One of my favorite sayings is "None of us is as good as all of us". I am a true believer of teamwork in the office. It is always so exciting when we sit down at a meeting trying to come up with a way to increase the bottom line, or improve on our service quality and everyone participates in sharing ideas. It is amazing to see what comes out of a good power meeting. You start with one thought and in the end have come up with ideas that you never would have thought of by yourself. But it is not always like this, sometimes things just do not gel and nothing worthwhile comes out of the meeting. Knowing how to run an effective power meeting is very helpful, there are many factors to consider, like location, comfort, ground rules and purpose to name a few.
Making sure that you have a good meeting facilitator is important to keep people focused and ground rules kept. Criticism is a creativity killer and should never be allowed when brainstorming ideas together. Power meetings are not necessary to come up with good ideas, but the synergy and sense of bonding that takes place when team members all have input into the ideas is priceless. Just the other day our team sat down just for 30 minutes (setting a time limit is necessary) as we are putting together a new strategic plan to implement in the office for productivity and efficiency. The first item we needed to accomplish was to come up with our office purpose or mission statement. We all know what we do and why we do it, but putting it into words wasn't as easy as we thought. So we just started throwing our thoughts out there and writing them down and with the input of all of us we were able to come up with a statement that said exactly what we all felt was true for us and it only took about 15 minutes. We were so excited that we were able to accomplish our goal for the meeting and in less time than we set aside. Power meetings are great and motivating to accomplish tasks without burnout.
In Verne Harnish's book "Mastering the Rockefeller Habits" he states that successful businesses have daily meetings for 5-15 minutes, which he calls huddles. He states that by having these huddles you can actually save time because you are focusing on what is happening for that day. There are only three questions that are covered at this meeting and they are the same each day, (1) what's up for the day. (2). Daily measures and (3). Where are you stuck? In our case working in a medical office the questions might translate into; what does the schedule look like? How can we best prepare for the patients coming in? Is anyone having any particular work problem they need help resolving? By just asking these three questions daily we can prepare and resolve many problems we face during the day that take more time away from being productive. It is also a good practice to have a short huddle at the end of the day to measure how the day went and gather ideas for better outcomes if there were any issues while they are still fresh in our minds.
You may think you do not have time for more meetings, but remember this is a huddle it is grouping those who work together to review what will be taking place that day. When everyone is on the same page and is identifying how they can resolve any issues before they arise to make for a more productive, less stressful day how can you not take the few minutes?
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