Are your staff meetings about as exciting as watching paint dry on a wall? Are you like a “one-trick pony” that’s doing all the talking while your team members just sit there, pretending to listen? If so, it’s time to get them more involved in your meetings. Start by assigning roles for managing the meeting and then ask these same folks to lead different agenda items, holding them accountable for the overall effectiveness of their segment. Sharing this leadership responsibility will be a win-win for all. You will personally save time on meeting management and creating content while strengthening teamwork, expanding employee engagement, and developing each staff member’s professional skills.

Here’s more on how to share your leadership at staff meetings:

Assign and rotate roles. Just because you’re the company or team leader doesn’t mean you have to run every meeting. In fact, it’s to the benefit of everyone — including you — if you partition up and share the leadership role. Assigning out the jobs of minutes, developing the agenda, taking notes and other duties enables the self-development of your staff members who will now be forced to get out of their comfort zones and take on various aspects of meeting planning, management, and participation. It will take a lot of work off your plate, freeing up time for you to do more critical leadership-related tasks and responsibilities.

Put someone in charge of “fun.” From a traditional viewpoint, staff meetings aren’t usually too exciting. Particularly if they’re not productive or feel overly routine, people tend to dread them. So for every meeting, give a different team member the job of making it fun, exciting, interesting or just different. Perhaps one month, the one who is assigned decides to hold the meeting at the local coffee shop. Then next week, another person in charge gets minds moving with a teambuilding exercise, or quick game of trivia, or guest speaker.

Gather feedback. When the meeting is over, it’s important to find out how it went so you can learn what worked and what didn’t. Get input on the process and those who participated, including any presenters or speakers. Have everyone rank the meeting on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being very effective and 1 being not effective. Ask people “why” they responded the way they did and encourage them to provide solutions for improvement or change. Then whenever you can, show that you value that input by adopting the solutions they’ve suggested. Also, acknowledge what’s working and keep doing it, so you’re not messing with a good thing or unnecessarily reinventing the wheel at your next meeting.

What ideas do you have for making meetings fun?​