Is your team in a bad mood?

Do you ever find yourself in a team meeting and everyone seems to be critical or cranky or the opposite of creative? When no matter what you do, someone is unhappy or tuned out? When you dream of calling the meeting police and have someone booked for obstruction?

It doesn’t have to be that way. Here are ways to get prompt changes to the dark cloud over your team meeting.

Five Quick Fixes for Immediate Improvement

1. Call for a break… If everyone’s been sitting for too long, you all may need to call for a break and deliberately move around, maybe even outside. Change it up. Maybe you need to get a piece of fruit or drink some juice or go for a walk. Change your kinetic energy. Ask everyone to do that and meet back inside in 20 minutes ready to tackle one more issue.
2. Call for a process check… Are you pushing for a decision when proper notice wasn’t given or the right people haven’t been consulted? Was the item on the agenda only supposed to be brought forward for discussion? Good process, good decisions, bad process, bad decisions. Remind people or question them about what the process is and what it should be.
3. Call out the elephant… Is there one thing that the team has been tiptoeing around that is holding you back? Is there a problem with someone in the room? Do you actually have the time/energy/budget for the issue at hand? Is the problem you are trying to solve something that customers don’t care about? Name the issue and see the relief as everyone stops wasting energy on avoiding the elephant.
4. Call on the team to do something different… When you are blocked on an issue, especially if it’s at the end of the day, sometimes it’s good to put it off until you’ve slept on it, particularly if you are meeting again the next day. Sometimes, sleeping on an issue gives new perspectives. Also, ask the team what issue, if solved, would most clear the path for solving other issues. When we are stressed, solving or getting some progress on the most stressful issue can be really helpful.
5. Call on the team to create success by picking low-hanging fruit… If your team is trying to pick an issue to solve, look at the easy ones first. It may be that an early experience of success will give your team the energy to solve a more difficult issue next.

Improving your team performance doesn’t have to be a complex project. For more on these and other team routines that create success and clear the “bad mood” of your team, learn about Intentional Teams, our signature methodology that has helped many organizations improve their team performance.

Each month, in our newsletter we provide actionable tips you can try at your next team meeting. Join today and start the journey to  increase your team’s performance. Click here: http://bit.ly/BTSjoin