Team Meetings Series: The Agenda

Actions to take: Send your agenda out at least 24 hours in advance of your meeting. Include start times, "owner," and enough context for each item to get your team thinking about the topics.

This is a post in a short series about running your team meetings, i.e. the regularly scheduled meeting with all of your direct reports in attendance. Many of the lessons apply to other meetings, but team meetings are the focus.

How often are you in a meeting where the facilitator asks for input, discussion, etc. and gets dead silence in response? How often have you run a meeting where that has happened? There are several reasons it may happen, but the first culprit is that the meeting facilitator failed to adequately prepare the attendees. 

The agenda is the plan for the meeting. If you are constructing a building, the agenda is the blueprint. Most agendas are about as good as a sketch in the sand—you'll probably make a building, but good luck keeping it together. It is possible to have a bad meeting with a good agenda, but it is not possible to have a good meeting with a bad agenda. Thrown together agendas make for thrown together meetings. Excellent, thoughtful agendas make for excellent, thoughtful meetings. 

The agenda shows people why they should go to the meeting. The following elements, which most agendas miss, will ensure that your agenda convinces people that they want to attend..

• Start times: Including start times for each agenda item is the biggest improvement you can make to almost any agenda. It has a host of benefits. First, it forces you to really think about your agenda & how long you need to spend on each item. Second, it indicates that priority to your team. Third, it makes it much easier to say "we are out of time on this one," keeping your meeting on track. (Note: Duration is not the same as start time. When your agenda lists how long things will take, your team will spend the meeting repeatedly doing math to figure out how behind you are.) 
• One agenda item per agenda item: If you put "9:20, discuss X. Decide on Y. Brainstorm Z," then you have missed the point of including start times. Invariably, your employees will spend the majority of the time on a single topic (usually the first), and the others will get short shrift. Separate them, with separate start times for each. The one exception is for your list of quick, purely informational items that you are telling to your team—those can be sub-bullets of your "information dump" heading.
• Owner of agenda item: After the agenda item, put the name of the person running that item in parentheses. For your team meeting, your name will probably go after most items. Still include it. This has two major effects. First, it subtly reminds your team that the meeting is about interacting with people as much as it is about the information and topics. Second, it will encourage you to have others lead agenda items from time to time, which is important for developing their skills.
• Describe each item: For any item that is not purely informational, provide a one or two sentence explanation. What will happen during that part of the meeting? Discussion? If so, what in particular do you care about? Decision? If so, what needs to be decided? Brainstorming? Delegation of tasks? When you spend a few sentences describing the agenda items, your employees will be primed to contribute something meaningful. When you wait until the meeting to ask these questions, you have to sit in silence while your employees think.
• Space for notes: This is an obvious agenda element that is embarrassingly neglected. Any good team meeting carries expectations for those in attendance. At a minimum, the team is learning things they need to know. Better meetings have a host of outcomes and action items. If you decided to do X for Project Y, the people carrying out that task need to note X and its deadline.
• Sent out in advance: If start times are the biggest improvement, this is the second. When you send your agenda out in advance, you give your employees crucial time to think. They will come to the meeting prepared. They will have thoughts ready; discussion will be lively; decisions will be smarter because the bad ones will be challenged. You must send your agenda out ahead of time.

There is universal agreement that most meetings are a waste of time. They are dull, the content often could have been an email, and it never feels like there is an opportunity to contribute meaningfully to the items that do matter. A thoughtfully developed agenda, delivered ahead of the meeting, is the quickest, largest improvement you can make to your own team meetings. 

Team Meetings Series: Introduction

Actions to take: better-boss.com recommends team meetings that are regularly scheduled, have a well-defined agenda that is published in advance, and are actively facilitated. Read future posts in this series to hear more specific advice.

This is the first post in a short series about running your team meetings, i.e. the regularly scheduled meeting with all of your direct reports in attendance. Many of the lessons apply to other meetings, but team meetings are the focus.

Let's break down a few clichés related to team meetings. We will put them into plain English and try to get something actionable out of them.

