Are you in charge of running your team’s weekly operations meeting? Here are some tips to help you do it more effectively and become everyone’s favorite meeting chair.
Key In on Objectives
The first thing you need to do is key in on the objective of your weekly meeting. The point of a weekly meeting is to give everyone on the team the information and context they need to make decisions for the rest of the week, ideally without having to constantly check in or slow down their decision-making process. This includes updates on what’s going on across the organization and in their teammates’ departments, so that they can own the things they do and make those calls autonomously. It’s also a great opportunity for quick brainstorming session or a way to create accountability for whether things are moving forward and people are taking action.
How to Structure a Weekly Meeting
When I structure a weekly ops meeting, I don’t like to do a lot of homework or preparation. I think if you do that, some people will have done the pre-reading and some won’t—and that just takes away from the feeling of being focused on the immediate business. Instead, I prefer to keep it very self-contained.
Start by Taking Control
As the chair, begin the meeting by taking control. Outline what the meeting is about and what everyone needs to understand. Share information you have received from your manager, information about things going on in the organization as a whole, deadlines, priorities, that kind of thing. Start the meeting with that as the context.
Do a Roundtable
Next, do a quick roundtable, giving each team member maybe two or three minutes. This is NOT an opportunity for them to justify their existence or have a one-on-one with the boss that you haven’t prioritized elsewhere in your week. This IS a time for them to share important updates. What does the team need to know from them and what do they need to know from the team—these are the two questions that make for a great weekly roundtable.
Do Not Deep Dive
One of the things that can really derail a weekly operational meeting is when someone in the roundtable says something and everyone goes right down the rat hole. If you start solving that issue right then and there, that means you’re giving short shrift to everybody else—and you don’t know if that was going to be the most important thing to get your attention. This really is key: if you’re running a weekly meeting, don’t allow anyone to deep dive during the roundtable phase. Use a timer to make sure everyone sticks to their two minutes.
Prioritize
After the roundtable, prioritize the issues raised. Not everything that was raised can be covered in one meeting. What are the issues that are appropriate for discussion now? Which ones can we sort out and resolve? Some of them may need more time, more evidence, more preparation—you don’t want to dive into those if you’re not ready to have the conversation constructively. You need to pick a few things that can be brainstormed, or help someone on the team, or think about how to implement something. Those are great examples of things that lend themselves to that ad hoc conversation in a weekly meeting.
How to Close a Meeting
Finally, reserve the last 10% of your meeting time for a structured wrap-up. If you’re in a 50-minute meeting, reserve five minutes to do what I call the meeting close.
A great meeting close is extremely important. Use this time to:
- Align on commitments — Summarize agreed-upon actions, who is responsible for what, set deadlines
- Agree on communication — Clarify any messages that need to be shared with the rest of the team, who’s saying what to whom
- Collect agenda items — Take note of items for your longer monthly meetings, especially systemic issues or those that require more in-depth discussion
Following these steps, you’ll find that not only will you have a more efficient weekly meeting, but also really improve the quality of your monthly meetings.
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