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The Problem of 'Catch Ups'

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Image courtesy of S. Slade Sundar

Does your weekly team meeting “catch up” and tune out?

I was talking with a friend yesterday and he was telling me about the new team of twenty people he had just joined. They had a weekly team meeting where the main agenda item was ‘catch ups’ - a time to update each other about progress in the last week.

At this weeks gathering the meeting itself came in for criticism.

The meeting now took one and a half hours, and people found them boring.

Interestingly the occasional presence of the senior leader in these meetings made them worse, as those who wanted to impress the boss took ever longer periods of time to set out in great detail all they had done so as to illustrate what good team members they were.

The view of my friend; those who had achieved the least, took the greatest time to set out their achievements.

I’ve not attended one of these but it has all the signs of a classic flabby meeting.

A solution?

The meeting facilitator (they could take it in turns) could invite all participants to fill out one gridcard with a fat pen (meaning about 20 words) on progress.

Each person to share what they have written on the card.

Map the cards on a wall chart against either a) key milestones, or b) last weeks card.

New meeting duration: 10 minutes, saving nearly 27 hours of time.

Or maybe they should try the
MOMO method?
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