• Team meetings "ensure that the team is aligned." Translation: everyone hears you say the same thing in exactly the same way in a team meeting. When someone asks a question, everyone gets to hear your answer. When you give updates or answer questions outside of a team meeting, a sole employee may start doing things differently because they have different information than everyone else has. Team meetings are an opportunity to rectify that.
• Team meetings "are a time to build stronger relationships." Average bosses often make the mistake of thinking they need to design activities with the express goal of teambuilding. That's like designing "falling in love" activities for someone you are dating. Cute if you do it once or twice. Creepy if you think it is a real strategy. The majority of your team gets nothing out of team-building activities and sees right through them. Instead, do work during your team meetings. Strong work relationships are an emergent property that comes from completing meaningful tasks together on a regular basis. Discuss issues, brainstorm around new ideas, encourage lively & respectful debate, get opinions on various issues, etc. 
• Team meetings are a place to "demonstrate your leadership." This phrasing is dangerous because demonstrating leadership should never be your goal. Leadership is just a collection of things you do. Those things aren't your objective. Better performance, getting work done, achieving the goals of the organization, these are your objectives. This cliché is trying to articulate that team meetings, like one-on-ones, are one of the easiest places to do leadership. You can answer questions, make decisions, clarify plans, etc. Meetings are often derided as a waste of time, but when done effectively, they are far more efficient at these communication tasks than email, Slack channels, or other options.

Your team meeting can be one of the most valuable things you do. The forthcoming series of posts will help you get the most out of these meetings by explaining in detail how to do them well. Here is what the Team Meetings Series of posts will cover: 

• The agenda
• Frequency
• Scheduling
• Topic purpose
• Ground rules
• Facilitating conversation
• Preparing for your meeting
• Prewiring important topics

Stay tuned for these future posts in the Team Meetings Series! 

More Reasons Why We Ask Before Giving Feedback

Actions to take: Ask your employees for their permission before giving performance feedback. Do it every time.

Better-boss.com advocates for casual, frequent performance feedback using the following formula: 1) ask if you can provide feedback; 2) provide feedback using the format "when you do X, it has Y impact"; 3) finish with a question asking them to change or an affirmation that they should keep it up. Feedback is short, simple, and can be about any work behavior. All posts about feedback assume this formula and strategy.

It is a little uncomfortable to say, "Can I give you some feedback?" That is particularly true when you are just starting this new feedback method. It feels overly formal. It adds just a little bit of reminder that you are the boss and they are the employee. It can feel unnecessary, especially with positive feedback. For these reasons, some of you will continue to resist asking the question, despite our first post explaining the importance of asking before you give feedback. The crux of that post was that feedback is advice, and you cannot force advice onto a person.

For some readers, that truth is not enough to balance out the awkwardness of asking. Here are several more reasons, which will hopefully tip the scales for you.

• It is a signal: A huge complaint employees have about their bosses is that they don't get clear instructions. They find out weeks later that the boss hinted this or that. The employee didn't pick up on the hint, went a different way, and got in trouble for it. We want our employees to know without a doubt when we are giving feedback. One of the the questions HR always probes for with problem employees is, "Did you explain expectations in a way the employee can understand?" Asking first erases any possibility of misunderstanding. "Can I give you some feedback" could not be more clear. Your employees will hear, "Hey, employee! I'm about to make a comment about your performance! You might want to pay close attention!"
• It gives them power: Perhaps unintuitively, we want the boss to be exerting as little power as possible while giving advice. If you don't ask, then you are telling. Telling an employee what they did wrong inevitably makes them feel like they're in trouble. We don't want the employee thinking about getting in trouble. We want them thinking about what the work we just commented on, and how to do it better in the future. When you ask before giving feedback, you are getting away from the "boss telling" power dynamic a little bit by giving them control of the situation.  
• It is polite: Here is a simple reason to ask: it is the polite thing to do. All day, we ask when we could technically tell. We ask an employee to help that customer, to put out the closing sign, to take the lead on small projects, etc. Yea, you can tell your employee to do these things and earn a reputation for being a dictatorial jackass. Or you can ask.
• It is free: There is no downside to this act because employees virtually never say no. I have given thousands of pieces of feedback, possibly tens of thousands. I can recall twice in my career when an employee responded no when asked if I could give them feedback. Both times, it was because they were distracted with something important in the moment. They followed up the same day to find out what my feedback was. 

I hope you will agree, these many reasons to ask your employees before giving feedback far outweigh the slight awkwardness of asking the question. It is easier not to ask first. It is less work not to ask. It is also less effective not to ask. Do the more polite, effective thing. Ask your employees before giving feedback.