Who’s got the ball?
We have all been in meetings where we discuss tasks and responsibilities but in miss the critical part of summarizing who is responsible for making something happen. Often everybody assumes the other people in the room are going to be doing the work. Nobody knows who is, for sure, going to be doing the actual work as a result of the meeting and that is just a waste of everybody’s time and effort.
Being clear about responsibilities is one of the key outcomes of many meetings focused around execution. There are other types of meetings, but for the most part, the execution meetings are were the rubber meets the road and where people can get into trouble when it comes to assignments.
There are other instances where people just don’t know what to do. In those cases there is a lack of clarity of the particular assignment made. We may say go do this thing, but the thing may be too nebulous or it may be unclear on the time frame of when it has to be done. It could also be unclear what the priority is for the task.
In all these cases making sure the tasks are well defined, where the task sits in the list of other things on a persons plate, and making sure a person knows where to go if there are questions or more clarity is needed are all important.
You can even go further and make sure these things are tracked and published in a place where everybody can see what has been committed to and where they are at any given time. There are any number of tools out there to help with this. Jira, Assana, and Trello are just a few of the more popular tools out there to manage shared tasks and each has their place in a team workflow. The real question then comes to: Are they used effectively? If they are not, what are the things which need to change to make them effective?
Once everybody is on the same page, clear responsibilities have been communicated and people are held accountable for the decisions in the meeting, then we won’t hate meetings, but understand their place in our organization and enjoy the clarity and collaboration they provide to our team.
Photo by Todd Trapani on Unsplash.
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