Stop Managing Fires: The Weekly Meeting System That Helps Your Team Reduce Errors, Prevent Miscommunication, and Execute Better

If you're leading a service business with a team and it feels like you're constantly cleaning up mistakes, things falling through the cracks, and the team is doing finger-pointing, while also showing low engagement, this episode will help.

Maggie breaks down why most team problems are really communication system problems, and why a simple weekly operational meeting cadence can create alignment, reduce errors, and improve execution (without living in meetings).


In This Episode, you'll learn:

• The signs your team has outgrown ad-hoc communication
• Why weekly operational meetings prevent issues before they become fires
• How meeting cadence impacts morale, culture, and accountability
• The happy middle between no meetings and too many meetings

And if you want help building a communication system that fits your business and strengthens your team, book a complimentary consultation with Maggie here - https://www.stairwaytoleadership.com/

Transcript

[00:00:00] If you're a service business owner with a team and you're noticing that there's been more and more issues lately, whether it's with certain team members dropping the ball, things falling through the crack, and there is a lot of finger-pointing going on, and people are not engaged as they are, I would encourage you to look at your communication system in the company and how do you ensure that your team members and everybody is on the same page, is building great relationships, not just working relationships, but human-human relationships, and what type of culture you're building.

And the first thing you wanna look at is meetings. [00:01:00] Welcome to Diamond Effect. Today, I want to talk to specifically about how weekly meetings with your team can save you a lot of time, build up your team morale,

prevent a lot of issues from happening, and boost the engagement. Over the past six months or so, I've coached a number of clients on this, and very often when I have a business owner coming to me as a potential client with team issues, the first thing I look at is whether they meet with their team on a regular basis.

And most often they don't. And this is one of the key reasons why there is a lot of chaos and issues happening in their team. It's [00:02:00] easy to coordinate work when you're the only one, or maybe you have one or two people working with you where occasional phone call, chat through Slack teams or however you chat is enough.

But the moment your team grows to five people and beyond, and especially if they're not all at the same location, you do need to put some structure that facilitates proper communication Builds up connection and through that eliminate a lot of issues, misunderstandings, things being dropped, and then that hostile atmosphere that can be created if you don't have a proper structure.

So before we talk about that, let me tell you how I run my team in my corporate life as a director of operations, [00:03:00] where I had a team of about 30 people with three distinct business lines, and my team was the heartbeat of a 450-people team in North America. We were responsible for the training, the technology, the dispatching of the 450 technicians, for making sure that their managers had the data on the performance, that they were meeting contractual obligations, that the routes of the technicians were optimized, that the technicians had everything they need to do the work, not only from the, technology perspective and data, but also from trucks and tools and so on.

We supported their management with the vacation, the, labor planning, all those things my team was responsible for. And the three [00:04:00] lines that I had a dispatch team that was about 20, 25 people. Over the years, it grew, and I had a manager that managed that. That was a critical operation where the dispatchers operated 24/7 in two languages, English and French.

We always had to make sure that there was somebody there to support technicians because we did attend to critical emergencies for the clients. Then I had administrative team, which was, I think, three assistants and a team lead who were supporting operations managers, so managers to whom the technicians reported.

So anything from the fleet, the uniforms, the vacation allotment, and all the little things that can happen and that were happening in the hundreds of people team, that team supported, across Canada and US. And then I had business analytics team or team member. There was one or two of them [00:05:00] at some point that were, running a lot of different reports, looking at data, making sure that we Met contractual obligations because not meeting them could have costed the department and company millions of dollars in penalties that also the operations managers had the performance data for each technician, for each team to ensure that their team were performing well.

So those were the three lines of business that were under, my leadership. And it took some time, but my team run like a well-oiled machine. We were all aligned on the processes, on what message we were putting out there to the technicians, to the operations managers, to the clients, so the internal stakeholders, out- [00:06:00] external stakeholders.

No matter who you asked, we would always have the same response according with the company procedures, policies, and things that we agreed on the leadership level because we had great communication, because we were all aligned and, we discussed things, we brainstormed things and so on. And I had great leaders leading my sub-teams that we-- I was aligned with and they were aligned with me, that then if there was anything that had to be cascaded down to the individual dispatchers or admins and so on, they were doing it however we agreed on.

And part of the success of the alignment. I always say department to department is, can operate differently because it's all up to the people in that department, how they operate, the leadership and so on. [00:07:00] So our alignment and how we operate wasn't necessarily the same like in every other department because we had a thing going, and one of the key parts of that thing, making that thing possible was meetings.

So what my cadence was, and I'm not saying that this is the perfect ideal cadence, it all depends on the size of your team, the scale of your team, and how much things change and how much things are going on, and our operation was very dynamic. There were things happening on an hourly basis. There was a lot of things going on, so we had to meet weekly.

We had a Monday morning meeting, operational meeting where I had- All my leaders from three lines of business meet and some [00:08:00] senior dispatchers, my admins were there. And that meeting lasted from 30 minutes to an hour, depended on the week, where we discussed what do we have going on, if there were anything new things coming up, whatever support my team members needed of each other or whatever they needed from me.

