MEL #010 | The 5D Method: How To Create Meetings That Matter and Conversations That Count with Dr. Angelique Adams

ADAMS:

Be honest, when you see a staff meeting on your calendar, do you get excited or do you brace yourself for another round of mind-numbing status updates? Don’t worry, I already know the answer.

Too many staff meetings feel like time drains instead of leadership tools. But what if your meetings actually inspired your team, sharpened decision-making, and even helped develop future leaders? That’s where the 5D method comes in, a simple but powerful way to turn your staff meetings into conversations that people actually want to be a part of.

In today’s edition of the Mastering Engineering Leadership Tools and Tips series, I’m going to break down the five key presentations that will make your staff meetings more strategic, engaging, and worth every minute.

So for each D of the 5D method, I’ll give you a brief description. I’ll tell you who delivers the content. I’ll tell you exactly what should be in the presentation, why it’s important, and how to obtain it. In some cases, you might make that presentation.

It could also be something that you invite someone else to present on your behalf, or you may go out and find resources or purchase a book or hire someone to come and speak. So let’s dive in.

Number one is the demystify presentation. A leadership update. Who delivers this content? You do. What is it? It’s a summary of your personal priorities, highlights of what you’ve been working on, and an analysis on a key decision or strategy that the organization has recently taken. Your analysis should include the context, the decision-making rationale, the decision-makers, and the outcome. Why is this important? This presentation satisfies the curiosity of those who are interested in serving at leadership levels. It answers the question, what do senior leaders do anyway? And it also provides your team with some organizational awareness by helping them understand the rationale behind decisions and who the influential people are.

The demystify meeting demonstrates that you are a leader who cares about transparency. When you let people in your organization know how things are working, they instantly improves your credibility and reduces their skepticism for decisions that are made. Oftentimes, in particular in technical organizations, when decisions are made, people immediately become skeptical because they just assume that people are doing things for irrational reasons because they can’t follow the logic. But the reason they can’t follow the logic is because they don’t have access to all of the information. And so to them, it seems like a dumb decision, but in reality, it makes a lot of sense to the people who have all of the information. And so when you can help illuminate that and show behind the scenes what was actually going on, it can really help to lower the level of skepticism. It also…

helps people make better decisions moving forward. Oftentimes, people who feel stuck inside the organization, is because they can’t seem to navigate the system, if you will. And the system is, in fact, these items that I’m telling you to talk about, the decisions, the rationale, and the influencers. And so when you can help people to better understand how all of that works, they then become empowered to use that information.

to make better decisions, to make better recommendations, and then the entire organization, their level of effectiveness increases. this is also a really important meeting for people who might be new to the organization or for people who might be leading people with more experience and expertise than they have. And this is often the case for new leaders or emerging leaders. And the reason this is is because this is expertise that you have.

Your expertise may no longer be in the subject matter area. But now you have expertise in the organizational side of things. And when you share that, that one demonstrates your expertise, but not in a sort of braggy way about I know this and you don’t, but in a way that says, I know this and I want you to know it too, so that you can be more effective. So that immediately increases your credibility and your relationship with the people that are working with you.

Number one is the demystify presentation.

Number two is the development presentation.

The development presentation is a presentation given by junior staff. So who does this? A person on your team who’s more junior than your direct report, somebody you may not typically see, but who is an up and comer. And what they will present is a briefing on a new initiative or a highlight of an accomplishment.

Why is this meeting important? This gives you as the leader visibility into your talent pipeline. You get more access to people who are up and comers. Second, it gives you an assessment on how well your direct reports are doing at coaching staff. set the expectation that they’re going to make sure that this junior person is successful. So that gives you a sense of, are they…

One, coaching them not only to present in a briefing like this, but even coaching them on ways to be thinking about whatever it is they’re working on and how they answer questions and their overall perspectives. And the third, and maybe even the most important thing, is this gives the person who’s invited a huge acknowledgement. This is a great employee engagement opportunity, and it is free. Allowing somebody further down in the organization to actually be in front of senior leaders is a huge boost, a huge kudos, and a very easy and cheap and effective way to do that. So how do you actually get this content? You ask your direct reports to nominate high potential junior staff to give your team a briefing. And then again, you need to make sure that your direct report is ready to provide adequate coaching, because this whole thing can backfire on you if that person who is invited to speak, that junior person actually crashes and burns because they didn’t have adequate coaching. So make sure that they

are confident and well-prepared and can do a good job, and that will reinforce this development aspect of things. So number two is the development presentation.

