Team managers may have heard of one of Jeff Bezos’ most repeated rules: Your team should be small enough to be fed with two pizzas. Managing larger teams can result in poorer communication, slower decision-making, and other inefficiencies (eg: varying recollections of meeting outcomes).
However, keeping your team limited to a small number can be challenging or out of your control. It’s vital to have a plan in place to manage even if there are enough people to enjoy a few more pizzas than Bezos recommends.
Keep reading to learn about some best practices for managing meetings with a large number of participants and to learn about Docket, a meeting workspace tool that can help you keep your teams aligned even if a whole buffet is needed to feed everyone.
Have Interdepartmental Check-Ins
When you have a large team of people, it can be useful to first divide meetings by department. This way, each department can keep everything clear and organized without having to also remember details from all the other departments.
Once your departments have their own meetings, you can have an interdepartmental check-in every morning or every week to discuss progress and contingencies and collaborate on a larger scale. Having these check-ins ensures that you are getting all of the information that you need without being overwhelmed by unnecessary details.
Keep an Agenda
This step is especially important if you rarely have interdepartmental check-ins. Keeping a written agenda—and sharing a copy with everyone on the team—can help you stay on track in your meetings and accomplish the goals that you set out at the start.
Docket allows you to collaborate on agendas to ensure that everyone is in the loop before the meeting even begins. This helps transform meetings into goal-oriented conversations instead of meandering meet-ups with no clear purpose.
Assign Roles
As a meeting leader, it can be helpful to assign roles to team members, such as a notetaker, timekeeper, or decision-maker. This becomes much easier with a tool like Docket, as you can easily take meeting notes and then distribute them to every participant automatically.
There are also features that allow you to create action items for different team members so that tasks are never forgotten and everyone understands the plan going forward. In larger meetings, this makes it easy for different team leaders to organize their department’s responsibilities and effectively communicate with team members about tasks.
In Closing
Though in many cases it is ideal to follow the two pizza rule, there are ways that you can manage larger teams (even interdepartmentally) and still have great meetings. If you’re looking to transform your meetings and keep everything operating smoothly despite a growing team, try out Docket today.
