Here is the top 10+ 1 ideas on how to effectively run your quarterly meetings. This is based on the work for the past 5 years with one particular leadership team, who have successfully held powerful and action-oriented quarterly strategic planning/actions/accountability sessions.

I lead a team of five people in an IT company. I consistently seem to butt my head against the same thing. We make plans, decide who’s going to do what, but then consistently fall short – miss deadlines a bit here or there. The result is that we seem to keep lowering the bar, ever so slightly. What can I do to increase the accountability on our team?

It drives me crazy that people on my team seem to have their eye on completely different goals. We do not seem to be dancing to the beat of the same drum, or heading in the same direction at all. Our team seems totally dysfunctional as a result. What can I do to fix this?

I can’t believe how often I leave a meeting thinking that someone is going to do something, only to have them leave the same meeting thinking they are doing something else, or that someone else is doing it altogether on a completely different date. Why is getting clear commitments so challenging and what can I do to fix it?

I’m working on a tough project with the team I lead. Everyone seems to agree with what I propose during our weekly meetings but the other day I heard a few team members in the staff room criticizing everything I’d suggested during our meeting only an hour earlier, though they didn’t say anything at the time

I don’t think our team has a very good level of trust and I’m not sure what to do about it. Nobody seems to come clean or be really honest with each other, nobody really says what they’re thinking or brings up the real issues, and nobody seems to really commit or to be prepared to hold each other accountable. How do you recommend building a stronger team?