What is a Team Cadence Meeting?

Elise Keith (2022). Want to quickly make an enormous impact on the meetings in your organization? Roll out an effective strategy for your Team Cadence and Progress Check meetings.

Elise Keith (2020). On April 1, 2020, we hosted a webinar with principals at the Mission Critical Teams Institute. We explored the communication practices business teams can learn from mission critical teams (firefighters, military, medical, and others who handle emergencies for a living) as we all work to adapt in times of rapid change.

Mercer Smith-Looper (2020). Nobody wants their meetings to become just another place to catch up on social media. A good balance of meetings that are regularly occurring with a shared, set agenda can be really fruitful for team alignment. Schedule out your recurring meetings so that your team can know what to expect and plan their days out ahead of time.

Elise Keith (2019). There's no way around it. Leading consistently engaging meetings makes a huge positive difference in a team's performance, and it takes a lot of work. After you implement the quick-hit tips, like using video conferencing instead of phone calls or starting with a go-around, you're left with meetings that are better but still don't thrill you. Most of the bad meetings habits stay the same. Meeting health is a lot like personal health that way. Everyone wants to look good and feel great, but the regular "diet + exercise" advice just sounds like way too much work. But when you boil it down, it not as much work as it is habit. Let's talk about that.

Elise Keith (2019). At Lucid Meetings, our mission is to make it easy for teams to run successful meetings every day. Teaching teams the skills they need to run successful meetings seems like an obvious way for us to fulfill this mission, which is why we've now opened our first courses to students. We opened Meeting School now because, after over a decade of research and work with high-performing organizations, we know what works.

Tricia Harris (2018). Why do teams cover the same topic over and over? Because most of them aren’t accustomed to collaboratively recording what happened in a meeting. Once the important information is documented, no further discussion is needed unless the information changes.

Elise Keith (2018). Embracing core competencies, like defining the meeting purpose up front, and the use of an effective meeting structure work to encourage meeting engagement and productive energy. Beyond these basics, there are five key steps meeting designers can follow to increase meeting engagement.

Elise Keith (2018). A real-time agenda is a process for co-creating, prioritizing and discussing a list of topics in real time.

Elise Keith (2018). Ground rules give you a tool you can use when someone goes too long. This means the burden and the power to manage the conversation falls not just on the meeting leader - ground rules give everyone on the team a tool they can use!

Elise Keith (2017). The way a team talks about their work changes the work. If we talk about the big strategic challenges the same way we approach our day-to-day tasks, we waste unnecessary time on the small items and give the big ones short shrift.

Elise Keith (2017). Any time there is an opportunity to quickly get information from the group all at once, do so in the meeting. This will save lots of time chasing email back and forth, and reinforce the group note taking habit.

Elise Keith (2016). A team’s regularly scheduled meetings should maintain work momentum and strengthen the relationships between team members. The frequency of these regular meetings sets the team’s work cadence.

Paul Axtell (2015). When you call on people, think of it as an invitation to speak. Invitations can be declined without consequence. So invite people to contribute to the conversation, but make sure your tone of voice and language correctly imply that it’s fine if they do not.

Elise Keith (2015). A deeper look at the stand-up and the common-but-wrong ideas you may have heard about them. For anyone considering stand-ups for their team, and for those that tried stand-ups but never felt confident about how they worked, this article is for you.

Elise Keith (2015). Here are 4 approaches to running remote team status meetings that work. Each one emphasizes different team values and work goals. Use any of them and you’ll get a project status meeting that sure beats the shiznit out of watching paint dry.