What is a "must have" meeting for you or your team? If you can please share why/what makes it so great - topic, frequency, etc. - I'm looking to brainstorm some fresh opportunities for my group.
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In my context, leading Software Architects, there's a need for short, conscise, one-way communication on a regular basis.
I run a 25 minute "Weekly News" meeting. Every Monday, 9:30. It's a quick-fire kind of thing. It's a mix of new information from the market, internal things, friendly reminders. It's essentially me curating the news stream, to emphasize what is key.
The meeting is over when all the news are delivered. Usually well before time.
If there's a lot of content or comments, it can run long. But I'm also very strict about the "Meetings ends 9:55, mid-sentence, if necessary.".
First meeting without agenda is useless. Topic itself cannot help if we donot know what we are trying to get from meeting topic. Most of the meetings are just proving update which can happen on any communication channel not through meeting. Leaders try to understand technical so that they could present to senior leadership.
For me, the one must-have meeting is a short, weekly “Insights Sync” where each person brings one meaningful market or customer insight. It’s fast, practical, and provide a clearer direction than any long planning meeting.
"Feature Friday but on a Wednesday". Long story explaining the name, but it is a meeting focused on delivery process innovation.
If you want to try something different, I'm currently getting good results with "Curiosity Day".
Curiosity is 4 placeholder meetings, optional meetings during the way, usually on a Friday. They are not meetings as such, but placeholders for learning at the individual level. I then ask the team which themes they find interesting, and we co-create the content. It's usually a combination of white papers, links to videos, misc. knowledge resources.
Examples of topics are agentic AI, Game Theory, The Databricks platform, strategy as a concept, the leadership model of the company, etc.
And it seems to work. My team has had the option to use agentic AI for a while, but it was the Curiosity Day session that triggered people getting very hands-on. Several useful agents were build and shared that day.
The day starts with a prologue meeting, where we roundtable, speak about our learning ambitions for the day. End of day, we have an epilogue meeting, where we close the loop, talk about what we explored, and how that might now be put to use.