In March of last year, I designed a new activity for our Monthly Team Meetings called 3-2-1 Growth. The objective was to engage the team in personal growth topics regularly. More on the origin here if you're interested.
Since then, I've tried several different activities and experimented with a variety of topics. This week marked another new iteration in format and timing. Rather than a 10-15 minute exercise at the end of Monthly Team Meeting, it is now the focus of the last Tuesday Meetup of the month, a 30-minute weekly meeting for the team to come together.
Instead of focusing on a topic, I thought it would be fun to frame the exercise around a relatable situation. Rather than ask "how do you handle client requests that are out of scope," I led with this:
The Situation: We're excited to present our design concepts to a new client after receiving sign-off on wireframes. When we get on Zoom, we're surprised to see the CEO since they've never been in a meeting before. After we present, the CEO thanks us for the work before asking if we can add a "Subscribe" button to the PDP and allow customers to customize their subscription. This is the first time we're hearing about subscriptions...
Once everyone had a chance to digest the situation. We went into breakout rooms and talked through this prompt:
Prompt: What thoughts are going through your head? How do we respond to the CEO? What happens next?
With 10 minutes left, we all came back and talked through our key insights. I was pleasantly surprised by how engaged everyone was, sharing tons of ideas for managing the situation. In my interactions for the rest of the week, it was also cool to see team members taking action on what they had learned or hear them talking about similar topics.
I did receive some good feedback, though. A team member asked me what we do with these insights, expecting that there were next actions everyone could take. When I get a question like this, I like to assume that at least a few other folks are thinking the same thing and there's an opportunity to better articulate to the larger group. I plan to do that in the next session.
For now, I explained that the intent is not for these meetings to directly change or impact the process in a matter of days. They're an opportunity for the team to think and reflect together. If we can all leave these sessions more aligned and 1% better than when we entered, I consider it a success.
The more we do it, 1% becomes 2%, 2% becomes 3%, and so on. Before you know it, we're all that much further along.
This post originally appeared in Edition No. 081 of my newsletter. Subscribe here.
Tuesday, March 29, 2022
