How to Lead a 10-Minute Meeting
There are 3 ways to lead a 10-minute meeting:
Avoid it - email instead
Commit and complete on time
End late
Obviously ending late is not good for your team’s confidence in you. Why’d you schedule a 10-minute meeting if you can’t lead one?
And sending an email isn’t always the best for critical information transfer - sometimes people don’t read them, and they can be slow.
Door Number 2: Commit and Complete on Time
I’ve led hundreds of short meetings. For several years I ran a 15-minute team huddle every morning.
This January I was goal-setting for the team and looking for ways we could save time. I looked at all of the meetings my team had and there was lots of trimmable fat.
We committed to shortening our morning huddle from 15 minutes to 10 minutes.
While not a big change daily, it adds up over time. It could save hundreds of hours this year for my team.
As an aside before I jump into how to run a 10-minute meeting well, if you’re curious how much time your team is spending in recurring meetings, I created an excel template to help you see and optimize totals. It’s in my store here.
More on Whether you Need a Meeting
10 minutes is not enough time to dig into anything. It’s a tool for building awareness. A quick touch point. “I’m here and I’m listening” is really important for teams to see from their managers, and a frequent 10-minute meeting gives that opportunity.
If you want to:
Have a discussion
Collect ideas on the spot (without previous warning)
Give a presentation
Give any kind of demonstration
You should NOT be having a 10-minute meeting. Don’t be afraid to give detailed discussions, brainstorming sessions, etc. the time they actually need in order to reach their goal (ALL MEETINGS SHOULD HAVE GOALS).
I’ll just scream that out again because I love it.
ALL MEETINGS SHOULD HAVE GOALS.
10-Minute Team Meeting Example
It’s easier to explain by mapping this out than with words, so I’ll share a real example:
Meeting Name: Daily Team Huddle
Meeting Time: 9:15 am, 15 minutes after our “required latest start time” (people could come in earlier but no later than 9am) to allow the team to settle in and prep for the day.
Meeting Place: Standing in the hallway by our visual metric board
Meeting Goals:
Ensure all safety and performance issues from day prior are heard, note actions
Review status of previous day’s actions with the team
Performance announcement: where we are, where we need to be to stay on target for our goal this week
Make general announcements and ensure everyone knows who is here/out of office today
Meeting Leader’s Schedule:
8:45 am - But isn’t the meeting at 9:15?
YES. Prep ahead is CRITICAL for your success in a 10-minute meeting. At this time I’d pull data and crunch numbers for our metrics from the day prior.
9:00 am - Walk to meeting space, update visual management board metrics, update action list, add announcements, and prep a 10-minute timer. I’ve tried just using a clock and it wasn’t great - a timer would be better. If I’m done setting up and people show up early we can chat a bit before the meeting starts.
9:15 am - Start the meeting, whether everyone is there or not. If someone arrives late, you can gently take them aside after the meeting and let them know how their tardiness impacts the team. In a 10-minute meeting, it can have a big impact.
My dad has a phrase “What you allow will continue” which I’ve noticed applies to most things in management but especially to people arriving late to meetings. It doesn’t take much feedback before the team understands you are just trying to protect everyone’s time.
At the start of the meeting the action I took was to review and fill out our “safety cross” by asking about any incidents or near misses from the day before (more to come on this in my upcoming safety article).
9:17 am - Move on to performance review. Since you’ve already filled in the board, it goes quickly. Where you were yesterday vs. where you need to get to by the end of today.
This is also a great time to give recognition for team members, calling out how someone’s specific positive contribution impacted performance the day before.
9:19 am - General announcement time. Since you’ve already filled in the board, it goes quickly. Definitely don’t wing this one - I’ve done it and I always forget an important announcement. Write them down for yourself and others to see because the meeting goes fast!
9:21 am - Shoot for 2 minutes: Review “Pinch Points.” What didn’t work yesterday? Where did you get stuck? Is something about a workflow just really annoying?
In the past I used a whiteboard card and I wrote everything out in the moment, but I think having people bring sticky notes to the meeting with their pinch points pre-written would be better. You can read the stickies and together quickly decide key actions, people to take them, and deadlines to write next to them. It is possible to go quickly without losing important details.
9:23 am - Anything else? Any questions? Leave yourself this 2 minutes for padding. Someone from another team might show up last-minute to make an announcement at your meeting, someone might be having a birthday, or someone might be getting promoted; all manner of things that bring a team together can happen in the 2 remaining minutes.
If a pinch point or safety issue is especially juicy it also lets you spend a little more time there earlier on occasionally, but be careful not to let timing slip every day or it will become a 15-minute meeting before too long!
And if there isn’t anything to say, let everyone go early.
9:25 am - 9:45 am: Follow Up Time. Make sure you’ve got time booked off in your calendar to actually take the actions that were gathered during the huddle, ideally ASAP. That way the next day they can be happily crossed off the action list.
Also, having follow up time ensures you have a moment to talk 1:1 with someone after the huddle ends if you need to find out more detail about an issue or just check in to see how they are doing. Often people have things going on that they carry with them to work and the huddle is a good time to get a read on that early in the day - you can see if they are really feeling up to the day, or if they’d be more productive if they went home and came back tomorrow. This goes a long way toward building trust and rapport with your reports.
So that’s it - for a manager, the 10-minute meeting is about an hour’s worth of work, but by doing them regularly you keep a pulse on how your team is doing and you show them by your repeated actions (every time you follow through to eliminate a pinch point they come up with!) that you care.
Thanks for joining me and let me know what worked and didn’t work for you in the comments. And if you’ve never had a 10-minute meeting but this gets you inspired, let us all know how it went!