If there were any questions of how to handle things, we discussed that. So then every line of business knew what was going on in the other one. Through that, my employees learned how maybe one action in one department affects the other department. So then decisions were not made in isolation, because that often happens.

One person decides or one department decides to do something without considering the impact on others, and then creating a whole lot of issues in another line of business or another part of the business. That wasn't [00:09:00] happening in my team because of that weekly meeting where we could discuss things, we could understand things.

And because everyone knew what was going on, we were clear on decisions may be made by higher leadership on the reasons and so on. We had one message as a department, one voice, an alignment. And if there was disagreement or certain conflict that was healthy where we debated things, we debated them at the meetings and ultimately came to one conclusion that then everybody got on board with.

And that's how we had one message, right? We were helping each other. We were sharing ideas. That cross-team knowledge and communication was critical. So that was operational meeting once a week, everybody together, or at least the leaders of the lines of business together. [00:10:00] And then I also met weekly with the heads of each line of business separately. So with my manager of the dispatch team and occasionally senior dispatchers, with the team lead of the admin team, and my business analytic teams.

And that was sometimes A weekly meeting from 15 minutes to 60 minutes. Sometimes we skipped the meeting if there wasn't anything going on, especially like with my business analytics team, it wasn't operations. The things were much calmer there. We didn't necessarily need to meet every week. But with the dispatch team or even admin team, there's so much going on that usually we had those meetings, but depending on the week, we would change and vary the timing.

What it allowed me to do is go deeper into each line of business, talk through processes, staffing, whether there were issues with individual staffing [00:11:00] members or whether there were good things and opportunities to grow, individual team members or support my managers, helping them be better managers, and also develop personal relationships with my direct reports.

I cannot stress enough that business is not just transactional. When you have team members, when you have a team, these are people who want to know that you care about them more than just employees, that you won't care about them as human beings. And the only way you can do that and convey as a leader is by knowing them as human beings.

And you can't know them if you never meet with them. And even if you meet with them, but maybe you don't have enough time to ask in the beginning of the meeting, "Hey, how was your weekend? How was your kid's dance competition? [00:12:00] How is your dog? Because they had issues. Is everything okay?" And allowing a little bit of space to have those conversations.

If you're a fast-paced, highly ambitious, high-performing entrepreneur, I know that sometimes that might seem like a waste of time, but it's not. This is a critical investment in your employees being fully engaged, feeling connected to you as their boss, as the human, and therefore also being able to go above and beyond.

If you keep your relationships very transactional, you do the job because I'm paying you, and you don't have time to develop that personal relationship, but also talk about you and your passion and the vision and so on, you will never have employees who go beyond, above [00:13:00] and beyond for you.

You also won't notice until it's late if there is a challenge with an employee. I was just coaching a client this month on one of their key operational employees, and for the past few months, that employee st- didn't perform the way they're used to, which created a bunch of challenges in her business because they're so key to that business.

That resulted in potentially loss of potential clients and then animosities in the field team that did the work and so on. And I coached the client to meet with that employee. Their meetings up to that point became very transactional, they were too short, they never had time to discuss things, and it started creating more and more tension and more and more conflict between them that then of course cascaded down [00:14:00] onto the field team.

And when I coach the client and I encourage them to extend the meetings and make sure they're more regular, and also address the changes in behavior from a compassionate place, from a place like, "Hey Maggie, I've noticed over the past three months you're not yourself. Is everything okay?" Coming from that and not just "Oh, you didn't do this.

There is a mistake." But more from a compassionate, caring level, it turned everything around because it... my client realized their key employee has been going through some personal struggles where maybe they were too ambitious or too hard on themselves that they didn't share. They were trying to do everything and take on things, and they were just overwhelmed and not able to handle.

And the [00:15:00] conversation, just that, already allowed them to release the pressure, to open up, to appreciate my client's concern and care, and then start figuring out, how can that employee be supported so then the mistakes don't happen, the business doesn't suffer, and at the same time, the employee still feels valued and still can contribute, okay?

We're all humans. Our lives are 50/50. Even your best employee, your best performer, will have time in their lives where- Their best performance is maybe 80 or 70% of what you were used to for some time, because they're going through some personal issues, whether they're, health issues or whether they're into the divorce or whether it's something else, it does not matter.

But when you [00:16:00] care about your best employees, they'll be so much more loyal to you. They will do so much more, because once they overcome those challenges, they will remember that you helped them through it, that you cared. And I'm talking here from my personal experience. When I was going through divorce with my first husband, this was the darkest probably year and a half of my life.

And there were days when I was coming to work and I wasn't performing at my 150 level that my boss was used to. I was tired from crying. Maybe I was half depressed, but I was showing up and I was doing my best. And my boss at the time knew what was going on. I knew that she was there for me, that if I needed to talk to her to cry my eyes out and [00:17:00] feel better so I can do the work, she was there.

