Speaker 1: If you want to encourage great team working, then team meetings can be an awesome way to get your team coordinated. But if you get them wrong, they can also be a huge drain on your team's time and on its morale. So in this video, I want to look at what the essential elements are for creating a great team meeting and therefore fostering effective teamwork. So what creates a really good team meeting? Well, firstly, you need to have an objective. And that objective needs to be clearly stated early on in the team meeting. Ideally, you'd also have an agenda in advance which states that objective. However, many team meetings are a regular team meeting that happens at the same time every week, possibly even every day. And therefore, you may not need that agenda in advance. But at the start of the meeting, you do need to state the objective. What I would say, however, is that if that team meeting needs to consider a decision, needs to resolve a problem, you really ought to advise people before the meeting with enough time that they can think through the decision, think through the problem for themselves and bring their ideas and contributions to the meeting. Not least because some people do their best thinking alone and not in the hurly burly of a social situation. Yes, some people do thrive on that meeting atmosphere. Other people's ideas spark new ideas in them. That's not for everyone and you need to cater for everyone. Second, a good meeting has to have the right people present. So you need to invite the right people to your meeting. Not every team meeting needs to have the whole team present to do what it needs to do. And good teamwork doesn't necessarily mean that the whole team is present all the time. So think carefully about who are the right people to have in your meeting. And also who doesn't need to be there. And by inviting them, you would just be wasting their time. It's also worth noting that by and large, smaller meetings are more effective. There is an overhead to a large meeting in the amount of facilitation it requires to keep it effective. So the smaller you can make your meetings, the better they will be. Crucially, a great meeting has good behaviours. And one of the advantages of a good team that has already developed high standards of teamwork is that that good behaviour is now baked into their culture. Examples of the good behaviours I would expect to see at a team meeting include good timekeeping. Expect people to arrive on time and reward them by starting the meeting on time. If people aren't there on time and they miss the start of the meeting, that's their problem. And missing the meeting is their sanction. Another aspect of good timekeeping, of course, is in longer meetings resuming promptly after breaks. If people wander off and then they come back after the discussion has started, that's hugely disruptive and disrespectful to the people in the meeting. Talking about that, if people do need to take a call, expect them to step out of the meeting rather than disrupt the meeting with the call. And to only use electronic devices as part of participating in the meeting, to take notes, to present. If people are reading their email while someone else is speaking, again, that's disrespectful. They're not properly hearing what's being said and therefore they're not going to be able to contribute to the meeting. Make sure that people take turns. They avoid speaking over one another. They listen carefully when someone else is speaking and they wait for the facilitator or the chair to recognize them before making their contribution. But in a good team meeting, everybody will be prepared to make a contribution. And when they do, they need to be open and they need to be honest about their opinions. And finally, you should expect people to stay on topic. If someone has something to say which is off topic, they need to wait to a suitable break to alert the chair to the fact that they've got something they want to contribute and to give you or the facilitator of the meeting the opportunity to schedule that bit of the conversation to when is appropriate, which might be after the meeting or it might be part of some any other business section of the meeting. The next thing that's really important to me is the distinction I like to draw between a team meeting and a team leader meeting. Ask yourself this about your team meetings. What happens when the team leader isn't there? Do they carry on as normal? If they do, it is a team meeting. It is a meeting for the team and whether the leader is there or not, the team gets on with its job. If, on the other hand, when the team leader is absent, the meeting doesn't occur or it doesn't work properly, then it's probably a team leader meeting, a meeting for the team leader, about the team leader, run by the team leader, and it is therefore not a proper team meeting. And I would argue that if you want to create really good team working, you should do away with team leader led meetings and find a way to rotate the facilitation of the meeting to make sure that the team can work together and hold its meetings effectively, regardless of whether the leader is there or not. Inevitably, there will be times in any team meeting where the meeting just goes round and round in circles and it doesn't make any progress. This is what you might refer to as a black hole. And in a good meeting, it would be possible for anyone who spots that to raise their hand and say, I think we've been around this circle a couple of times. It's time we moved on. And if the facilitator hadn't noticed that, they should check the mood of the room and then be prepared to move on. And likewise, if someone spots that actually we moved off topic and we're no longer talking about what we're supposed to be talking about and what in British English we refer to as a red herring, a distraction, something that is not part of what we should be talking about, then again, the facilitator should be prepared to move the meeting on. A good tip for a great team meeting is for the facilitator or possibly someone that the facilitator has appointed to periodically summarise where we are and to note that either on a whiteboard or a flip chart or a blackboard somewhere. Particularly if the team makes a decision, makes a choice or agrees to something. If actions are allocated and accepted, this is another example. All of that, I would recommend you note in a way that everyone can see throughout the meeting. This creates a running record of the meeting, but also gives the team confidence that it's making real progress. And its final value is it ensures there is no confusion or ambiguity about what has been agreed or what people have undertaken to do. Keep your meeting lively. Energy levels will rise and fall, particularly in a long meeting and especially if the meeting is in the early part of the afternoon. So therefore, find ways to change the tone of the meeting from time to time as you move from one agenda item to another. Take a short break. And at the end of the meeting, go to that board and summarise the agreements the team has made and the commitments individuals have made to actions. And the ideal thing to do is for each action that someone has committed to, look them in the eye and check that they are committed to doing that action and write a time or a date next to that action so that you can then do the last thing that a facilitator will do for every meeting, which is to follow up afterwards. At the end of the meeting, thank people for their attendance, remind them of their commitment and then after the meeting, follow up. Send around appropriate notes to the meeting and check up on the activities that people have undertaken to do. On our sister channel, Online PM Courses, we have a couple of specific videos about how to run particular types of meeting. And don't forget that on this channel, we have a whole course on meetings, which you can work through and learn huge amounts about making your meetings effective. And I do recommend that course. However, if you're facilitating individual team meeting, the checklist I've given you will help that meeting to be productive and to foster great teamwork. Please do give us a thumbs up if you like this video. There's loads more great Management Courses content to come. So please do subscribe to our channel and hit the notification bell so you don't miss any of it. I look forward to seeing you in the next video. And in the meantime, keep learning.