Regular meetings are a very important part of the process of building a cohesive team in your organization. But how do you do them?
We’ll talk about this in another article, but you may want to think about changing it up a little bit, especially at the beginning of your meeting. Because the beginning of the meeting sets the tone for the rest of the meeting.
In our team meetings for Pro Website Creators, we always start out with a Celebration and then move to review an aspect of either our Vision, Mission, or Core Values.
However, every now and then we’ll change up the review of our Vision, Mission, and Core Values with a thought-provoking question that’s personal, but not intrusive in any way. Having a question like this allows us
- to get to know each other better
- a chance to think about what is often REALLY important or enjoyable
- to ignite a little creativity
- to improve the foundation for our communication
In other words, let’s spice up those meetings and use them not for just status, but to get to know each other a little better!
So how to find these thought-provoking questions?
You can do a search online for icebreaker questions so no need to put those here. Simply filter them through your own mind and keep or discard as needed. But make sure you don’t skip a question just because it makes you feel a little uncomfortable; simply use your own judgment. However, we'll have a list here, and we'll keep adding to this list as we come up with them and use them.
- Think of one thing you’re proud of that you’re good at and share it. Give an example of how you've used it.
The first one we did was “Think back across your life; what is one of your favorite moments where you had fun and just enjoyed yourself?”
This just brought big smiles, positive thoughts, and amazing endorphins into our lives.
(Hint: the answers normally are related to family.)
We, therefore, enjoyed it so much that we did another one.
Now one thing to consider: not every question you ask or exercise you want them to do will produce a great result - in other words, you’ll FAIL!
That’s OK, because you’ll succeed much more often than you fail and when you do, you can joke about it and say, “Well, seems like a skunk made it into our team meeting and stunk up this part of it!”
Back to the one that really worked well and caused us all to think and get new insights into each other….
"If I had 30 seconds left to live, what would I tell my children are the 3 most important things I learned about how to live a happy life?"
We enjoyed it so much, we thought we’d share our results with you.
Dave
- Create and Nurture your faith in Jesus - this life won’t last forever, and you have to know where you’re going when it’s over.
- Make as many decisions as possible based on achieving long-term, sustainable results, not short-term.
- Create sanctuaries in your life to energize and rejuvenate you, and where you feel safe. His are Home, Church, and the Gym.
Aris
- Support and love each other, especially family.
- Find God in your life.
Daphne
- Dream Big.
- Practice gratitude over both big and small moments.
- Forgive more - especially the things that won’t happen the way you want.
Andrew
- Eat, Drink, and Be Merry (just kidding!)
- Forgiveness - don’t hold a grudge as it makes you feel worse, and really only harms you.
- Always support family no matter what.
- Find something in life to bring you joy, hopefully, work, to help you get through a lot of other things that happen in life.
Wrapping up
We recommend you try something like this at your next team meeting unless you do one every day. But even with a daily meeting, you do it once a week, or maybe once per month.
You can always try this with family and friends first to see how it goes.
Just try it and see what will happen - don’t be afraid!