As a professional service business owner, you understand the importance of strategic planning to achieve your business goals. But have you considered that alignment is the key to making your strategic plan a success?

Alignment is crucial to get everyone in your team working towards the same vision. However, achieving alignment is not easy, and it requires a disciplined approach to make it happen. One of the best ways to achieve alignment is to implement a team meeting rhythm.

What is a Team Meeting Rhythm?

A team meeting rhythm is a disciplined approach to recurring team meetings focused on goal setting, alignment, reporting, and accountability. This meeting rhythm occurs on an annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily basis.

Implementing a team meeting rhythm can help you achieve better communication, collaboration, and coordination within your team. It ensures that everyone is working towards the same goals and priorities, which is essential to achieve success in any business.

Trent’s Recommended Team Meeting Rhythm

To help you achieve alignment and get everyone rowing in the same direction, I recommend you implement a team meeting rhythm as follows:

Annual Meeting:

Time: 1 – 2 days

Agenda: Deciding on new annual goals to support 1, 3 to 5-year targets

Attending: Management team

This meeting is best held offsite and may be professionally facilitated.

Quarterly Meeting:

Time: 1 to 2 hours

Agenda: Communicating new quarterly priorities to support annual goals

Attending: Entire team

The focus of this meeting is reviewing what got done, what didn’t get done, and what still needs to get done in the next 90 days.

Monthly Meeting:

Time: 1 hour

Agenda: Discussing 1-2 strategic items, learning, and reviewing

Attending: Management team

Your monthly meeting is a good time to discuss specific strategic items and learn by reviewing progress.

Weekly Meeting:

Time: 1 hour

Agenda: News, KPIs, who/what/when

Attending: Management team

Most importantly, if you’re only going to do one meeting, make it the daily huddle!

Daily Meeting:

Time: 10-15 minutes

Agenda: News, KPIs, bottlenecks

Attending: Entire team in cascading huddles

The focus of this meeting is learning what’s up, what’s stuck, and how we’re doing on KPIs.

What’s up is a chance for everyone on the team to talk about what’s on their plate for the next 24 hours.

What’s stuck is a chance to address whatever is preventing any team member from doing what needs to be done next.

KPIs are the numbers that you’re tracking for each team. These could be sales goals or the percentage of a project that has been completed.

Everyone in the company should be involved in a daily huddle at their level. Begin with the team on the floor, then cascade up through management to the executive team.

All it takes is 15 minutes, no more, no less, and when it’s conducted properly, everyone leaves with a solid understanding of what each person is working on over the next 24 hours as well as what their team is expecting of them in return.

A well-established team meeting rhythm will help you accomplish what seems like two competing ideas: preserving order amid change and preserving change amid order.

Rating Your Team Meeting Rhythm

On a scale from one to five, how would you currently rank the rhythm of your team meetings? Do you and members of your team feel like team meetings are haphazardly scheduled, even a waste of time? Or are all levels of your team up to date at all times on what’s going on in the business?