Leadership | Coaching the Meeting Practices

To help the team adopt defined standards with a sustainable result, PMO leaders need to implement coaching practices. Because establishing PMO standard practices is a habit change for the team, we need to apply the change management principles such as people's emotional readiness and adoption cycle. Changes also require time and energy. It's useful when we can sense the right coachable moment and give clear and easy-to-follow instructions one step at a time. The followings is an example coach process for standardizing PMO meeting procedures.​​

Step 1: Start with Meeting invitation Guideline | Book Meeting. 

• First, confirm all meetings have the correct name. A proper meeting name starts with the project name, followed by the meeting function. For example, the project name is Hummingbird, and the meeting function is a daily scrum. The meeting title should be Hummingbird Daily Scrum. The typical issues are incorrect project names and inconsistent function names. 
• Next, check if each meeting includes a meeting agenda and links to related project documents.  
• Last, verify all attendees so that they are up-to-date and are invited with a good reason. 

Step 2: Review Meeting Minutes Content Guideline | Meeting Minutes.

• All critical content elements are required and should be presented in order. However, the detailed format may vary. 
• Encourage actionable statements with a structure of who is doing what by when. 

Step 3: Practice the same day meeting minute principle.​​

• Make the clear requirement and then ask for feedback to understand the challenges.
• We would encourage the brief meeting minutes to send a minute quickly. 

Step 4: Reduce or combine meetings 

• Combine meetings when sharing the same audience and the projects are related. 
• Shorten the meeting time 
• Cancel meetings as many as until we can't run the project well without them. 

Remember that effective coaching requires a realistic but inspiring plan, the right questions to engage, and timely and actionable feedback. 

​Questions to Ask by the Coach

• Why do you have the meeting? 
• What are "the right things to do" when initiating a meeting?
• What would be the loss if someone were not invited to the meeting? 
• What should be the top messages from the meeting minutes? Is there anything your audience can get from the exisitng project documents/reports? 

​Reference 

1. YRichard E. Boyatzis,, Melvin Smith, and Ellen Van Oosten, Coaching for Change, HBR, Oct 2019
2. HBR Guide to Coaching Employees, HBR 2014