How to Lead Engaging and Productive Team Meetings That Drive Results: A Guide for New Managers
Your team is waiting to be led! (Image by Wolfgang Weiser for Pexels)
As a manager, one of the most crucial skills to master is leading effective team meetings. However, many new managers struggle with facilitating discussions and ensuring actionable outcomes. Here are some tips to help you navigate these challenges.
1. Set Clear Agendas
A well-structured agenda sets the tone for meetings, keeps everyone focused, and helps prevent derailing into unrelated discussions. These are typical agenda elements:
Define the meeting purpose: It could be to provide project updates or to problem-solve.
Topics are listed in order of importance so you can focus on the most important items early on, while brains are still feeling fresh.
Each topic has a time slot: This ensures a balanced discussion, and that the meeting ends on time.
The agenda is shared ahead of time so your team can prepare.
2. Encourage Participation
If you know me, you know I talk about how psychological safety creates an environment where everyone feels comfortable speaking up, and where diverse thinking and ideas are valued and encouraged, and that this leads to better solutions.
These are some simple techniques to encourage psychological safety and participation:
Ask open-ended questions.
Rotate roles: Assign different team members to lead portions of the meeting or present updates. This ensures everyone gets a chance to speak and contribute.
Acknowledge contributions: Recognize and appreciate input from team members.
Use technology: Tools like virtual whiteboards and polling apps can help gather input from everyone in virtual meetings.
3. Manage Meeting Dynamics
Balancing participation can be challenging for new managers. We all know people who love to talk in meetings, and people who rarely talk. Here are some tips for getting the balance right:
Establish ground rules that set the stage for all voices to be heard, and for respectful listening.
Use a warm-up at the beginning of the meeting and ensure everyone has a turn to speak. Warm-ups encourage curiosity and contribution, and set the tone for everyone having an equal voice.
4. Encourage Collaboration
Collaboration is key to creative problem-solving and innovation. These are some techniques for fostering a culture where team members build on each other’s ideas:
Regularly run brainstorming sessions so folks feel comfortable with contributing and building on ideas.
Use breakout groups for larger teams. Smaller groups can lead to more in-depth discussions and varied viewpoints.
Use diagrams, charts, and other visual aids to help illustrate points and foster a shared understanding.
5. End On and Follow Up with Actionable Outcomes
Meetings should lead to clear, actionable outcomes to be effective, so summarize key points and decisions at the end of the meeting. This includes action Items that were assigned, so everyone knows what they are responsible for.
Send out meeting minutes, with action items included, asap after the meeting.
Conclusion
Leading productive team meetings is an essential skill for new managers. By setting clear agendas, encouraging participation, managing dynamics, fostering collaboration, and ensuring actionable outcomes, you’ll create a meeting environment that drives results. With practice, you’ll be able to conduct meetings that not only engage your team but also provide greater momentum for your projects, which helps you stand out as the valued manager that you are!
If you don’t already have your copy, the Brainstorming Playbook is a great companion to this article! It’s filled with techniques, tools, and tips that help new managers lead their teams in creatively solving problems, and it’s free! When you sign up for the Brainstorming Playbook you’ll also be added to our mailing list, where you’ll continue to receive useful nuggets of innovation leadership wisdom (fear not - you can unsubscribe at any time… we won’t set the meerkats on you!).
I develop newly minted managers who want to stand out and become highly valued, by leading a team that comes up with solutions no one else could see before.
If you’d like to see what tapping into creative potential could look like at your place of work, contact me at Ellia@ThePotentialCenter.com to arrange a no-obligation call.