Q: I do the same thing in our team meeting every week. What else should I be doing?
A: Today I’ll explore three ways to introduce more variety into your weekly team meetings:
- Vary your approach to your usual agenda
- Empower your team to shape the agenda
- Idea bank for how else to use your meeting time
1. Vary your approach
Let’s say you typically go around the room and ask each person to share their top priorities for the next two weeks and then invite questions.
Vary the engagement structure.
Instead of going around the room, you might pair people up and then ask them to present each other’s priorities. Or write out priorities on a white board and vote on the order in which they’ll be discussed.
Why? Adults learn best by doing and we feel a deeper sense of ownership when we co-create.
Vary the altitude or time horizon.
Instead of asking your team to share priorities for the next two weeks, you might ask for the next three months.
Instead of asking about the team member's priorities, you might prompt “what are the organization’s priorities for the next two weeks?”
Why? This forces your team to think more strategically and situate their work in a broader context.
Vary the relational focus: team, internal, external. When sharing priorities for the next two weeks add another prompt:
- “which other teams does this impact?”
- “how does each priority support your PD (or your direct reports’)?”
- “how does this priority improve outcomes for our clients/customers/learners?”
Why? This helps your team build deeper organizational context, reinforce connections, and can help you fill in any blindspots before they become issues.
2. Empower your team
Tapping your team for topics is a great way to infuse more variety, and it helps direct reports build their meeting leadership skills with your support. This Do you need a meeting? checklist can help your team members identify topics well-suited for meeting agenda time. Once they’ve identified a topic for the meeting, you can challenge them to write clear objectives and plan how they’ll structure the content block. What this sounds like:
- “If this goes well, what specifically will be true that wasn't before?”
- “What prep do you need to do for that to be true?”
- “What prep do others need to do?”
- “How will you structure the conversation?”
3. Idea bank
Want a more radical change? Swap your usual for one of the following:
- Building context (within the team, with other departments, or externally). Solicit questions about a topic in advance, discuss an industry-relevant article, invite a guest from another team for Q&A, etc.
- Working session. Advance work together. OR each person shares a goal for the time, sits together doing independent work, and is there for quick questions and accountability.
- Making decisions. Scope a decision-making process, gather input to make a decision, evaluate input and decide.
- Processing change. Preview change and solicit questions to shape it, inform about change and practice how to talk about it, plan for implementation.
- Debriefs. Structured reflection to learn from something that went well or not so well.
- Team building. So many options! Do a values or strengths reflection. Or create a playlist using a prompt “your favorite song when stressed” or “your favorite summer song.”
- Professional development. Learn together, discuss a case study, share updates on personal or direct reports' PD for accountability and ideas.
For more detailed guidance on how to structure many of these ideas, check out meeting design guides here.
Before your next team meeting, ask yourself:
What is ONE way I can switch things up this week?
