How I lead weekly creative meetings
In October 2018, Langrand’s Executive Creative Director saw my passion for teamwork and put me in charge of leading weekly creative meetings.
I was excited!
At this point, I had already been at Langrand for many years, and I’ve seen the concept of weekly creative meetings come and go. For whatever reason, they would NEVER stick! The team would congregate at the designated time and place for a few weeks… but inevitably people would just stop showing up. And it would always die a slow death.
Rinse and repeat. It was painful.
I figured that one of the issues with the meetings is that there wasn’t any real joy or purpose.
So when it was my turn to lead the charge, I came up with this analogy:
From the past failures, I was able to come up with a system that worked for me. These are a few of the guidelines that I came up with:
Find genuine joy in team
This came easy to me. I loved my team. Seriously, I’m not just saying that! My desire to be in the room with everyone was authentic.
And people could sense that. Think about it—people aren’t dumb. If your heart isn’t in it, they can tell. And several of my teammates have said to me that they could tell that I had fun getting everyone together.
Treat your team like the adults they are
Respect is mutual. Don’t guilt or threaten them! If they can’t make it, they can’t make it. They’re grownups with free will who can make their own decisions. Trust them to manage their time. If they see that everyone else is there, though, they’ll want to be there out of fear of missing out. At least that’s how I would feel everyone went somewhere without me.
Keep it fun and casual
I don’t want anyone dragging their feet to come into the meeting. Keep the spirit relaxed. Be friendly. Take genuine interest in each other’s lives. Do some icebreaker activities every once in a while. Switch things up a bit to keep people on their toes. This is an INTERNAL meeting. That means the stakes are low. Be playful!
First things first
I keep my meetings organic. That means I never really know where they will go. It’s a big mystery box because I gravitate to what people want to talk about. So how do I ensure some semblance of purpose?
I deliver the main message early in the meeting. Whatever is important or top-of-mind, that will get said and that discussion will be prioritized. This means that no matter what happens, at least THIS nugget of value was dispensed among the team. But after this is done, anything goes. So…
Be flexible, but pull levers as needed
The conversations will take on a life of their own. My job is to get people engaged and sharing thoughts and ideas. Sometimes it’s easy and I don’t have to do anything. Other times, I have to get the ball rolling.
I always have things in my back pocket that I can pull out to stimulate discussion. It can literally be anything, but I’m known to pull out interesting industry news and thought-provoking world news.
If needed, I will have presentations and videos at the ready to inject some lessons into the team. Or we can just share the cool things we’ve encountered lately (whether it be industry projects or just movies and TV shows we like).
Time and place
We met on every Wednesday at 11:00 AM for an hour. Kind of an arbitrary time, but it worked. And I respected people’s time by never going over the hour.
I was less stringent about the place. Sometimes we met in the Large Conference Room, sometimes we met at the kitchen table, sometimes we met at a random different third place. Switching things up can get people excited. Don’t be afraid to break the routine a bit.
I do find that meeting locations where we can see everybody’s entire body works better. I actually didn’t like meeting in the Large Conference Room. The table hides people. They get disengaged. Some fall victim to checking their phones. My Executive Creative Director asked me to institute a phone ban during the meeting (so I did), but I find that the distraction of phones goes away when people don’t have anything to hide their phones with.
Format
I originally started each meeting with a deck, and that worked well for a while. But then I realized it kind of felt too formal. So I slowly transitioned to just a rudimentary webpage that was able to display the messages and images I needed. But it felt less like a “presentation” and more like a collaboration. I could easily pull up a web browser and look up different things.
This made me feel like less of a teacher talking to a class, and more like a facilitator.
What about remote meetings?
After COVID-19, I had to figure out how to do creative meetings over the internet. I eventually landed on something simple that worked: A Slack channel call, with the Slack channel chatroom as my place to show things to everyone. People were free to talk on the call, or they could easily chime in by typing things. This all felt very natural and worked very well.
Never skip a meeting
One of my philosophies was to NEVER skip a meeting. Why? Well, it’s just human nature. Once you break a habit, that habit is hard to piece back together. We met on Wednesdays at 11:00 AM. Period. My job was to just click the “Begin Call” button. I wasn’t afraid of a bad meeting. Yes, not all meetings can be amazing meetings, but I found that most meetings were overall quite pleasant and productive.
But on rare occasions, a meeting would be a dud and I was totally OK with that. It’s like going to the gym. Not every workout can be an amazing workout. Sometimes your back hurts and you’re just able to get in 15 minutes of work. That’s OK. Keep it going.
Even if I was out on vacation, I would ask somebody to lead the meeting for me. It wasn’t a problem because I’m sure they feel a little excited too about getting to do things their way. Like I said, it’s a low-stakes internal meeting and it should be FUN. It’s always a great change of pace when things change up every so often too.
In conclusion
I honestly had a blast leading the creative meetings at Langrand. These are just some of the things that worked for me, but I’m sure everyone has their own unique style and approach to these types of things. In the end, I was proud to say that the meetings never died and I kept them going week after week after week. That sounds like a low bar, but it’s not! Because I’ve seen them die so many times. And of course, I’m grateful for every teammate who contributes. There would be no magic without them.