Three kinds of meetings (part 1)
That's a lie, I'm only covering two today
As a support leader, there are three kinds of meetings that you have to master. While all three are equally important to the team’s success, you’ll have to approach each one from a very different perspective. The first kind is the traditional team meeting: top-down information transfer. The second is an offshoot of the team meeting: a focused discussion to answer more detailed questions, brainstorm solutions, and gain consensus to move forward with a plan of action. The third type of meeting is what one of my team members dubbed the ‘ticket crash’: a combination troubleshooting, brainstorming, and knowledge transfer session. Here the watchword is collaboration, lateral communication, and anarchy (in a good way…?). Try to run a team meeting like a ticket crash and you’ll have a bad time. Try to handle a ticket crash like a regular team meeting, you won’t do any better. Why is that? Let’s dig into all three types of meetings and what you’ll need to do to be successful in each.
Team meeting
We all know what team meetings are. Everyone sits down and the leader says some stuff. Maybe there’s an outline. Pretty straightforward, right? Well, yes and no. You knew I was going to say that, right? The purpose of these meetings is clear, but doing it right can be surprisingly tricky. Learn from my mistakes!
Repetition is good. A lot of a weekly team meeting is going to be the same topics over and over again, and that’s fine. Ensure everyone knows who’s handling the upcoming weekend or overnight shift. Highlight upcoming time off so nobody’s taken by surprise.
Be consistent. Stick to your meeting schedule, whether weekly, biweekly, or monthly. Use the same format, cover the same standing topics. Consistency helps establish comfort and trust.
Have a set agenda and don’t deviate from it except in great need. I write out my agenda in advance, ideally from a template since some topics (as above) are going to come up every week. Don’t let yourself get sidetracked. If someone on your team brings up an important point, unless it is extremely time sensitive you should default to either adding it to next week’s agenda or setting up a separate meeting to discuss that topic specifically.
Solicit topics before the meeting, not during. To expand on the above, the time for folks to suggest discussion items is before the team meeting, not during. Make sure everyone is aware of this, and make a point of asking in your 1:1s if they have anything they’d like to bring up. This will make it easier for you to push off derailing (or simply complex) questions to next week’s meeting, rather than having to freestyle your way through it in the moment.
Minimize discussion and keep things moving. At the end of each item, ask if anyone has any questions or concerns. If it threatens to explode into a larger can of worms, table the discussion, make a note to set up a separate call for it, and move on to the next item.
No big surprises unless absolutely necessary. If you’re announcing something that will affect individuals on your team, particularly adversely, let them know privately in advance that something is coming, if at all possible. Don’t single folks out without letting them prepare ahead of time.
Take good notes and share them with the team. Make sure people have a record of what was said, what was decided, and what needs to happen next. I’ve typically handled this by editing the agenda directly (while sharing my screen) and putting it up in a shared folder/company wiki afterwards.
The most important thing to keep in mind when doing a standard team meeting is that it is, and needs to be, an expression of team hierarchy. Information flows downwards in these meetings. While there is of course always room for discussion and hearing everyone’s viewpoint, that is not the primary purpose of these meetings. If a particular agenda item sparks more than a few questions, or starts to spin off into a heated discussion, it’s a good sign to table it and set up a separate meeting to treat the topic with the deeper attention it deserves. Coincidentally, that’s the next kind of meeting we’re going to discuss.
Focused discussion
Think of a meeting like this as a single discussion topic from a team meeting that’s grown up and now has its own time slot. The purpose here is to thoroughly go through a single topic, concern, or project plan for two purposes: focused knowledge transfer, and gaining broad support for a team-wide initiative or process change.
Knowledge transfer: explaining a complex new process, discussing a new team initiative, or explaining broad companywide plans often fall under this bucket. You want to explain everything you can and leave ample room for clarifying questions. Your goal is to emerge on the other end of this meeting with everyone fully up to speed and most, if not all, questions answered.
Reaching consensus: maybe you have to make a decision affecting the entire team, or maybe it’s clear that your team needs a new way of handling tickets but you’re not sure exactly how to proceed. In any case, you’ll want to air the question (ideally in advance so people have time to think it through on their own) and listen to everyone’s perspective, and wrap up the meeting once a clear path forward has been agreed upon.
Typically a meeting will be more focused on one of these categories than the other, but there’s a whole lot of overlap. You may go into a meeting expecting to simply explain a complex new process, but end up hosting a debate on the merits of the process and emerging with a different plan entirely, and that’s fine. Conversely, sometimes you expect to have a spirited conversation about two equally likely choices, but find that everyone immediately agrees that one option is preferable, and the discussion is over before it began. That’s also fine! Just be ready for both.
Remember that while these meetings are inherently more democratic than regular team meetings, and everyone is free to share their own opinions and preferences, eventually a consensus must be reached on the proper path forward. The final say always lies with you. A longer discussion on building consensus will have to wait for another time, but in brief:
A decision must be reached. That’s the whole point of the discussion and debate. Do your best to allow everyone to have a complete say, and let those opinions inform the final decision, but don’t lose sight of the need to come out of the meeting with a decision.
It is your responsibility as leader to make that decision. As leader you need to ensure your team is effective, and that includes making sure that you’re not mired in endless debate. Resolve to have a decision in hand by the end of the scheduled meeting length, and stick to that resolution.
It is equally your responsibility to ensure everyone both understands and accepts the decision. Sometimes people will believe passionately in a different course of action, and while that’s fine, you need to get them on board somehow. You can’t and shouldn’t try to please everyone, but you can make sure your process, and final decision, are both transparent and understandable. Explain your thought process, explain why you chose one solution rather than another. Even if you can’t make people happy, you can at least make them feel heard, and ensure they’re fully informed.
Next week we’ll talk about ticket review meetings. Stay tuned!
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