Unblock Your Weekly Team Meetings

Use this format to make your meetings effective and relevant

This article contains excerpts from my new book Unblock: Clear the Way for Results and Develop a Thriving Organization.

Every Monday morning, Claire and her six direct reports come together for a three-hour meeting. Today, Wanda is invited to share an update about a big construction project. When ready to deliver her presentation, she asked, “Did everyone read the slides, or should I walk you through them?” Some nodded in affirmation. But Claire responded, “Please, talk us through the slides,” so Wanda guided us through all 38 slides, consuming 45 minutes of our time.

When Wanda presented, only a few people paid attention. The others were on their laptops, seemingly waiting for it to end. Claire thanked Wanda and said: “Now, let’s discuss.” One of the managers asked a detailed question. Even though Wanda had previously provided the answer during her presentation (while he was not listening attentively), she graciously answered.

Two other managers started debating the performance of one of our suppliers — a topic that was only loosely related to Wanda’s project update. They went down a ‘rabbit hole’ for about 10 minutes.

Comic by Jonathan Brown, copyright Corporater. Used with permission.

What happens in Claire’s team is not uncommon. Lots of creativity, motivation, and energy are wasted in meetings every single day. Most people hate them, but accept this as a fact of life, saying, “Meetings are just awful, you know?” But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Research confirms dysfunctional meetings are associated with reduced market share, innovation, and employee engagement. Every minute someone spends in a wasteful meeting can’t be spent on meaningful work. Remember, talking about work isn’t the same as doing work.

However, meetings are crucial for coordination, collaboration, and sense-making. But you need a meeting culture that makes it easier, not harder, for teams to reach their goals.

What meetings should do for you

If done well, meetings are a powerful tool for teams. Imagine you’d like to create the ‘perfect’ weekly or bi-weekly team meeting; what should this meeting do for the team? We believe this (bi-)weekly touch point should help the team with:

• Decision-making
• Alignment
• Progress tracking
• Strategy realization
• Cross-functional collaboration
• Contextual awareness and learning
• Sense of community and well-being
• Adopting new habits
• Removing barriers to progress

Maybe you feel your weekly team meeting works well to achieve these goals. That’s great! But have you asked if every member feels that way? There is often an unequal distribution of the feeling of value.

A highly effective meeting doesn’t naturally emerge from a group of humans sitting in the same physical or virtual space. It requires an intentional design to achieve high effectiveness.

The Unblock Meeting structure

At Unblock, we have helped hundreds of leaders become better at cooperating by improving their meeting rhythm and the structure of their recurring meetings.

The meeting structure that we’ve consistently found incredibly effective is the structure we named the “Unblock Meeting.” (*)

The meeting’s purpose is to coordinate and unblock the team’s work: get everyone in the team what they need to make progress until the next team meeting. At the end of the meeting, everyone should know the status of the team’s projects and any actions that they and their colleagues will take.

Most teams do this one hour every week, but some have found one-to-two hours every two weeks a better cadence. The Unblock Meeting is guided by a facilitator. After stating clearly the purpose of the meeting (to Unblock progress), they guide the team through the following steps:

1) Check-in Round (5 minutes): To connect with each other and get present, the facilitator asks everyone to briefly answer the same question (no reactions or discussions). For example: “What has your day been like so far?” or “What is something that inspires you?” Don’t wait for the group to be complete before starting this round.

2) Checklist Review (1–2 minutes): To check recurring tasks or build collective habits, the facilitator reviews a list of items that the team has agreed to review every week. They ask, “In the past week, did you do X?” (For example, did you ask questions first before giving your opinion? Or did you update our digital board before this meeting? Or, did you apply our Even-Over statements?) Participants answer simply by saying “yes” or “no” or giving the thumbs up or down to reinforce personal accountability and build new habits.

3) Metrics Review (+/- 5 minutes): During this segment, the team reviews their team’s 1–3 most important steering metrics that the team uses to monitor progress and guide their work. The facilitator or designated person calls out any significant changes in these metrics from the previous week’s meeting. For example, the team may review metrics such as sales numbers, revenue, or unplanned downtime of factory equipment. The purpose is to quickly assess the current state of the team’s most critical measures of success.

4) Project Updates (+/- 5 minutes): The facilitator goes through a list of projects or outcomes and asks, “Any updates?” The project owners either say “no update” or share what has changed since the last meeting. Focus on real updates and resist the urge to say what you plan to do next. Limit the list of projects and outcomes to those most relevant to the entire team. Sometimes participants write the updates before the meeting in a digital list, so people who can’t attend can read them as well.

