Sherpany

Have you ever come out of a leadership meeting and felt frustrated? Or that you have just wasted your time? Odds are: you probably have. Many executives, directors, and administrators struggle with how to make their meetings more effective . Luckily, there are three things you can do before the next meeting to make sure that this never happens again.

I’m sure many of you reading this have been in a similar situation. You’ve walked out of a leadership meeting, and you were left feeling frustrated or that your time was wasted. Many executives, directors, and administrators struggle with this, and I want to share with you a simple solution that has helped me and my colleagues many times. It’s called the Sherpany.

The CEO and founder of a small company called Sherpany, Robert Sollars, started leading team meetings by asking an interesting question: “What did we just do?” So far, he’s led over 1000 meetings with this question, and he’s found that–of the people who have responded to his question–87% of them have been able to give the correct answer. This highlights a significant insight about the kinds of questions we ask and why we ask them.

Sollars’ experiment points to the power of asking questions which encourage us to consider what we’re doing in our day-to-day lives. In his leadership meetings, Sollars would first take a moment to ask participants what they had just done so that they could reflect on it and determine whether it was worthwhile or not. The questions he asked were simple, but the answers were complex—and they got his audience thinking about their work in a way they might not have otherwise.