Meetings are powerful tools for unleashing energy, excitement, generating momentum and sparking innovation. These are vital ingredients for impact. To unleash the torrent of energy needed to elevate and affect what you seek to shift in the world, you need to unleash a few other things first, all of which can be done most effectively in a meeting...
Clarity: Clarity is needed for any individual, team or organization to effectively operate and navigate the field of play they choose to play upon. Individuals, teams and organizations must be clear on their goals, roles, and processes if they are to efficiently and effectively move forward, fast, in the same direction. Holding conversations that illuminate, clarify, reiterate and/or negotiate the goals, roles, and processes in meetings is the most efficient way to get the buy-in and accountability needed. By having these discussions as face-to-face conversations, in front of the most impacted and involved stakeholders, you gain and maintain the support, focus and accountability needed to succeed.
Alignment: If a meeting is participatory, participant driven, fun and focused, you can build the role, department and/or organizational alignment needed to move from A to B, or to simply get unstuck from the current state. Whatever the reason your team, processes or organization is out of alignment, it is time to get the dis-aligned parties together, face-to-face and begin to clarify, dream and plan how to realign and get back to trust and performance.
Action: Meetings, when designed and facilitated effectively, inspire action better than any email, memo, intercom announcement or cooler-side conversation ever can. That energy that is needed to move from idea to action, is best released in person and in group settings. Getting people excited is a tactile process, and moving groups into action requires the transfer of energy to spread throughout the stakeholders. Doing so in a shared setting (retreat, town-hall, meeting, confab, whatever) is a contagious way to kick-off action, and when effectively kicked-off, the results will be, well, real results - the impact of your group’s action.
Celebrating & Learning From Results: Learning and celebrating is essentially about pausing to recognize, acknowledge, give gratitude and develop a shared understanding. "Debriefs," "After Action Reviews," "Award Ceremonies," and the such are opportunities to learn, and make explicit the reasons your group, team, department got the results they got, or not. Conducting these expressions in public, while sometimes embarrassing for the person on the "hot seat," plays an important role in creating, sustaining and focusing your organization's culture.
Leaders who are intentional about why, how & when groups are convened hold powerful levers to shape the cultures they want to see in practice. Since “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” it is important that executives are taking as much time crafting the “how” their staff comes together as is it the “what” they do once together. By creating meeting rituals that are highly participatory, leaders can push and pull powerful levers that will evolve culture towards increased creativity, trust and productivity.
