De-Suck Your Unproductive Weekly Status Meetings

Having great weekly meetings is the secret to increasing your speed of execution and getting more initiatives done.

"Wow! Really? Mine suck. In fact, I am thinking of stopping my weekly status meeting altogether,” a friend said to me. When I asked him why, he shared that they were boring, tedious, and his team could not wait for the weekly status meeting to be over so that they could get some real work done. The British Psychological Society reported that $37B each year is lost to unproductive meetings. Clearly, some of those dollars were my buddy’s.

“Well, let’s try and de-suck your meeting before we kill it.”

Most weekly meetings are status meetings. My chart below gives you a quick comparison between the typical status meeting and the Weekly Adjustment Meeting that we advocate.

Here are a few minor adjustments you can make to transform your time-sucking weekly status meeting into a productive weekly adjustment meeting:

• Change the Name. Don’t call it a status meeting anymore. It sets the wrong tone. Call it a Weekly Adjustment Meeting, and have people come ready to discuss solutions to problems or issues.
• Don’t start with status. Why go over status for a whole list of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) when you can read about the status yourself.
• Begin with the end in mind. Focus on whether the team is on track to achieving the company’s plan for the quarter.
• Solve one problem. Or tackle one opportunity. It does not seem like a lot, but if you solve one problem every week, you will solve fifty problems a year! Very few companies solve 50 problems a year. You would be moving faster than your competition.

My buddy made these changes and immediately started having productive meetings. I asked him a few weeks later, “Dude, how are your weekly meetings now? Do you still want to kill them?”

He said “No! They are great. We get real work done in the meetings.”

The weekly meeting is the cornerstone of increasing the speed of execution in your company so that you can get more strategic initiatives done.

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