If meetings feel like a loop of repeated conversations with little follow-through, it’s time to shift the mindset. Meetings should be where decisions are made and agreements are clarified, never simply a space to share updates (though connection time is crucial - but that's a different type of meeting). The key is to become more deliberate and transparent about each meeting's outcomes.

Use a Capture Canvas to track and share four things each meeting:

- Decisions made

- Actions agreed

- Heads up for next week

- Car parked for next time

Do this during the meeting in a shared doc that everyone can see and edit (or in the comments - wherever makes most sense).

This simple shared canvas eliminates ambiguity, reduces repetition, and ensures clear accountability after every session.

It’s easy for you to become a bottleneck especially when every decision, update or escalation lands on your desk - and it does your stress levels no good either!

The shift here is to stop driving everything forward yourself and instead focus on enabling others to lead and the way you meet and collaborate is the perfect way to model this. 

One obvious option is to rotate the design and leadership of one recurring team meeting. Choose a meeting that would benefit from shared ownership, provide each person with a clear brief on the meeting’s purpose and then step back. Let them run it in a way that works for the team - even if it's not quite the way you would have run it.

It's a slight misconception that by focusing on outcomes and actions, meetings will become more 'dry' or functional. 

The mindset shift here is to recognise that building relationships isn’t separate from performance - it directly supports it.

Trust makes collaboration faster, smoother, and more resilient and transparency and progress is part of building trust. Trust and progress go hand in hand.

If you want to deepen trust outside of this loop action, the route is to create low-effort, regular moments that let personality and connection come through in an unforced way.

One simple technique is to introduce a team podcast or an team newsletter.

It doesn’t need to be fancy or clever and could be as simple as a 8-minute podcast where in each episode, colleagues talk about their work or answer non-intrusive questions about their wider world. 

Or it could be a social newsletter ("Team X Goss" <--- nothing that takes itself too seriously!) that shares snippets, shout-outs or behind-the-scenes moments, can go a long way.

These lightweight formats help people get to know each other beyond the task list, reinforcing empathy and strengthening the team’s shared identity and surface otherwise hidden links and commonalities between people.