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I managed to improve meetings in my highly sceptical team and so can you.
When I ran a team of 20 in my own business, we had a LOT going on. Sometimes 60-70 client projects at one time.
People working on strategy, people working on copy, people working on design, people doing digital. Everyone trying to be expert in their discipline and collaborate seamlessly with others to produce client work at speed and scale.
We HAD to get our s*** together.
We bought agency management software - didn’t help.
We divided the business up functionally to make roles and ownership clear. Didn’t really help. There was still so much stuff.
We had a washing line each with our clients pegged to it - actually that was pleasingly visual and did help!
Eventually I created a rhythm of meetings and collaboration points similar to agile sprints - based on what I’d learn from our brilliant client Unboxed and GDS blogs.
It was heavily resisted. A Carrie-Thing. Too weird, too annoying, too restrictive. I persisted, jiggled things around.
I knew we needed something. Just winging it was getting us into massive hot water.
Cut to 6 months down the line. I heard one of my colleagues explaining how we worked to a potential client. "Yes, we always run it like this - it's fast, transpareny and centred on humans." Oh right, wow!! She summarised the approach I'd been trying to cultivate perfectly, won them over and won the business.
Wow, we’d got there - or we'd got somewhere anyway!
Fast forward 8 years and I used a similar approach at another company. I engaged them differently in it they got it straight away. They were flying.
The point is there is a curve to go round and it's this:
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