This week in our own Weekly Adjustment Meeting, our consultants were discussing one of our clients that was having a hard time using Rhythm effectively in their weekly meetings. I realized that the tool by itself doesn’t make the meeting effective – how the team uses it does. And, the facilitator is the one accountable for ensuring that the team uses the time in a productive way. You can’t just let the team sit back in their chairs, checking email, while you click into every square on your EnergyMap and read comments out loud to the group. This is just as much a status meeting as the traditional model where everyone presents for ten minutes while nobody listens. As the facilitator (or facilitators, if you rotate this responsibility like we do), you can use some specific questions and strategies to ensure that the time your team spends together weekly is for making adjustments, not for boring, non-productive status updates.
Here are some questions that can help you to drive the right conversations so that your meetings truly are focused on solutions and not status:
It is also key to look for patterns in your dashboards and use those to drive the conversation:
As you facilitate, it is good to be aware that you only have a certain amount of time for your meeting. Your adjustment meeting will quickly slip into a status meeting if you attempt to dig into 20 red or yellow status items and plow through all of them. Focus is just as important here as it is in determining your plan for the quarter. The facilitator needs to spend some time prior to the meeting reviewing all the status updates and determining if there is enough time in the agenda to address each red and yellow status. If there isn’t, you need to agree with your team upfront about which conversations need to happen today, this week. It is a far better use of your meeting time to dig in deep and really try to solve two or three problems than to just run down the list.
For the Red or Yellow priorities that you are digging deeper into, you can use the questions above or you can implement some brainstorming strategies to get the team really engaged in thinking about the problem. Some techniques might be Edward de Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats or just having the team make a list of 20 ideas (no matter how crazy) to get back on track. Everyone on the team should come to the meeting prepared to work on problems, having already read the status updates, so engage those brains around the room to do some real work. This is the only way to prevent the dreaded boring status meeting from taking over the time for your team’s weekly adjustment meeting - the most powerful tool you have to achieve breakthrough execution on your quarterly goals.
Additional Rhythm Systems Meeting Resources:
How To Have Effective Weekly Staff Meetings (With Sample Agenda Template)
Download our weekly meeting agenda
Are You Having Weekly Meetings with Yourself?
Supercharge Your Meetings with This Effective Weekly Meeting Agenda
Weekly Adjustment Meetings vs. Weekly Status Meetings (Infographic)
Consider using Rhythm Software to run your weekly meeting, where the status and agenda are automatically created every week to keep you on track!