In this week's newsletter

• Two frameworks to ground your recurring meetings
• Preview: Weekly Team Meetings Summer Series
• Warm-up and checkout questions you can use today
• Your weekly bird break

Nearly every coaching conversation, reader survey, email, and question over coffee in the last month has come back to the same theme: weekly team meetings.

People are wrestling with:

• Collaboration: How do I set up a regular team meeting to foster collaboration the rest of the week?
• Disengaged participants: What do I do if people don’t want to participate?
• Stuck in a rut: I do the same thing every week. What else should I be doing with my team?
• Competing goals: Based on feedback, everyone wants something different out of our weekly meeting. What should I do?
• Decisions: It’s supposed to be a place where decisions are made, but people come ready to share status updates and flag risks. What can I do differently?
• Getting started: My team lacks a regular meeting. How can I convince my manager we need one?
• Multi-tasking: My manager talks at us during our weekly meetings while everyone multi-tasks the whole time. What can I do?
• Running over: How can I tell if we need more time or need to stick to our agenda?

Today, I’ll lay the foundation, and over the next few weeks, I’ll answer all of these questions and more, so you can lead through your weekly meetings.

Let’s start from the basics. ​
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Team meetings can be used to: make decisions, roll out a change, deepen cross-team collaboration, align team members to strategic priorities, and so much more.

Regardless of objective, the core structure of the weekly team meeting uses four building blocks:

1. Housekeeping sets the stage: the agenda, norms, logistics, and anything the group needs to know before diving in.
2. Warm-up gets everyone present and participating. It is a low-stakes moment for every voice to be heard early, which paves the way for more participation during the rest of the meeting.
3. Content is the substance of the meeting: the topics, discussions, decisions, and work you are there to do together.
4. Close creates clarity: what was decided, what is next, who is responsible, and how did the meeting land?

How you populate those building blocks will vary week to week based on your priorities and your objectives for the meeting. Read how to apply the building blocks to structure a weekly meeting.

Once you’ve used the building blocks to set up the structure, you can’t just set it and forget it! For a recurring meeting to be effective, I recommend ensuring these five components of a STANDing meeting are in place:

• Stewardship: Someone actively owns curation of this meeting agenda week to week: solicits topics, delegates components, matches content to priorities, manages the flow, and ensures follow-through. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the person who called the meeting, or the team leader, as long as roles are explicit.
• Tempo: Duration and frequency match the objectives. The team knows what to expect: when the agenda goes out, if the meeting starts/ends on time, how time is managed.
• Access: Attendees are clear on how to get topics on the agenda and what is expected of them when they bring a topic. They’re also clear on how to engage when they’re not presenting.
• Norms: Explicit agreements about how people engage, prepare, and show up. Trust that they will be enforced and a shared understanding of everyone's role in enforcement.
• Deliver: Every meeting ends with clarity about what was decided, what is next, and who is responsible. System in place to revisit commitments and deprioritized topics.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll tackle the reader questions listed above in the context of both frameworks in a Weekly Team Meetings Summer Series.

In the meantime, ask yourself

Think a friend or colleague will find value in the Weekly Team Meetings Summer Series??

Forward them this email and encourage them to subscribe!

Meeting Minute

​Warm-up question​

Low-friction way to surface interdependencies before they become blockers. This can encourage people to ask for more help than they might have otherwise, or give folks a heads-up that an ask is coming their way.

​Check-out question​

Connects to the warm-up question by pushing folks to name interdependencies surfaced through the team’s conversation. Solidifies learning from the meeting, which is especially good after communicating a new decision, change, or project update. Helps you, as the leader, get a read on whether team members understand how work connects, which can tee up reinforcement or more probing in your next 1:1.