How many team meetings have you held in your career where half the team comes ready to rock while the rest can't produce the right information for a productive hour?

When people are asked why they don't have what you need for the meeting, they often defend themselves by saying they were unaware that you wanted to cover that item that day – even though it might have been on the agenda, or that they didn't see the email with the agenda on it, or some other excuse, lame or not.

And so, while making sure that everyone's clear about your expectations, a sure-fire way to motivate people to come prepared is to use our easy 4-part Accountability Grid for team updates. When you use the Accountability Grid you can step up preparedness – and fast. 

Here's how: 

At the start of every meeting, have each person on your team, in quick round-robin fashion, give an update to the group. When  this is set up as a weekly expectation, it takes away any excuse people have of "being unclear" or "not getting the agenda."

Before you put any of this in motion, prepare your team for a no-longer-business-as-usual meeting. A week or two before you plan to start using this process, pass out the grid and, if you need to, adjust it to fit your team's needs.

Here's the grid and a brief explanation of each of the four quadrants.

Accountability Grid

The Top 1 - 3: These are the top 1 to 3 objectives, projects or action items the person has been working on since last meeting.

Progress Update: What's been done to move things ahead.

Problems Update: Problems standing in the way of progress.

Strategies/Plans/Actions: New actions that are planned to continue progress, as well as actions that will be taken to remove/mitigate any problems. These will become the progress updates for the next meeting's report.

And after this Accountability Grid discussion, you can then get into the specifics of each person's report.

For the always-prepared individuals, this accountability grid will be a no-brainer. For most team members, it'll be a great structure. And for those who might be slacking off, this will get them on their toes. Why? Because people don't like to look bad in front of their teammates. And showing up without a cogent update is a clear indicator that they're not doing the work.

(C) 2009 Denise Brouillette, San Francisco, CA. All Rights Reserved.