Are you running your meetings or are your meetings running you?

by Nathan Roman

What is it about meetings that make you crazy? Most of us hate meetings because they’re boring or frustrating (or both), they don’t accomplish much, there are distractions, they’re sporadic, they’re never focused, filled with unnecessary people and so on. On average, business leaders rate the effectiveness of their team meetings as a 4 out of 10. So how do you fix this problem?

As a Professional EOS® Implementer, I would suggest implementing a productive weekly meeting that is held on the same day of each week, at the same time each week, use and follow the same agenda each week, and it must start and end on time. Having the meeting at the same time every week helps with individual accountability because people know when they leave the meeting that they have seven days to accomplish the tasks they’ve been assigned and that they’re going to be asked about it at the next meeting. This automatically builds traction into your operations.

The Level10 Meeting™

This weekly meeting is known as a Level10 Meeting, introduced in the book Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business, by Gino Wickman. It provides an opportunity to ensure that everything is on track for the week, which in turn ensures that everything stays on track for the quarter. It is designed to help your teams create a consistent rhythm that keeps the company focused, organized, on task, and encourages you to manage and handle conflicts and resolutions. We call it Level10 because one of the things we ask new clients to do is rate the effectiveness of their meetings on a scale from 1-10, with ten being the best. The average meeting is usually rated a four, but after teams start using the Level 10 Agenda, the ratings skyrocket.

The Five Points of the Weekly L10 Meeting

A productive meeting pulse should meet the following five criteria:
1.Same day 2. Same time 3. Same agenda 4. Start on time 5. End on time
With a normal meeting, there is typically a dynamic I am going to share with you, which is illustrated in the following procrastination model.

If your normal, here is what typically happens with activity — coming out of meeting A there’s stuff to be done and typically just before the next meeting everyone rushing to get everything done.

It’s called procrastination, and it just makes us normal.  To the degree, we can increase that meeting interval, we create that spike in activity more often, increasing the meeting pulse moving us towards utopia. You come out of the shoot running, so there’s no time to procrastinate. That’s what the meeting pulse will do for you; it’ll become the heartbeat of your organization.

If every meeting follows the same agenda, is held on the same day and time each week, and has a solid start and end time, your Level 10 Meetings will accomplish its goals and take your business to the next level. The key to successful and productive weekly meetings is to keep them consistent and to always start and end on time.

“Early, is on time, and on time is late.”
— Vince Lombardi

Starting a weekly meeting late almost always results in less time to solve your issues, which is the most important part of the meeting. Teams should aim to spend around 50% of these meetings solving issues.

To ensure that you are staying on track and maintaining a pulse on the business, be patient with the weekly meeting process and over time, you’ll see a notable rise in the health of your team and improved communication throughout business.

To Recap:

In order to fix the problem of low productivity and effectiveness in your company’s team meetings – implement the Weekly Level10 Meeting and get a pulse on your business. Pick the ideal day and time for your team and get your first Level 10 meeting on the schedule.

Next Steps:

To learn more about The Weekly Level10 Meeting Agenda contact Nathan Roman, Professional EOS Implementer at nroman@nextstepistraction.com
To obtain by mail your free hardcover copy of the book Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business, by Gino Wickman; reach out to nroman@nextstepistraction.com

Follow me on Facebook @nextstepistraction or connect via LinkedIn @ www.linkedin.com/in/nathanroman/

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