Commitment Meeting Best Practices

This article discusses some logistics and best practices for your commitment meetings.

Types of Meetings

Depending on your commitment type, you have a few options for your meetings:

Commitment meetings are 10-15 minutes long and cover the 4-question agenda. Most teams will use commitment meetings. Commitment meetings are best when the team makes small outcome commitments or uses projects to influence the key results.
Commitment huddles are 5 minutes long and are best when using leveraged behavior commitments. During the meeting, the team will track their activity and discuss impediments.
1 on 1s may replace a commitment meeting or huddle when it is impractical to schedule a team meeting (e.g. client support, time zone differences, etc.) During the 1 on 1, the team leader should use the 4-question agenda to track progress towards the key results for small outcomes and projects. The team leader should schedule a meeting for each team member.

Cadence

Each team will choose how frequent to meet. We suggest weekly. However, daily or every two weeks might fit better with your team’s current processes.

Agenda

If you recall from the overview, the 4-question agenda contains the following questions:

Did you complete your commitments from the last meeting?
With the information we have today, how confident are you that you will achieve each key result?
Are there any impediments in your way to reach the goal?
What are the one to two things that I can do this week in order to impact the key results?

For commitment huddles, instead of the 4-question agenda, the team will focus on completion of the leveraged behavior since the last meeting and clearing impediments.

Keys to Successful Commitment Meetings

Keep your meetings short. Allocate 10-15 minutes for the meeting. If necessary, have everyone stand during the meeting.
The meeting should take place at the same time and location. Consistency is important to create a sustained cadence. Missing a meeting will cause the team to lose momentum and impact your key results.
Only discuss the objectives and key results during the meeting time. The team should keep all other topics out. If you need to discuss urgent topics, schedule a meeting after the commitment meeting. It is important to keep the commitment meeting separate.
Focus on improving the results and not blaming or making excuses. At times, you will experience disappointing results. Team members should feel confident to share bad news. Help and support while holding the team accountable to complete missed commitments.

Let us help you create a meeting cadence for accountability. Send us a note below.