How do you start your week?
It’s important to get the week off to a good start by:
- Getting some structure to the week and planning your time effectively – with the correct focus
- Injecting a positive energy!
If you have a team then the above are even more important. Get the team working on their objectives for the week and start them off from a great place. If you work solo in your business you can still do this though – it’s a good habit to get into. You can run this your team in person or over Zoom or Teams.
I advocate starting with a LINO meeting on a Monday morning. This stands for:
L – Last week – a review of last week, celebrating positive events and noting issues that arose
I – Insights – what was learned from last week – good and bad?
N – Next week (the week coming up) – what is planned for the week coming (taking into consideration the Insights)
O – Opportunities – what opportunities can be seized upon
It should be noted that this really should not be a long meeting – so having some structure is crucial. Before you get to the LINO, it’s worth starting with each person in the group sharing something positive or fun – “the best thing that happened to them last week, or over the weekend” is a good place to start. It gets everybody speaking and injects an upbeat, positive energy to the room (virtual or otherwise), If something went wrong, this is not the place to share it, there will be time for this later. Sharing gratitude is another way to begin, and you can judge this depending on personal circumstances. Make sure everyone gets a turn – it is really important that everyone is heard once. It makes everyone feel like they have a contribution to make. It is clearly important to ensure that others are respectful, that they listen – properly. But just a sentence, or two – not War & Peace
The LINO can now start!
Last Week – depending on the team structure, invite people to summarise the week just gone. Here are some examples – depending on what your business does:
- What projects are they working on, what progress has been made, where are the sticking points, projects completed with no issues (designers, techies, engineers)
- How many calls were taken, was there a common thread to issues, successful resolutions, customer surveys (customer service, helpdesks)
- Summary of sales meetings, calls made, objections handled – customer wins (sales teams)
Take some time to decide what metrics you want to examine and how you want the meeting to progress. The crucial thing is to summarise the week and identify notable events. It make take a few weeks to evolve to the right level of detail.
Insights – what was learned? Summarise from the positive and negative points raised above. What we want to encourage here is team participation to show how they can avoid issues in future, or build on the successes from the previous week. Contributions should be sought from ALL team members. Don’t take too long though – and encourage them to work on issues together in the team throughout the week.
Next Week – what milestones are coming up? Big order to be fulfilled? Project nearing completion? Rollout of new software? How will this affect workload and how can the team prepare (especially build on the Insights).
Opportunities – what’s new and coming up – how can the team come up with or seize on
- New projects
- New tech
- New processes
Do avoid “shiny new” syndrome though – maintain the proper focus on older projects that need to be kept up to speed.
Bonus points – finish up with everyone stating one goal for the week – anything from answering more calls to doing some training. Make sure that team members do have some time for personal development every week. This might form part of their “win” for next week’s meeting.
If you are doing all this just for yourself then you can run this through in 10-15 minutes – and then complete your plan for the week – making sure you put in your Big Rocks that will be non-negotiable.
It will take time for the team to get to grips with the structure of the meeting and you all need to be clear on what is to be included (and what is NOT to be included). You also need to be rigorous regarding time management. If there is a problem taking too long to discuss then it probably needs a separate meeting – sometimes you can just ask for it to be resolved and for them to come back to you (or just report next week!) – you should be empowering them to sort out the problems as they arise. You do NOT want your weekly Monday morning meeting taking half a day.
Let me know if you have tried meetings like these to start the week and how it went?
Get in touch if you would like to discuss further.