Fix Your Weekly Meeting

Weekly meetings suck. I mean, let's be honest - most of your weekly meetings suck. Each team member shares what they have going on and no one cares. There's no time to discuss the real important issues, and everyone's looking at their watch to figure out how much time is left until they can go back to work and get some real stuff done.

Maybe a weekly meeting started out with the right intention and agenda, but now you're just going through the motions. Or maybe you've gotten so fed up, you look for every excuse to cancel the meeting - Joe's out this week, or we have too much going on. But here's the problem: done right, your weekly team meeting is your most important meeting. Done right, the weekly meeting is the seed that real accountability grows from. Done wrong, and accountability dies. Your weekly meeting, and with my clients I call it the weekly accountability meeting, is the best forum to hold yourself and your team members accountable for their commitments.

Instead of saying, "Jessica, what do you have going on this week?", the meeting should be driven by the idea of holding each team member accountable for working in the business and on the business. Working in the business means holding people accountable for their daily, weekly, and monthly key performance indicators. Holding them accountable for rolling up their sleeves and getting the job done. Are we hitting our goal for the number of sales meetings per week or the number of marketing qualified leads? If not, what are we doing to get back on track? Working on the business focuses on those one to three priorities they have to take things to a whole other level. What are they doing to improve the business?

I recommend focusing on a small number of 90-day priorities I call "rocks." Holding team members accountable in this weekly meeting means you won't go off track too long without identifying what's happening so you can fix it. Holding team members accountable in this meeting means there's peer pressure. We don't want to let our other team members down. Holding team members accountable in this weekly meeting means you have to agree what you're holding them accountable for. It challenges you to strategize and plan outside of the weekly meeting. With my clients, we do this in annual and quarterly planning meetings. Done right, it should take you no more than 30 minutes to hold people accountable in the meeting. Assuming your meeting is an hour, you could use the remaining 30 minutes to tackle one or two issues or opportunities you identified in the first 30 minutes.

Fix your weekly meeting. Have the right agenda and facilitate it with real discipline. Make it your most important hour of the week, instead of a waste of time.