I’m a great believer in regular, scheduled meetings. Weekly team meetings, monthly project reviews, monthly board meetings, annual appraisals. Routine, regular and mandatory. I even like to have set agendas for them.
Now, you’re probably thinking that sounds bureaucratic, just lots of pointless meetings that waste everyone’s time. I mean, everyone has far too many meetings and NOTHING happens in meetings, right? So why fill your calendar with lots of routine boring ones?
Here’s where we differ. I don’t think they’re boring, I think they’re magical. They makes sure people focus on the objective. They hold people to account for their actions. They build team spirit and relationships. They keep things on track. In fact, they do more than that, they create momentum. Perhaps it’s because of the mundanity of the arrangements, the repetitiveness, but it seems to free people up to be creative, think outside the box and come up with new stuff.
I’ve lost count of the times a meeting’s started with someone saying “We don’t really need this, do we? There’s nothing to talk about, really”, only for it to turn into a key meeting where some major issue is uncovered, or some great new idea is developed.
Routine is often the framework on which we hang our art.
2 Comments