The Meeting Cascade: A Small Tweak to Improve Communication Speed and Cross-team Collaboration
Don’t you love it when you find a small tweak that makes a big difference? That always feels like a win because so much of what we do requires tremendous effort and the benefits are not always realized.
We experienced one of these low-effort, high-reward changes this past year, and I thought I’d share our insights.
Problem #1:
Like many organizations, we rely on the timely cascade of relevant, contextualized information. Discussions at the executive level get shared with the director level, then to management, and finally to individual contributors. How long does that take, and what is the fidelity of that communication?
If the executives meet every Thursday, the directors on Wednesday, managers on Tuesday, and individual teams on Monday, that could create a 2.5-week delay in the information cascade. And that’s assuming every group meets weekly (which they don’t). And it assumes that no one along that chain forgot to communicate (they do).
This results in information not being cascaded in a timely manner, if at all. When the information is urgent, leaders must schedule additional meetings to achieve the cascade effect, because the regularly scheduled meetings aren’t soon enough.
Problem #2:
We want people to collaborate across teams to solve problems. When something comes up, teams from different groups try to find time to get together. Inevitably, someone says, “I cannot meet then. That’s when my team meeting is, and I cannot skip it.” That’s actually a good response. I like it when people prioritize attending their team meetings. I even wrote an article about that.
However, each of these conflicts shrink the window of time available for inter-team collaboration. So, collaboration is harder and less timely.
Solution: Organize team meetings to follow each other down the hierarchy.
We changed all of our team meetings at various levels to follow each other in the order of the hierarchy on the same day of the week.
- The executive team meets from 8:30–9:50. (That’s the team I’m on)
- The Directors in my department meet with me from 10:00–10:50. (That’s the team I directly lead)
- My direct reports gather their Managers from 11:00–11:50.
- We avoid meetings over lunch.
- Managers meet with their teams from 1:00–1:50.
This solves both of the stated problems, plus a few more:
- Information is contextualized and cascaded in hours instead of weeks.
- Peer groups are in their team meetings (separately) during the same time block. Previously, they were scattered throughout the week. This alignment created many hours of conflict-free collaboration time.
- These official communications channels work efficiently and equitably, so people hear things at the same speed. This cuts down the chatter on unofficial channels and rumor mills.
- As you all know, communication is a two-way street. Leaders share information, but they also listen to hear how it was received, answer questions, and gather input. So, a week later, I can ask how it went and assimilate all of the collective feedback from my group, provided each of my direct reports had weekly 1:1s with their managers between meetings.
The drawbacks:
I started off this article by stating that this was a low-effort, high-reward change. Low effort doesn’t mean zero effort. There are drawbacks and downsides. Managers are used to having their team meetings at certain time and don’t really like being told from on high when they need to have them.
And they all most certainly had something else going on during the assigned timeslot they were supposed to move their meetings to and therefore had to renegotiate those commitments. No one liked doing that.
As you know, I’m all about empowerment, so I’m reluctant to dictate something like this, especially since it can appear capricious. However, after a healthy explanation, everyone bought into the idea and was quite happy with the results.
Finally, I’d like to give credit to Dale Henninger for this idea. We were brainstorming ideas to reduce management workload and enhance opportunities for cross-team collaboration. Dale shared it at our team meeting. After a healthy discussion, we decided to give it a go. Dale later shared with me that he had proposed this idea at two other large companies, and they never did it. I’m glad we did.
Read this article on my blog site or listen to it on my podcast🎙️
