusively through 1:1s and project syncs. They’re likely thinking:

• We’re all in a lot of meetings
• I know what everyone is working on and can connect dots and share updates on behalf of others as needed
• Most of the time Joe's work is unrelated to Maite’s
• I don’t want to bother people with extra meetings or context they don’t need
• I personally don’t have time for more meetings, let alone to design and lead one

So your first task is to figure out which of these is holding your manager back, then you can advocate.

Making the case

As I explored in this March issue, meeting one-by-one has a lot of hidden costs. If you want a team meeting, you need to point out the costs of not having one (or what you stand to gain by holding one). What this looks like:

• Highlight examples when meeting with others on your team paid off: “Having context about X project saved me time on Y project” or “I leaned on Joe to help me get unstuck and we delivered X result to our top client”
• Highlight misses that a team meeting could have avoided: “We took two weeks to respond to this client because alignment took forever,” or “I duplicated Maite’s work for a couple weeks before we caught it,” or “Julie relayed old details about my project to another team which led me to spend hours in meetings clarifying the status”
• Highlight the benefits of other recurring meetings at your organization and how your team might benefit from a similar space

Remember, your manager is not perfect and may have different strengths than you. It’s possible you see downstream impacts better than they do.

It’s also possible they have context you don’t have and discussing this with them will change your mind…

Offer to share the load

In the STANDing Meetings Framework, S stands for Stewardship. Every recurring meeting needs someone who actively manages the agenda, the flow, and the follow-through. Good news: the team leader does not need to steward the meeting. They need to ensure it is someone’s responsibility or set up a rotation.

If your manager doesn’t have (or won’t make) the time to steward a weekly meeting, consider offering to take some or all of that responsibility off their plate. You could offer to:

• set up an agenda template and process for submitting agenda items and roll it out to the team
• facilitate the meeting for the team
• offer to take notes and communicate action items out with the team

Frame as part of your professional development on the job or as stepping into an operational leadership role on the team — they still lead the team at the strategic altitude; you’re helping them with tactical leadership.

Start small and frame as an experiment

Depending on your manager’s starting assumptions, the convincing might go better if you start small.

Instead of weekly, start with bi-weekly or monthly.

Frame as something you want to try for three months and then reflect on how it’s going.

After the trial period, you can point out all the tangible benefits (or tweak if you’re not yet seeing them).

Before your next one-on-one with your manager, ask yourself:

Meeting Minute

Use these to start and end your meetings this week

​Warm-up question​

This question is great for a team still building their information-sharing practices and their understanding of how their work is related. The art to leading this well: even though this prompts backward reflection, focus on the future. The purpose is not to point fingers and blame others for not sharing info. It's to build awareness of what context is worth passing along as an FYI next time.

​Check-out question​

This question is designed to reinforce connections among team members and de-emphasize the leader as bottleneck. If people have a hard time coming up with answers, that's a signal the meeting needs more structured opportunities for teammates to engage with one another. Check this out for engagement ideas.