The meeting test: why your team's health is on display

How healthy is your organisation?

Many leaders look first at performance data, but one of the best indicators is much simpler: sit in on a leadership meeting. The way a team communicates, challenges ideas and makes decisions will tell you almost everything you need to know about its organisational health.

In our latest OpenSource series, running great meetings, we explore why meetings are one of the most important activities leaders undertake and how designing them with intention can transform the way teams work together.

Inspired by Patrick Lencioni's work on organisational health, we've built our meeting structures around a simple principle: every meeting should have a clear purpose. One of the biggest mistakes organisations make is trying to discuss everything in a single meeting – strategy, operations, updates and administration all at once. Lencioni calls this "meeting stew", and it often leads to disengagement, confusion and poor decision-making.

At Dixons, we take a different approach. We separate meetings into four distinct types, each with its own purpose:

• Daily check-ins for alignment and scheduling.
• Weekly tactical meetings to resolve short-term operational issues.
• Topical meetings for strategic discussion and debate.
• Cycle reviews to step back, reflect and set direction for the next cycle.

Each meeting plays a different role, helping us create clarity, maintain focus and ensure the right conversations happen at the right time.

Throughout this OpenSource series, we explore each of these meeting types in more detail, sharing the structures and routines that support our work across Dixons. Whether you're leading a school, a trust or another organisation, we hope these ideas provide practical approaches you can adapt for your own teams.

Watch episode one here to discover why great meetings are the foundation of healthy organisations.