Management

How to Get the Most Out of Reporting Meetings

This simple but powerful reporting structure will help your team get straight to the point, increasing transparency and collaboration.

In small, co-located teams, you can get away with a relaxed approach to reporting. Everyone can see and hear what’s going on as it happens, and group announcements can be made merely by speaking in a loud voice.

However, as teams grow, so does the need for more structured forms of communication, such as weekly update meetings in which team members report their progress to one another. Get this meeting right and you’ll rocket towards your goals . . . but get it wrong and you risk missing your target altogether.

Winging it

My leadership meetings could sometimes be a bit ad-hoc. Usually, each teammate was allocated a certain amount of time to provide an update on their area of the business, but some meetings were highly structured, while others were less so — and some regularly went off on tangents.

If targets were hit, things moved quickly. When targets weren’t hit (which, let’s face it, happens a lot), team members presented a brief explanation before describing a rosy future in which a miraculous…