In the last part of the Strengthening the Team series, I would like to share some simple actions that I have found useful to keep the team spirit alive after meetings.
The danger with holding meetings or team events, especially when they are one-off , is that a lot of the energy, enthusiasm and creativity that gets generated during the meeting is not channeled back at work. Keeping the “ghost” of the meeting alive takes time and energy but it can be used to build the team and motivate team members to continue giving their best during their time together. And if the meeting felt like a particularly successful one, then the reasons for keeping the team feeling alive are even more obvious.
This post is therefore more relevant to meetings which don’t take place regularly (every two months or less frequently) but hopefully it will also be useful if you think that your regular meetings are losing their punch.
Make deadlines official.
Make sure that any deadlines or dates agreed during the meeting are entered into the office/team calendar or diary or are included in the project time line. This will give more weight to the decisions taken during the meeting, encourage team members to meet the deadlines and take decisions together in future meetings.
Send a follow-up e-mail.
This might seem unnecessary or just an infringement on your already busy schedule. However, people do like to be reminded that their time is valued and their contributions welcome.
If your team meetings are regular and you feel like a “thank you for coming to the meeting” will look like just another routine e-mail, then send this electronic thank-you note only when the meeting has gone either extremely well or when it has been a challenging one.
If the meetings do not take place regularly, then wait a few days before sending out the e-mail, so that it lands in the Inbox as a short burst of energy. Add value to the e-mail by making it a practical one too, either with reminders of important deadlines or actions agreed or mentioning any significant progress that has taken place since you met.
Use successes to stay in touch
Meetings are useful because they bring everyone together to plan together and planning saves time (mostly!). Information flows during the meeting and these exchanges should benefit future work. Whether the meeting is used as an opportunity to let everyone know who is responsible for what or to exchange data, the information gathered should serve as a shortcut of where to find help or missing bits of information later on.
These exchanges can also take the form of opinion or practical help. Therefore when you spot an instance where someone in your team has achieved a good result after receiving help or information at the meeting, let it be known!
Inform of team decisions which have been reversed
During away-days or even regular meetings, teams discuss and create ways to make the team process more effective: creating a new online team space to maintain communication, cleaning up the shared file system to make it more effective etc. But these initiatives are usually the first to be dropped when the reality of workloads and other demands on time hit us back at work.
It can be frustrating to come up with ideas and plans at meetings which are not carried through. At the same time, the role of teams can change quickly in organisations and unexpected pressures can throw the best of intentions out of the window. This is inevitable. But it needs to be acknowledged. If someone in your team “confesses” that they are not going to be able to do x or y as agreed at the meeting, then let everyone else know. Let them know the reasons for this and the fact that it is going to have to be put on the back burner for a while. Unless someone else wants to pick it up?
And if you are the one who finds themselves not being able to carry out an action as promised, it is twice as important to acknowledge this, to create a culture of accountability.
Revise all the actions at the next meeting and if they haven’t been carried out, figure out whether this is just due to a lack of time or whether, deep down, they are no longer necessary.
RUNNING TEAM MEETINGS
I hope these thoughts are of some use to some of you (even all of you!) at some point in the future. What I hope these three posts have highlighted is the fact that teams do not work well by magic. Even if initially team members are working brilliantly together, as team leader, you need to keep an eye out on the team process. Meetings provide a great way of identifying what is working and what isn’t; what systems and procedures are working and which ones are redundant. They are a place where you can remind yourselves of the structure within which you are working so that you can regularly find the freedom to remain creative within its constraints.
You might also find the following posts of interest: Strengthening the Team: Before the Meeting, Strengthening the Team: Facilitating Collaboration during Meetings and also the review on the book The Right Fight,
