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A focused, productive meeting with your team is the single most powerful way to start your week. Despite this, many teams don’t have those regular sessions to start the week – and where meetings do take place, they often underperform versus their potential.
For your team to believe that Monday meetings are a good use of their time, those meetings should achieve five goals:
- Ensure that everyone clearly understands priorities and goals for the team as a whole in the week ahead and their role in achieving those goals.
- Keep lines of communication open, identifying small issues before they become big problems.
- Build a performance culture – in which everyone is accountable for delivering on their commitments.
- Maintain motivation, so that everyone walks away feeling enthused about the week ahead.
- Do this in a tight, focused fashion so that these meetings enhance productivity rather than be a drag on people’s time.
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Tips for an effective Monday meeting
Recently I spoke to an advisor who was struggling with how to make the Monday-morning meetings for his four-person team more effective. Over the years, I’ve talked to many top-performing advisors about how they communicate within their team. Based on those conversations, here’s what I suggested.
Meeting length
Without a firm deadline on length, these meetings drift and lose focus. I recommended that his meetings be scheduled for half an hour with a hard stop after 30 minutes. I spoke to one advisor who was frustrated by the extent to which his Monday meeting had devolved into chit-chat about how people spent the weekend; it’s not that there isn’t place for informal conversations of this sort, but that place shouldn’t be your meeting to kick off the week.
Meeting time
The meeting should be early on Monday but not the very first thing – so say 10 a.m. rather than 8 or 8:30. That way, if someone is held up in traffic, the rest of your team isn’t waiting for a latecomer to arrive.
Keep meetings on track
I suggest a four-part structure for the Monday team meetings, each running six to eight minutes. To help adhere to this timing, use the countdown function on a smartphone, so that if an item has eight minutes on the agenda, people can see how much time is left for discussion. You could also set an alarm, so that you have a warning signal with one minute to go.
A four-part formula for productive meetings
Here’s how I suggested that this advisor divide the 30 minutes for his Monday team meeting.
Key priorities for this week (six to eight minutes)
The advisor should kick off the meeting by highlighting the top priorities for the team as a whole in the week ahead. This could relate to addressing admin issues, rebalancing portfolios, dealing with a compliance audit, a big event with clients or prospects or summarizing changes that he’s contemplating as a result of a conference he attended the previous week. As part of this, canvass team members for any item to add to the list.
What happened last week (six to eight minutes)
In the next section of the meeting, each participant in the meeting has two minutes to do a couple of things:
Share one success story from the previous week. This can be a client thank-you, progress with a prospect, an admin problem that got solved or striking an important item off a to-do list. Most of the time, it will be a small win – what’s important isn’t the size of the win; it’s that people feel that they’re making progress each and every week. (Click here to read about research from a Harvard Business School professor on how a sense of making progress was the top factor in maintaining motivation among people in office environments.)
Once they’ve done that, team members summarize how they did in achieving the two or three priorities that they identified at last week’s team meeting. This has to be tight – remember, each team member only has two minutes.
Goals for the week ahead (six to eight minutes)
Once each team member has highlighted what they did last week, the focus shifts to key goals for the week ahead. Again, everyone has two minutes to summarize the top two or three things they need to get done in the coming week.
To establish accountability, someone takes notes of what each member of the team identifies as their top to-dos for the week ahead; these are circulated on Monday afternoon and again on Thursday with the agenda for next Monday’s team meeting. This summary of key goals for each team member is the starting point for the discussion in the previous section on how people did against their top priorities.
One opportunity to be more effective (six to eight minutes)
The final section of the meeting is the chance to talk about one idea on how the team can function more effectively. On a rotating basis, each team member has the chance to table for discussion one issue that could help the team be more productive. This could relate to work flow, sharing an idea they picked up from another advisor or internal or external communication.
In some cases, there may not be an issue to talk about, but by having this as an agenda item, you encourage people to share ideas that they otherwise might be reluctant to talk about.
Clearly, no meeting structure is exactly right for every team. Given that every advisor and every advisor team is different, this four-step process needs to be amended to fit with how you work. If you do decide to start holding Monday-morning meetings with your team or want to make the meetings that you hold currently more productive, use this structure as a starting point. Do this properly and the effort to develop the right structure for your Monday meetings will pay big dividends in your team’s communication, motivation and overall effectiveness.
conducts programs to help advisors gain and retain clients and is an award winning faculty member in the MBA program at the University of Toronto. To see more of his written and video commentaries, go to www.clientinsights.ca. Use A555A for the rep and dealer code to register for website access.
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