How to use Roles to run effective Meetings
It's always the same people who are taking over responsibilities within a Meeting: the Team lead ends up facilitating although she would like to focus on sharing complex updates and the intern has to document as nobody else steps in… Does this sound familiar?
A trap in many Meetings is the missing assignment of clear roles and responsibilities within a Meeting: Either nobody really takes over the Facilitation of the Meeting or the same people (often the ones in a specific position in the hierarchy or with a strong inner drive to be of service) end up taking over the Facilitation or Documentation Role. This can be quite inefficient and draining for all Meeting participants.
An easy to implement tool is the introduction of Meeting Roles to create clarity around who is doing what within a Meeting.
To make sure, it is not always the same people who are „accidentally“ taking over the same responsibilities again and again, it helps to work with Roles: Roles are not a person, but a description of a purpose and responsibilities. A person can take over a role and the connected responsibilities, Roles can be shard by multiple people and one person can take over more than one role.
Therefore, Meetings are a good way for a Team to start practicing distributing responsibilities by using Roles. As a side effect this creates the opportunity for all Team members to learn and grow their skills by stepping into a Role that doesn’t feel so natural (yet).
To establish a playful and easy to use way to assign Roles at the beginning of each Meeting, Teams can use Shuffle Tools to figure out quickly who is taking over which Role for a Meeting.