5) Build the Agenda (+/- 1 minute): This is a silent moment when participants reflect on what they need to unblock their work for the upcoming week, and add agenda items to a shared digital or physical board. Participants can also add items to the agenda throughout the meeting. I’ll explain more about this co-created agenda below.

6) Process Agenda Items (+/- 30 -40 minutes): Quickly ‘triage’ each item to clarify the next step for moving forward. The objective is to get through all of them before the end of the meeting.

• The facilitator selects the next item to discuss and asks the item owner, “What do you need?” The owner clearly states their need, which could be to inform, decide, get advice, hear opinions, etc.
• The item owner engages with the others to get what they need.
• If the conversation surfaces any action items, these are captured on the shared board. Some teams use a separate role of ‘secretary’ to be responsible for this.
• At the end, or at any point, the facilitator asks the owner, “Did you get what you need?” After which, they move to the next item on the agenda.
• When the conversation moves into different topics, the facilitator asks to add a new agenda item and redirects the conversation to the original item owner’s need.

7) Closing Round (5 minutes): The facilitator asks everyone to briefly share their closing reflections about the meeting by asking a question, such as, “What did you notice or learn during this meeting?” Resist the temptation to keep discussing things when there is time left.

How to get started

The number of steps in the Unblock Meeting might feel like a lot at first. Adopting it could be a stretch for your team because they may prefer something other than a highly structured format. And that is understandable.

However, you don’t need to start with all seven process steps of an Unblock Meeting at once. Usually, when we start with a new team, we skip the checklist- and the metrics review. Then, when they get the hang of it, we’ll introduce the missing elements.

Measurable impact

If there is doubt, we’d still invite you to try it, or at least the elements that inspire you. We’ve helped over 100 teams adopt this; almost all teams see good results and don’t want to go back to their previous way of meeting. In one case, a leadership team reported the following results after trying it only eight times:

• Every voice gets heard and is considered +70%
• Amount of times per month that your work was stalled due to lack of information -29%
• Amount of times that an activity was slowed or blocked pending approval -52%
• Confidence in getting what you need from the weekly meeting to unblock your work +63%
• Amount of ad-hoc or emergency meetings per month -46%

Design your meeting

Although we are a fan of the Unblock Meeting format, it is certainly not the only way. In any case, design your weekly meeting intentionally. What traits would you like your weekly meeting to promote? What conversation does your leadership team need to have every week? Then, adopt a design to match those requirements.

Let’s look at how the Unblock Meeting structure has baked behavioral nudges into its design. It is designed to promote…

1. Participation: The team, not the person ‘highest in rank’, owns the meeting and the agenda. The co-created agenda is created and focused on the needs of all participants. Everyone has the opportunity to get heard and bring important ideas to the table.
2. Relevance: Because the agenda isn’t pre-set before the meeting, it enables the most relevant topics to emerge from the group; not the ones decided upon by a leader who controls the agenda, sometimes weeks in advance. In between meetings, people can collect topics that may have required a separate meeting.
3. Strategic focus: The Project Updates and Metrics Review sections weave strategy realization into the day-to-day conversations of a team.
4. Transparency: Because actions are captured on a shared board accessible to everyone, it builds the habit of transparency. The updates contribute to this as well.
5. Connection and improvement: The check-in and closing rounds build a habit of connection and reflection.

Whatever you choose as meeting design, make sure it ticks the boxes:

• Purpose: a clear articulation of what the meeting should help to achieve
• Structure: there are clear process steps that help achieve the meeting’s purpose (like agenda items with clear needs, questions to reflect on a topic or steps towards creating an asset together)
• Tools: digital or physical tools that enable the structure (like a physical or online board with stickies or cards)
• Participants: the ‘right’ list of participants; only invite the people who are able to contribute to achieving the meeting’s purpose based on the roles they fill
• Facilitator: a role held by a person that holds the structure, ideally not the ‘highest in rank.

Dive deeper

If you want to learn more about improving your meetings, check out my new book: Unblock: Clear the Way for Results and Develop a Thriving Organization.

(*) The Unblock Meeting is based on the Tactical Meeting invented by Holacracy, which was inspired by the work of Patrick Lencioni. We’ve learned how to apply this structure in a wide range of organizations during our work at The Ready, where they called it an Action Meeting.

This article was co-authored with Koen de Boer.