90 Second Leadership – Traditional vs. Stand-Up Meetings
I hate meetings. And if you’re like most people, you probably do too. I’m going to give you a new meeting style to help you kill off unnecessary meetings.
The traditional meeting is seen by most as a waste of an hour, sometimes two hours. If you’re lucky, you’ve got a 30-minute meeting. Regardless of time, what happens, even if people bring in an agenda, they bring an agenda. Everyone wants to put in their two cents and have their pet project up front. The result is a lot of unnecessary talking.
A stand-up meeting is quite different. Traditional meetings may happen once a week, but a stand-up meeting may happen a couple times a week. The difference is that a stand-up meeting is 15 minutes long, at most. There is a reason why we’re standing up; we want to make it uncomfortable if people are talking too long. Each person brings three things to the meeting: what they did yesterday, what they are doing today, and any blockers they may have that prevents them from getting work done. When people communicate in this way, it keeps the team fresh and moving forward. Furthermore, when two people have something to talk about, they can immediately go off after the meeting and continue that conversation. This stops wasting everyone else’s time.
Now that I’ve given you this new structure for a meeting, are you going to apply it? What are you going to do about it?
