The Modern Leader
Raise your hand if you’ve ever spent time in a meeting and came out the other side feeling like you just lost 30-60 minutes of your life doing absolutely nothing of value!
I’m just going to pretend I’m seeing all of you raise your hand because we all know this is an all too common occurrence. Time is finite during a work week, and there’s never enough of it to get everything on our to-do list done, which is why if you’re heading up a team meeting or involved in one, this is a particularly useful email.
I have a meeting with my direct team every week - same time, same place (on Google Meet, of course), same structure. It’s predictable and there are never any questions on how we’re going to spend 45-60 minutes together. Knowing this is up to an hour of my team’s time, I want to make sure we’re spending it well, but I also don’t want to just talk at them for this duration.
The rest of this meeting will review how I structure my team meeting. I keep a document updated on Notion, and every week I just duplicate the “Template” tab and fill it right in.
Start with metrics review. We look at key performance metrics like latency and cloud costs as well as overall business metrics (in our case, # of customers, cameras, appliances, and QTD revenue). Choose whichever metrics are relevant for your team.
Celebrate wins. I ask my team what wins we had over the past week and always come prepared with a few of them to kick things off. This could be a new feature release, fixing a gnarly bug, a new employee starting, or a promotion, for example.
Leave time for demos if the team would like to demo something. If a team member has something they’ve been working on in a demoable state, it’s great to have the entire team see what’s being worked on. It’s also excellent practice for your team to work on their presentation skills and get instant feedback.
Finally, review the topics of discussion for your team this week. I try to remember to send this out to my team a day in advance so they can be thinking about anything they’d want to talk about, and I’ll also pull topics from 1:1s that come up that are better to address to a broader audience. Be mindful of how much time you have available so you don’t overdo it on topics here.
That’s it! Rinse and repeat every week. I rarely cancel a team meeting these days unless I’m out of office or there’s just absolutely nothing to cover and we’re hyper-focused on work for the week.
This format provides a super transparent way of keeping your team up to date on business matters and give them the space to bring up concerns they may have that need to be addressed with everyone and not just one on one.