Number three is the dismantle silos presentation. So this is where you invite people inside your organization who are your peers, but are in different departments. So what they will do is they will provide a briefing on their organization. Topics include strategic priorities, and also any insights into how best to work with them and their team can be really helpful. Why is this important? So this will again increase organizational awareness inside your team. It will help them to understand what others are working on and how to work best with them. It also signals camaraderie and cohesion at higher levels in the organization.

There are inevitable friction points between different departments in an organization. They can be sort of built in based on functions. So in my case, I often worked inside the research and development team, and we would work with business development. And there would be this friction point about, who should be talking to customers to learn about their needs and insights? Is it better to have somebody on the business development team, or is it better to have somebody in the research team.

So that was just sort of, there was always this friction and it was just the nature of the way that the organization worked. Then there can be other friction points based on personalities. That just naturally happens when you have different people working together. So when you invite your peer from that department where there might be a friction point, you are sending a very powerful signal that says, hey, we work together. And so you need to figure out how to work together too.

And then the other thing it does is it builds what I like to call professional empathy. And what I mean by that is it builds this better understanding of the challenges and the pressures that other parts of the organization are under. And so you can sometimes get into a situation, for example, we’ll use HR as an example, where you have the technical team, they’re under all this pressure to really push a project, to make it go through, and they need to hire somebody. And so.

They’re getting all this pressure from higher levels in the organization. You have to hire someone, you have to hire someone. And then they go to hire, they go to HR for help with hiring with someone. And HR says, okay, well, here’s our process. Here’s the paperwork you got to fill out. And now the technical team now feels like HR just doesn’t get it. Like they are just dragging us down. They’re slowing us down. And there’s this sense of frustration. But what they don’t know is that HR was getting a separate set of mandates from the very same leadership team, causing them to, for example, put systems in place, potentially slow things down to reduce turnover or reduce rejection rates of hiring or any other set of potential metrics. And so what appeared to one side of the organization as HR not caring, not being on board with this really important initiative, was in fact, HR just executing on their own set of priorities and mandates. And when you can get those two parts of the organization to sit down together and understand better where each other are coming from, then you get this professional empathy. You get more smoothly working together than you get, for example, the technical team maybe giving a more advanced notice to HR that they’re needing to hire, maybe filling out some of the you know, paperwork or some of the process steps in advance or other things like that. once you can get these two sides of the organization talking together in a real way, they will come up with their own creative solutions to work together better. But you as the leader need to facilitate that conversation. And so that is why you have the Dismantle Silos meeting. 

Now, how do you get this meeting to happen?

Identify candidates. You can brainstorm with your team. Again, I really like to start with ones where there’s friction points, but you don’t have to do that. Could just be some, they, maybe part of your team has heard about a new initiative, for example, in IT and they just want to learn more about it. That’s another reason to have these meetings. But just brainstorm who you want to invite and then just invite your peer to the meeting. And so your invitation could look something like, hey, I’d like my staff to get a better understanding of how your department functions.

Would you be willing to give a 30-minute presentation to my team? And topics that know they’d be interested in include your organizational chart and strategic initiatives you’re working on, any processes that we need to be aware of in order to help you all work more effectively. Those are all things that we would love to hear about. Just simply ask that and find a time to embed it into one of your staff meetings or if you have to have an ad hoc meeting about that.

And that’s really it. One thing to note about this is just be ready to reciprocate. I know that when I started to do these types of meetings, the people that I invited always found them useful because my team would end up asking some questions that they found really helpful or really useful or really interesting. so that would inevitably, I think 100 % of the time, prompt them to then invite me to come and talk to their team. So just be prepared for that kind of reciprocation, which is absolutely a good thing.

Number four is the discovery meeting. So these is updates from stakeholders who are outside of your organization. Who’s gonna do this? Someone who has an essential implication for your function, but is not inside your actual firm. So these could be customers, suppliers, community partners. And what they’re gonna do is they’re gonna deliver a briefing very similar to the one I just mentioned.

Briefing about their organization, their strategic priorities, any insights that they think could be useful for us to know, and then how best to interact with your team. Why is this important? This is going to broaden your team’s professional network because they’re going to start to make their own set of peers in these different organizations. So you have your peers and then as you go down in your organization, they can start building relationships with their peers.

