How Effective Team Meetings Can Really Make Teams Excel By Using Proven Methods
Have you ever felt frustrated or energy-drained after a meeting? Or did a meeting leave you with an after-wonderment of undecided or unclear follow-ups?
At Shudofsky Coaching & Consultancy, we often work with teams and organizations on performance development. An essential part involves identifying ‘meeting issues’ that have unconsciously hindered teams and organizations from achieving better outcomes.
There is no denying that we all experience team meeting issues. So, the vital questions we clarify with our clients are, in what way do your team meeting processes influence you? And how can you make your team meetings more effective and thereby positively shape team and organizational results?
Why it is vital to understand your team meeting effectiveness
A study on team meetings shows that the key to understanding team meeting effectiveness lies in uncovering the microlevel interaction processes throughout the meeting. The study analyses ninety-two videotaped regular team meetings among 182 senior managers.
The results showed that teams with more functional interaction, such as problem-solving interaction and action planning, were significantly more satisfied with their meetings.
Better meetings were associated with higher team productivity. Moreover, constructive meeting interaction processes were related to organizational success 2.5 years after the meeting.
Criticizing others or complaining, part of dysfunctional communication, showed significant negative relationships with these outcomes.
Achieving right outcomes
As we now know that productive meetings are essential for team and organizational outcomes in the short and long term, the question we want our clients to get answered is how to achieve those proper outcomes.
A big chunk of team meeting effectiveness is setting expectations beforehand.
With setting expectations, our clients often think of goals for the meeting and setting action points. That is indeed a great start.
However, at Shudofsky Coaching and Consultancy, we take you further to excel in making team meetings part of your individual, team, and organizational performance development. How? Through Color-Coded Meetings!
Management Drives color-coded meetings
To navigate the social complexities in the workplace, where there is a mix of people working from home, hybrid, and full-time in the office, having a strategy for productive meetings is crucial for positive outcomes.
Something that could be the answer for productive meetings is to provide meetings with one of the six Management Drives colors beforehand. Drives predict how people and teams will behave and respond based on their strongest Drivers (motivation). A color represents one of the six Drives and applies at the individual, team, and organizational levels.
The Management Drives method can significantly assist you in team meetings to be productive, motivating, and focused on positive outcomes.
Labeling your meetings with a Management Drives color, besides setting the meeting topic and discussion points, clearly sets expectations of the meeting objective beforehand.
Practical and easy application of the Management Drives method
For example, with a Yellow coded meeting focused on exploring and brainstorming ideas, a Green-driven team member should keep in mind also to vocalize an opinion.
And for a Blue coded meeting, where it’s, for example, about creating detailed clarity on which steps to take, a Red-driven person must keep in mind to adjust their fast-paced behavior.
A Purple-driven person knows what to expect and adapts accordingly when going into an Orange-coded meeting where flexibility on possible approaches is stressed to achieve better results.
Incorporating the Management Drives colors into your meetings drastically improves team meeting effectiveness and positively impacts individual, team, and organizational levels.
Find out below what each Management Drives color means for making your team meetings more productive and effective.