She also wasn't maybe pressuring me or putting too much on me and giving me space to do the job that I had the best I can, and I never forgot that. I was loyal to her. I stayed with her as an employee probably longer than I would ever stay, being ambitious and wanting to learn and so on, because I knew that she cared about me beyond just me being an employee, and that she was there for me even to listen and to talk where I didn't have anybody else to talk about.

Because sometimes being an immigrant, people are alone, and the only people that are their family or they're close to are their workmates or their boss, at least in person. My family [00:18:00] was across the ocean and it's hard sometimes to talk about things that are going on, emotional things over the phone and over WhatsApp or whatever it is, right?

So sometimes it's work, and I'm not saying you have to bring all your life to work or allow. It wasn't like I was crying at work all day long and I wasn't doing, My responsibilities, I was showing up and I was finishing the work, but there were moments where I just needed somebody to understand or hold space for a five-minute conversation so I can keep going, right?

And your best performers will never abuse it, but they will always appreciate it and give you so much more over the course of their employment with you.

So if you're not meeting with your team on a regular basis, ideally weekly operational meeting, [00:19:00] right? It doesn't have to be a strategy meeting every week. That you can do once a month, once a quarter, whatever works for you. But weekly operational meeting, you want to start.

Whether it's 30 minutes, 60 minutes, or even 15 minutes, it's up to you. It depends on how big is your team, how complex is your business, how much changes throughout the week or a day. You want to decide, but give yourself enough time where you can start the meeting with a little small talk. I don't know, talk about the weekend, what happened, so you get a little bit personal.

You get to know your people beyond their work. You are able to go through the operational stuff that will be happening that week to, battle ideas or solve certain little issues or remove the roadblocks that your team thinks that they might have, preventing them or making [00:20:00] it harder for them to do their best work.

Offer them. And you have extra time to maybe talk about something unexpected that came up or a new project that you are guys working on or whatever it is. The time can always be changed. If you don't have, topics to talk for an hour, don't stay there for an hour pretending like you have to.

Cut the meeting short in 30 minutes. But if you have things to talk through, take the time, talk through those things.

That will allow your team to stay aligned, speak with one voice, in a sense that they represent your business in the way you wanna be represented in front of the clients, in front of other stakeholders, and also understand each other's roles, which then makes them more compassionate and more understanding. Or more even thoughtful in how they operate because what they do affects their colleagues, and I understand they understand how because they have insights into it.

[00:21:00] Another client of mine, before we started coaching together, she had a small sales/quote processing team. And because it was just two people, she was not really meeting with them on a regular basis. It was more ad hoc, and, some of them were in person, some were at the desk and so on. She didn't have an opportunity to really understand what was going on in sales. So since she started her weekly meetings, not only she knows really well what's going on in sales, and we started tracking certain KPIs, she also has opportunity to coach her team and help them through certain more complex quotes or client inquiries.

It also created a bond, a better bond with the team and better understanding between the team members because some of them are remote and some of them are in the office. So the remote team members don't feel so [00:22:00] excluded, right? Or isolated because they're not in the day-to-day in the office.

And that client actually always says, "I can't believe how a weekly meeting can change the dynamic and how well the team operates together." And that's the thing. Sometimes the smallest changes, the things that you think are not necessarily needed, are the ones that create the biggest impact.

And before you start thinking, "Maggie, but I don't wanna die in meetings," I'm not advocating here for an extreme, right? I see very often businesses go in ex- in two, two ways of extremes. Either don't... They have zero meetings, and that creates the challenges that I just talked about, or they have so many meetings that majority of them are [00:23:00] not productive, nothing comes out of them And people just spend their lives in meetings without having actually time to do meaningful work.

And I've been in that situation as a senior leader in a corporation where there were weeks where I spend my whole days in meetings, and sometimes even triple-booked, which created additional stress not being able to go all of them, without my ability or having to do my work after hours. But a lot of those meetings were not constructive, were not productive. It was just a waste of time. What I'm advocating here is my happy middle philosophy, creating a cadence of meetings that helps you run your business, that when you invest an hour a week, it saves you hours a month in fixing misunderstandings, going back and forth in emails and phone calls, dealing with issues [00:24:00] that could have been avoided.

It saves you hours of work of having to coach your team members because they're disgruntled, or they make mistakes, or looking for new people because your best people get disengaged and they leave.

So if you're not meeting with your team at all or your meetings are very ad hoc, there's no structure to it, change it. Implement right this week or next week one weekly meeting that's more operational, that discusses things that are going on, but also give you that opportunity to have a bit of a personal touch in the beginning.

Do it for three months and see the difference. It will be hugely impactful, I promise you. And then you can always adjust the length and the frequency as you go and realize what's working, what's not.

Now, if you want to create actually a [00:25:00] proper communication system in your business that increases your team performance, their alignment, decreases mistakes and issues, increases the team member satisfaction and overall atmosphere and culture in your work, let's coach. I can help you set that up tailored to your business and your needs.

Book a free consultation with me through the link in the show notes. Have a fantastic week. Bye.