The importance of rhythm

When people ask me, where they should start as new leaders or after getting a new team, my answer is always: Set up the rhythm. I am not talking about some sort of musical team building (although I have tried that and that was fun!). I am talking about a predictable meeting routine so that everyone within the team knows when they are meeting and what they can expect.

Humans are routine-junkies

It may sound strange. How can something like rhythm be so crucial? What about vision, strategy, growth? That will come. People need to be active and energetic to be able to use their brains for the most complex tasks, such as generating ideas or making sense of visions and strategies. People find that hard when their thoughts are diluted by anxiety: “when will I have an opportunity to hear about my personal goals?”, “When can we plan what we do as a team?”, “When do we need to update on the status of this project?”. Do you want these thoughts to dominate during an ideation workshop? Of course not: you want novel ideas!

Rhythm and routines have consistently been found to be important for children. It seems people do not grow out of this. Doctors are using it in clinical practice. Predictability of the rhythm reduces anxiety and helps to adapt to change. Perhaps this was a bit less relevant before when the nature of the work was more repetitive and foreseeable. For many of us today, the work is constantly changing. We are expected to be adaptable, welcome change, and deliver the best results. Even though that goes against our nature. That is precisely why rhythm is so important. It compensates for the lack of structure and predictability in our lives.

Scrum event ecosystem

Ok, so rhythm is important. What is the optimal setup?

Perhaps the most well-known is the one offered by the Scrum framework. Scrum is of course much more than just events. Nonetheless, it was Scrum that introduced me to the concept of cadence where every event has thought-through purpose and dependency on each other. On top of that, the ecosystem of events has a clear relationship with the core pillars: transparency, inspection, and adaptation. I had an aha-moment once I understood it. The brilliance lies in the simplicity of the setup. It consists of just four types of events (if we do not count refinement, which as a clarification even that can be organized more ad hoc, once there is a need):

• Sprint planning: as the name states, it transforms the feedback and ideas received previously to a concrete plan for the upcoming iteration. It is transparency (for the team) providing meeting and also promotes adaptation: the plan is adjusted to the latest situation and feedback.
• Daily scrum: very short daily status update meeting. Once again, it forces transparency and inspection by making it difficult ot hide barriers and lack of progress. I personally really like the dedication to make it short. Nobody likes long status meetings. Nobody.
• Review: this one is absolutely fantastic and promotes all of the scrum pillars. By having this one planned in the calendar, every member of the team is set on their toes to deliver or be very open on the issues. The team is forced to show and tell at least something. I cannot imagine anything more motivating than this. It is like defending thesis every second week!
• Retrospective: more internally oriented meeting, which main purpose is to remind the team that they can always do better.

Find what fits your team

Unfortunately, Scrum is not for everybody. In fact, for some teams, it will be a total waste of time. In my view, scrum is great when the team is working on very interrelated tasks that are complex, unpredictable, change a lot, and depend on the stakeholders’ thoughts and opinions, rather than e.g. clear regulations or well-defined standards. Personally, I have never been part of a team where pure scrum was a good fit (however, I worked closely and coached such teams and saw how great it CAN be when done well).

I have analyzed various alternatives and suggest using the MENU principle. Just like in a restaurant, pick and choose to set up a nice balance of a snack, starter, main course, and dessert. Perhaps some wine pairing? It all depends on the needs (hunger and appetite) of your team.

1-1 meetings

• 1-1 with each of your team members. I think it is a must. Everybody needs some personal attention, possibility to share private, sometimes awkward information and get feedback. 1-1 is an enormous topic in itself, so I will not go into more detail than that it is recommended to schedule them every week or bi-weekly for at least 30 min, preferably longer.
• Networking 1-1. For some jobs, netwroking is crucial. I believe that leader’s job belongs to this category. I suggest making networking a habit and scheduling regular time for it at least once a month.
• 1-1 with your leader. As mentioned above, everybody needs personal attention. Plan for it, book it in the calendar and fight for it to happen. Busy top leaders tend to have a lot of meetings and tend to cancel or postpone a lot due to changing priorities and burning fires. But this one is important for you. Make sure you find a way for it to happen.

Team meetings

• Info and Q&A. Team rarely has direct access to transparent information of what is going on in the organisation. They need regular tactical updates, incl. what other teams are doing, what changes are upcoming (there is always something), all kinds of administrative things, new processes or procedures etc. Besides that, the team needs to have a forum to share successes and failures. From what I have seen, these meetings depend on the amount of information share. My suggestion is go with “more often but shorter” (e.g. 30 min bi-weekly) rather than 1,5 hr every 6 weeks.
• Status meetings. These depend on how interrelated your team’s tasks are with each other. If they work on the same product or rely on each other, then daily, even two times a day catch up is needed. If everybody works on different projects, perhaps monthly meeting updating each other on core deliveries and potential news is sufficient.
• Feedback and reflection workshops. My suggestion is to run these quarterly or bi-annually. The purpose of these workshops is to understand what is the general feeling in the team and compare it to where you want to be. These workshops are typically data-driven, meaning that they are normally preceded by a survey, interviews, external feedback or some other basis for the discussion.
• Strategy meeting. Even the most operational team need to understand and make sense on how does their work relate to the big picture. What is the purpose of what they do? Do they need to adjust the angle slightly to go in line with the whole organization? Candence of such meeting depend on how mature and well understood the strategy is. If the whole team already fully lives it, perhaps an annual refresher is good? If strategy is new, unclear or considered too fluffy, focus on it bi-monthly until that no longer gives value.

Leadership team

• Leadership team meetings. My guess is that these are already happening. Leaders’ team must absolutely talk together. Share and discuss problems, ideas, feedback. Have some conflicts. Have some internal jokes. If this is not part of the rhythm, it is like losing heartbeat. Make sure it happens.
• Planning. Depending on the organizational planning cycle, you will need to be ready with an aligned version of what is going to happen. The purpose of this meeting is to ensure the whole leadership team has the same understanding of what you want to achieve and who will do what. This takes time. It requires deep thinking and thus cannot be done during the more tactical catch-ups. In my view, it requires minimum 2hr quarterly, potentially much longer if the cycles in the organisation are 6 or more months.

Project meetings

Naturally, if the people are involved in cross-team projects, each of these will have a separate cadence. Prepare to think about how to integrate it into the existing setup and avoid overbooking.

My approach to this is that the more team members work on separate projects, the more they are actually part of the project team, rather than “home team”. This means, shorter, lighter, less often catch-ups, and focus on knowledge sharing rather than status updates.

Team knows best

Ultimately, the above lists are meant for the beginning. To have some starting point, start the experimentation and see what works. Hence the feedback and reflection workshops: use them to see if the rhythm works. If it contributes positively to the melody. If not – fail fast. Stop what is not working, change it, add new things.

The team – collectively – knows best. It might not be visible at first, it might need some facilitation to come to the surface. It might require many experiments. My suggestion is to just have fun with it!

What is your experience? What worked and what did not?