When you’re growing a business, there is no end the number of meetings that you and your team will conduct and attend. If you’re not careful, your meetings will take over your days and end up leaving you and your team members with nothing to show for it.
Successful meetings have a clear purpose. Having a purpose is essential to making sure that everyone in the meeting is on the same page. If one team member comes in excited to talk about how to implement the latest marketing techniques and another is concerned about the flow of work between team members and wants to discuss a better project management system, it’s going to be a difficult meeting to get through.
With that in mind, your meetings should be scheduled with not only a date, time and attendee list but also a purpose. Getting several people together in the same room with no purpose is a waste of your time and theirs as well.
There are several different types of meetings that you can hold but here are two of the most important to a growing organization.
Strategy meetings
A business can’t grow without a goal and a strategy meeting can give you just that. Strategy meetings help your company define where you are starting from, what your capabilities are and what you are trying to achieve. They are designed to help the team set goals and evaluate the best way to achieve them in a set period of time. In this type of meeting, your business can set out goals and strategies that will help you get to those goals. You will not cover the specific day to day operations of the strategies – you will just create the big picture that will guide those operations.
Operations meetings
While strategy meetings focus on the big picture, operations meetings are all about the nitty gritty details involved in running your business. The operations meeting is your opportunity to take the vision established in the strategy meeting and decide how it will be implemented in the real world. The operations meeting answers the questions:
- How do we do this?
- How do we spend our resources?
- Where do we invest our resources?
- How do we work on a day to day basis?
An operations meeting should be focused on taking the strategy from a strategic meeting and bringing it into the real world.
These two types of meetings are essential to your organization’s success – and they are so important, we’re going to share tips for successful strategic and operations meetings in the next two parts of this series.
