By Mandy Green
2 minute read
This article is the last in a three part series. If you missed either Part 1 or Part 2, read them first.
The third and final weekly meeting rhythm for achieving progress with your team is also the simplest.
It’s something I call “Weekly Staff Brainstorming” or W.S.B.
Unlike the daily huddle and WAM that I’ve talked about before, this staff brainstorming meeting is meant to be casual and free flowing.
The goal of this meeting is to spend 1-2 hours with your staff simply talking about admissions, marketing, and/or recruiting in a different location than your office.
- What trends are you seeing?
- What problems are you experiencing?
- What big ideas do you have?
- What do you think the office or school could be doing better?
You could get together at a restaurant or coffee shop and simply talk about how things are going while you share a meal. When I was an assistant soccer coach at the University of Utah, we used to do this meeting on the golf course that was on campus.
It was my most favorite meeting of the week.
Not only did we start to suck a little less at golf at the end of my time there, but we also got a lot of staff bonding in.
Being in a different location away from the chaos also got us thinking from a different perspective which generated a ton of ideas that we probably wouldn’t have thought of had we just been sitting in our normal environment – Kind of like how many of us you get our best ideas while in the shower.
The goal of this meeting is to make the time and space you and your staff need to stop looking at the proverbial trees and see the entire forest.
It’s easy in the craziness of the year to get lost in specific projects and strategies. But it’s important to step back and ask if you’re working on the right things.
By simply sitting down once a month or even weekly to talk about how things are going and how they could be going better, you’ll make better decisions, make fewer mistakes, and progress your program much much faster.