The 10 Minute Team Meeting

The 10 minute team meeting is a great tool to introduce to your busy company.

Looking after customers, chasing suppliers, paying the bills, updating the website. Does this sound like anyone you know?

Many of the business owners I mentor are so busy running their operations that they don’t have time to let their staff know what’s going on.

Unfortunately, this can be a recipe for disaster.

When staff don’t know what the business is doing on a strategic level, they’re not going to be able to help out.

The 10 minute team meeting can tie everything together, without using up all your time and energy. This article is a guide to why you need to cut down your team meetings to just 10-minutes, and there’s a downloadable guide with a suggested agenda to keep your team meetings to 10 minutes and on track.

Keeping everyone informed

If employees don’t know about the new service you want to develop, they won’t be able to tell customers that it’s on its way, so you’ll miss out on potential sales.

If your staff don’t know what each other is doing, you’ll get two people doing the same thing, often in very different ways. Maggie will assume that Tom is doing it, and vice versa. Or no-one will do it.

Unless you tell your staff what your sales target is for the week, how do they know whether they’ve done well?

And if you want to sell a lot of red things this month because red things have a better gross profit margin, you need to be able to tell everyone else to sell red because otherwise, they’ll be focused on the orange things.

That’s where the 10-minute team meeting comes in. We all know that getting everyone together regularly is a hassle and doesn’t work. That’s partly because we make our team meetings way too long. You only need a 10-minute team meeting to be effective. Everything else can be done asynchronously.

Emailing people is not enough

You might think that you’ve mentioned the new products or the high margin on red things. But in reality, people don’t remember everything they’re told about, especially in our world of constant emails and potential information overload.

People need to hear the important things from you. You can’t get your passion for red things over in an email.

The power of thanking someone for a job well done is raised exponentially if you say thanks in front of everyone else. And if you can use the magic word “because” and thank someone in front of everyone else by explaining the impact of what they did, you’re using a whole new superpower.

You can use the 10-minute team meeting to say something like:

“Thanks for sorting out the new client onboarding process Anya. It made a big difference because now we will all be able to use the same process when we get a new client.”

It would take about 20 seconds to do this, but Anya is going to be glowing all day because of the praise. And everyone else will know that there’s a new client onboarding process.

Why people don’t have team meetings

People tell me that they intend to have team meetings but somehow don’t get around to it. Clients often say things like this:

• “We were busy that week, so we didn’t bother.”
• “Morag was in late, so we skipped the team meeting.”
• “Everyone’s so busy.”
• “We used to have them, and they were beneficial, but we got out of the habit somehow.”

Rules of the 10-minute team meeting

Most of the meetings we have are a waste of time. But this one is important. Here are some suggested rules to make it work:

1. A 10-minute team meeting takes 10 minutes. No more.

2. Have the meeting standing up. People are less likely to blether.

3. Talk about the same things each time – maybe you could pick a couple of these to have as regular agenda items:

• • Targets

• • Did we meet last week’s target? What are we aiming at this week?

• • Special things to look out for, such as red things, or people who are interested in buying the new apricot flavour we’re trialling.

• • Areas which are going well. This is where you get to say “well done” to people and make them smile.

• • Things that are not going so well. Do not identify or blame individuals here.

• • Holidays/people who are going to be out of the office.

Try it, and let me know how you get on.

What if you don’t have a team for a team meeting

Maybe you’re reading this and thinking, “Oh, that’s all very well and good, but there’s only me and the cat in my company”. You could try having a 10-minute meeting on your own (or with the cat) and see if it helps clarify your thinking. I bet it will.

Do you want more ideas for building a successful company?

I’ve written dozens of ideas and how-to guides here at the Joy of Business to help you to build your business.

Some of them are in my Secrets of Business Success downloadable guide.

And here are some more articles you’ll find invaluable for creating the kind of business you want to be known for:

Selling with an eastern mind – Changing your mindset when it comes to selling.

How to immediately free up some of your time. Do you feel like there’s just not enough time for you to do everything? Here are some ideas for things you can do to free up your time.

How you can make your business stand out more. Is your business a bit boring?

Photo credits to Tim Gouwe, Kaleidico, RawPixel, Agê Barros and Mikhail Vasilyev on Unsplash