From morning to night they come to you one by one asking what to do about this and when to deliver that, and you spend the whole day answering the same kinds of question. Or if you do hold a meeting, the meeting is an hour of you talking and handing out work while everyone else listens.
In both cases the coordination is happening in the wrong place, which is you. A regular working meeting is what takes that coordination off your shoulders.
What does a working meeting mean in a small team?
Go looking for advice on working meetings and nearly every result says the same things: have an agenda, start on time, take minutes. None of it is wrong, but it all came out of meetings at large companies, where dozens of people sit in one room and the real job is bringing order to that crowd.
Your team of four or five does not have that problem. Your problem is that whenever anyone gets stuck they come to you, and the working meeting is exactly where that traffic can be gathered up and put on a regular rule. With systemization you build rules that separate the work from your constant presence, and a regular meeting is the cheapest and simplest of them.
Why do most meetings end up wasting time?
Meetings have an old illness that started in large companies. According to Harvard Business Review, senior managers now spend on average close to twenty-three hours of their week in meetings, where the same figure in the 1960s was under ten. The meeting has gradually turned from a coordination tool into a habit. A small team does not have that much spare time, so if you are holding a meeting, that hour has to actually settle something.
In a small team a meeting becomes useless in one of two ways. The first is the meeting with no decision, where you all gather, everyone reports on their work and heads nod, but by the end it is not clear who is doing what by when. That meeting gives you a feeling of togetherness and moves nothing forward.
The second is the one-person meeting, the hour where you talk and hand out work and everyone else listens. That one is worse than the first, because it not only fails to take the coordination off you, it trains the team to wait and see what you say about everything.
A good meeting reduces the business’s dependence on you
The biggest thing a good meeting does is that people start making the everyday decisions themselves. When the team knows that every Tuesday you sit down for an hour and go through what is stuck, nobody needs to interrupt your work mid-week for every small question, because they know where that question belongs and when it gets answered.
The reverse is true as well. As long as every piece of coordination runs through you, you are rehearsing the business’s dependence on its owner every day and making it stronger. A regular meeting is the cheapest place to start reducing it, because it needs no money, no software and no new hire, only one fixed hour of the week.
How do you set up a meeting that produces something?
Five rules are enough, and most business owners follow one or two of them and drop the rest.
- Keep it short and hold it at the same hour every week. A short meeting on the same day at the same time beats a long occasional one, because the team gets used to the rhythm and you no longer have to arrange it each time.
- Decide in advance what you are going to talk about. Three lines is enough. Without an agenda everyone says whatever comes to mind and the meeting ends with nothing settled.
- The meeting is for making decisions, not hearing reports. A report can be written and read and needs no meeting, so keep anything that does not need a decision off the agenda.
- Every decision gets one owner and one deadline. If it is not clear whose job this is and by when it has to be done, next week you are back where you started.
- Write the decisions down. Anything said only out loud gets done differently by each person a week later, but a few lines of documentation in a shared file are enough for everyone to see what was agreed.
This weekly meeting is itself a new method and meets some reluctance in its first days, so change management tells you how to make it stick rather than have it dropped after a fortnight.
Where to start
You do not have to put all five rules in place at once. Just take one fixed hour out of the week, write a three-line agenda, and set the rule that every meeting produces a few clear decisions with an owner and a deadline, written down on the spot.
Keep that up for a few weeks and it will take more coordination off you than any elaborate technique. And if you find that whatever you do everything still comes back to you, in a free diagnostic session we work out where the hold-up is and what should come off your plate first.