I have recently been working with a number of teams on setting up meeting best practices.
The two books I recommend on this subject are Andy Grove’s High Output Management and Trillion Dollar Coach about Bill Campbell’s work coaching executives at Google, Apple, Facebook, and more.
In High Output Management, Grove differentiates meetings between four meeting types:
-Staff Meetings (regular/recurring)
-Operating Reviews (quarterly, in-depth strategic reviews)
-1-1’s
-Impromptu problem-solving meetings
The focus of this post is on staff meetings.
For staff meetings, I recommend managers start every meeting by going around the table and having everyone do a 30-90 second check-in.
Why? The goal is threefold:
-First, to build the connective tissue of the team.
-Second, to get all the voices in the room and get everyone speaking openly at the outset of the meeting (including introverts!).
Third, to help people to transition from whatever was on their mind previously to the task at hand.
Put another way:
“Bill (Campbell) and Eric (Schmidt) understood that there is a direct correlation between fun work environments and high performance with conversations about family and fun (what academics call socioemotional communication) being an easy way to achieve the former.”
So what is a trip report?
There are a number of different ways to run trip reports and each one can suit your team/culture. There are two general rules I like:
Keep them short with clear guidance on how long each check-in should roughly be.
This is not a work update. It is something personal or emotional. It is about getting to know one another better.
Trip Report Questions:
Your trip report question should be clear and specific and it should directly tie into the goal you have or the development of the interpersonal dynamics of your team.
Here are a few examples I like:
-"What is one personal update about your weekend, your family, or another part of your life that you want to share with the team?"
-"Who is one teammate you want to show appreciation for and why?" (reinforces a culture of team-first and appreciation
-"Name one feeling you are experiencing right now and why?" (reinforces a culture that emotions are part of business and people bringing their whole selves to work)
Note this last check-in will require some work with your team to help them get comfortable with identifying and sharing their feelings and understanding why this matters.
Final thoughts:
Companies and in particular high growth companies are all about the people. As Google noted in their well-known research report on team effectiveness, the #1 factor in team output is psychological safety.
It’s impossible to take risks or produce innovations if your team doesn’t have trust.
I know this first-hand from a different area of my life, as a rock climber. Choosing to go on a long climb with potentially serious consequences is both immensely rewarding but also requires trust in each other that partners will communicate their needs and support one another.
The same is true on teams--and Trip Reports or personal check-ins go a long way in building a people-first mentality at your company or on your team.