How to lead weekly sessions for your team

Care about your teammates' time and energy.

Introduction

At my last company, I organized our weekly learning session.

It would happen once a week.

Since we were remote, sharing knowledge wasn’t easy. The goal was to share knowledge across teams with the aim of increasing the bus factor.

It turned out pretty well. During a company retro we once had, many voiced being very happy with the learning sessions and saw it was one of the company’s strengths.

It was fun. The learning session channel we had on Slack would turn into a place where people regularly shared interesting resources or learnings.

Beginning

At the beginning, I made many mistakes:

• No Agenda

• Not recording the sessions

• Not keeping people informed

• Tried to get it prepared ad-hoc on the same day

Looking back, I feel a bit bad.

Improvement

But we learn from feedback and the mistakes we make.

After receiving feedback from my manager, I improved:

• Agenda

• Clearly inform who is presenting what

• Recording each session, updating the Agenda and sharing the session with the team

• Prepare the session a week before or cancel, letting people know a good time before the session won’t be happening

If you organize sessions for your team, do it with professionalism.

Everyone’s time is expensive.

Every cognitive effort in the organization is valuable and not cheap.

Respect your teammates by respecting their energy and time.

The last thing you want is for people to join a call and stay 5 minutes just for you to announce it’s not happening this week.

It’s annoying.

People have work to do and context-switching is more draining than we think.