The Meetings Way

Situation

The Brainchild Collective is a Chicago-based non-profit that brings arts and entrepreneurship education to Chicago schools to help students build social-emotional skills in a holistic way. As the company grew, it was experiencing a shift in their team, and they wanted to anchor new employees in a consistent, efficient meetings flow. They particularly wanted to maximize their current 1:1s, team meetings, and program meetings, while seeking ways to help the organization and leadership team be more strategic.

Objectives

The goal of our partnership was for Ethos to provide the organization with a clear guide to meetings, including:

• Setting meeting goals
• Incorporating feedback into current structures
• Identifying opportunities to enhance their current practices of appreciation.

We also wanted to assist the team in building tools and strategies to enhance current meeting practices and offer the opportunity for every employee to take more ownership during their team and program meetings.

Ethos Approach

We first met with employees and leaders to discover what was working well and where the team saw areas that needed improvement. Using our own experiences and resources, we built a complete guide for meetings in the organization, outlining the meeting goals, agenda structures, and feedback opportunities for each type of meeting. We also built a scorecard and project status tool to help the team have clearer insights into the business and streamline the process of program updates. To allow the team to get more involved with strategy, we also outlined the structure and cadence for strategy meetings and helped them design an effective structure for their leadership meetings.

Outcomes

Even through the planning process, the team was able to refine agendas, strategize how to best use meeting time, and think about ways to improve communication across the organization. With the meeting guide in place, expectations were clarified and meeting processes codified so that the team could worry about content rather than structure, setting them up for more effective meetings with shared ownership of responsibilities in the future.

Conclusion

In our work with The Brainchild Collective, we successfully worked with the team to create a meetings process that systematized the organization’s current meetings strengths and built off that foundation to provide more structure, organization, and guidance.

Interested in leveraging Ethos to help your teams build better meetings? Reach out to [email protected] for more information on how we can transform your organization.

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