by Michael Holland
Spice up your ongoing team meetings with two simple practices.
Rotate the Seats
In many team meetings, especially those team meetings that occur on a regular basis, attendees often sit the same seat every week. Guide a change in energy, perspective and attention by creating a purposeful rotation of seats.
Make it Random – Create seat labels/identifier cards. Shuffle the deck ahead of the meeting and have team members pick a card upon arrival. The card will tell them where they will sit for the meeting.
Dynamic Agenda
Good meeting management includes the development of an agenda for a team meeting. So all of us dutifully prepare an agenda ahead of the meetings we run and forward along to those attending. But too often the agenda is stale, repetitive or lacks tactical urgency.
Make it Dynamic – Utilize the first 8 minutes of your meeting to list out the top 3 agenda items that are important to each attendee. Write the items on the white board or easel allowing each attendee to provide at least 1 item but no more than 3 items. Use a simple voting system to prioritize the items.
Start the meeting with the item that received the highest votes. Once the discussion is complete on that first item, move on the next most important item. You may not get to all the items, in fact, you may only get through one or two of the items. But the team will have invested their time in the items that are most important to the team as a whole.