Oftentimes you’re making decisions based on your own internal assumptions. Now you’re getting insights external to you, but still really important to how you work. And that’s going to improve your decision-making capabilities. How do you get this content? Very similar to the way we just, the presentation we just did. You’re going to invite them. You’re going to brainstorm with your team about who they’d like to hear from. And then you’re just going to invite them to do that 

very same sort of invitation kind of script. I’d like my staff to get a better understanding of your priorities. Would you be willing to give a 30-minute presentation? Things that I know they’d be interested in. Your org chart, strategic initiatives, what you’re working on. Any insights you think we should know and the best way to engage with your team. Again, very simple invitation. You put it on the calendar and you go from there. Again, be ready to reciprocate very often.

I would be asked to do something very similar. And in most cases, these ended up becoming regular meetings where at least every six months, they would invite me and we would do this sort of information to share.

So that’s number four, the discovery meeting.

Number five is depth. Depth is third-party expert insights. So who does this? Someone outside of your team, it could be inside your organization, but generally it’s not. These are third party who have expertise in an area of interest. So when I say area of interest, you can think as broadly as you want, a couple of topics you might consider. So these are like emerging trends, emerging industry trends, they can be emerging technology trends, they could be emerging macro trends that can be affecting your team, they can also be in the areas of like professional development, so things like time management, things like public speaking, things like emotional intelligence, those sorts of topics as well often work well for this depth presentation. So how are you gonna get this content?

You’re gonna identify the topic. This is a great topic to brainstorm with your team about their interests. Then find the content. So in this case, the content may need to come from different sources. You may know an expert in the area that you can just invite, which is great. You may need to hire an expert in the area and invite them in. Or you might get a book that you decide to all read together or an article or a podcast or a YouTube video. There are many different ways to get this content once you’ve decided on what you want to actually have this discussion about. And of course, you can absolutely delegate this task of finding this content. And then you just make sure that your team gets the material and then set some expectations. Give your staff the content either in advance to be consumed on their own or during the meeting.

And then ask him to prepare some notes on how the content impacts them personally or professionally. So a specific example, one that I used frequently because I would been in the innovation space. So there’s actually a white paper by Boston Consulting Group about different innovation strategies. And it’s pretty old. It’s from 2017. But I’ll put it in the show notes because I still think it’s useful. And it talks about different innovation models. And so what I would do is I’d say, read this and then reflect on which of these innovation models you and your team are using and let’s discuss the pros and cons of those innovation models and then decide if we want to share any best practices or maybe even make some adjustments in our various innovation models. So give them the white paper. If I recall, it’s certainly less than 10 pages, I think. Give them the white paper, say, okay, in two months we’re going to talk about this. And then they would each come back and give five, 10 minute briefing on the topic.

And it would spark this really great discussion. It required them to do some reflection. Oftentimes they brought in their own direct reports so they would engage with them. And then now we’re having a conversation in a staff meeting, not just about updates, but on a much more strategic topic that we can now relate to each other in a very different way. And that’s really the key benefit of doing something like this is that it allows your team members to relate to each other in way that they normally don’t, where they’re not just talking very tactically about what’s happening in the next five or 10 days or five or 10 weeks. We’re talking now much more strategically about whatever topic it is.

All right, so that is presentation number five, the depth presentation.

So the way you can think about implementing this is just starting with one.

embedding it into one monthly staff meeting. And so maybe only once a quarter you add something like this. However frequently you decide to do it, even just once a quarter is gonna have a pretty big impact.

We broke down the 5D method, a simple but powerful way to transform your staff meetings from dull to dynamic. So instead of wasting time on endless status updates, this approach ensures that every meeting is engaging, insightful, and action-driven.

Number one, the demystify presentation. This is the leadership lens you are presenting. You’re talking about what you’re working on as the leader, but you’re also taking a decision and dissecting it and helping your team understand the context, the decision-making rationale, the outcomes, and who the influencers were. 

Number two is the development meeting. Rising voices, this is where junior staff get a platform to share insights, develop their leadership skills, contribute to team discussions. 

Number three, dismantle silos. This is insight insights. Peer-to-peer knowledge sharing fosters collaboration professional empathy, cross-learning, smarter decision-making. 

Number four is discovery. These are industry and stakeholder signals. These are external people coming in, like customers, suppliers, or partners, coming in, bringing real-world insights and perspectives to help inform your internal strategies. 

And number five is the depth presentation. This is third-party experts, thought leaders, outside experts, whether they be human or their written form and this will allow you to share and get fresh perspectives on trends, best practices, and innovation.

Okay, now it is your turn. Pick one of these and integrate it into your next staff meeting. And I want you to notice how the energy shifts, how engagement increases, and how your meetings start driving real impact instead of just filling time.