Turning Your Staff Meetings into Can't Miss Events!

What do staff meetings have to do with accountability? If the leader is committed to keeping the team focused, the times that the team is together can be used to really let the team’s commitment to accountability shine. Staff meetings can become can’t miss events if people believe that challenges and problems will be discussed and resolved, that decisions and commitments will be made, and that they will be upheld. To illustrate this, let’s look at the experience of a team I once helped.

Bob was a team leader whom I encountered with an accountability problem. His people were not taking action on the tasks to which they had committed during their weekly staff meetings. Bob asked me to come observe their meeting and see if I could give them some advice on how to improve the team’s functioning. The gathering began with a team member named Kathryn briefly reading through the action items from the prior meeting, and getting status updates from people as she reached their name on the list. There seemed to be a lot of hemming and hawing for most of the items. I could see what Bob meant when he said that people weren’t sticking to their commitments, and I had a good idea why. More on that later; now, on to new business.

There was actually very lively debate on several pressing issues. The team was floating around a lot of ideas for solutions to problems; however, it was hard for me to tell when anyone had actually decided anything, or assigned a corresponding obligation. There were some vague comments like, “Sue, that would be a good thing for you to think about following up on with the marketing department.” The meeting ended, and I shared my perspectives with Kathryn (at Bob’s request). I realized she had been taking notes on the ideas that were batted around, and she thought she was clear on who had been asked to do what. I told her it wasn’t so clear to me, and I was in the room, too. I even wondered whether the leader was absolutely clear on when something had been assigned, and to whom it had been allocated.

I recommended some changes for the next staff meeting. First, team leader Bob–not Kathryn–should be getting the status update from each person, since he is the one to whom the team members report. They should be eyeballing him and trying to fluff their way through the answer, since Kathryn couldn’t hold their feet to the fire like he could.

I also suggested that she keep a running list of action items that arose from the discussions in a way that was visible for all to see. Either on a flip chart, or, since they had an LCD projector mounted in the ceiling, as a Word document to be updated and reviewed at the end of each discussion item (or at least at the end of the meeting). As stated before, there is something about seeing your name up there in bright lights with an action step and a due date beside it to make it really real.

People seem to take a lot more interest in what is actually written up there when their name is listed beside it. I asked Kathryn to give me a call after the next meeting to tell me how things went. In our next post , we’ll find out the rest of the story --- how the new system worked how our findings were applied to other teams.