Running effective meetings

Including actionable tips

[substantially-expanded version of LinkedIn post, with actionable tips that you can use]

🕒 Spending too much time in bad meetings? Here are some tips for making meetings more effective and productive.

I recently discussed with a founder how to make their meetings more productive. They felt that they were not getting enough value out of all the time they were spending in meetings.

I spent way too much time in unproductive meetings, before I got to a place where I could design most of my meetings and I figured out how to improve them. If you are a founder or leader who can design your own meetings, then this post aims to give you ideas for improving them.

I’ve learnt that effective meetings need intentional design 🎨 and continual iteration ♻️, and they don’t spontaneously come into being. There’s a lot that you can (and need to) do, to improve your meetings. While the list below is long-ish, trust me that you can build the muscle memory faster than you think.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of all the things that can be done to improve meetings; instead, these are just the things that had become second-nature for me.

Philosophy (and biases)

I’ll first explicitly spell out my philosophy and biases, so that you better understand why I take the approach I do.

My starting point is that time is valuable and we need to respect people’s time. And all else being equal, async time (each person reading on their own) is less expensive than sync time (everybody present at the same time).

Hence meetings are expensive (in terms of time), and they should be as efficient as possible. Most importantly, meetings should serve attendees, and not the other way around.

So while meetings are an unavoidable evil, they can and should be kept to the bare minimum. A notable exception is gatherings for culture and team engagement purposes; those are usually great investments of time if properly designed, especially in a hybrid or remote setup.

Designing the entire system of meetings

In a way, you can think of all your meetings as your team’s operating system (although you should also make sure that meeting frequencies don’t end up dictating execution velocity; again, meetings should serve people, not the other way around).

So here are some principles and tips for intentionally designing your meetings as a system:

• Avoid unnecessary meetings in the first place! For example, updates can be easily (and usually better) shared using async methods like Slack and Google Docs. Go through your calendar to eliminate meetings that can and should be turned into async processes. So if you have a meeting dedicated to updates, you can ask everyone to write their updates in a Google Doc, and then either eliminate the meeting entirely or at least shorten it radically.

• Ensure each meeting has a clear objective. Design the meeting to achieve that objective in the shortest time and with the fewest attendees possible. Common objectives are to make decisions, do retros and share learnings, announce important updates with a Q&A, discuss blockers, etc.

• Avoid or minimise overlapping agendas/objectives across different meetings. If you encounter the same content from the same person in more than one meeting, then you may face this problem. It is most likely to arise when there are common attendees in different meetings.

• Schedule recurrent meetings at the right frequency for its objective. This can free up a lot of your calendar, especially from 1:1s. 1:1s do not have to be weekly — you can do them every 2 weeks or even every month, if it makes sense and especially if you are getting updates elsewhere (as you should)! And you can always make sure the other person knows, that you can always do an ad hoc 1:1.

• Periodically review your meeting calendar as a whole. Do this once you have done the above. Sometimes you may identify more opportunities for optimisation. Other times you may identify gaps which require additional meetings (yes, shock and horror). Either way, as your business grows or evolves, new needs and gaps may arise or previous needs disappear. Periodic reviews are also useful for fighting a natural organisational tendency to add meetings and processes over time, even if nothing has fundamentally changed.

Designing each individual meeting

Here are some principles and tips for running each meeting more effectively and productively:

• Consider mandating a pre-read, especially for decision-making meetings. This has 2 benefits. Firstly, it forces the person/team asking for a decision to really think through and crystallise the issue and pros/cons, which will improve the decision-making process. Secondly, when the meeting starts, all meeting attendees would already be up to speed, saving valuable sync time. To reap these benefits, you may need to enforce a norm around pre-reads being delivered sufficiently in advance, or implement an Amazon-style reading time when the meeting starts.

• Start each meeting by explicitly asking “What do we want to achieve in this meeting?” Do this even if the pre-read had stated it, to keep people focused. It may also expose misalignment on meeting objectives, which is better to surface upfront. Then remind people of the desired goal if/when time starts running short.

• Ensure that every decision and action item answers this question: WHO does WHAT by WHEN? This ensures clear next steps and accountability for delivery. And don’t let meeting schedules determine execution velocity; for example, if someone says “we will update at the next meeting”, ask them to update outside of the meeting at the earliest possible time — after all, an update can also be done by Slack, email, etc.

• Be intentional on meeting attendees, and their roles. To truly respect people’s time, you should avoid inviting people to unnecessary meetings. This means that the attendee list should be kept as small as possible, with each attendee having a clearly defined role. Smaller meetings tend to be more productive, so resist the tendency to “be inclusive” and invite people to meetings unnecessarily; if people associate meeting attendance with social status, you have a deeper cultural issue to address.

• Monitor “share of voice”. We’ve all been in meetings where someone dominates the conversation, to an unproductive extent. Be mindful of who’s talking too much and who’s not talking. Do prompt quiet attendees to speak up, by asking “Hey XXX, what do you think?” I’ve seen this result in powerful contributions.

• When making decisions, explicitly ask “Who is the decision-maker?” The most senior attendee may not be the decision-maker for a given issue (for example if they had empowered someone else to own it), in which case they could ask “What is my role here?” These questions serve to clarify attendees’ roles, which is especially important when the most senior attendee is not the decision-maker.

• When making decisions, the most senior attendees should speak last. Assuming the goal is to have the most robust discussion possible, then it is important to get attendees’ honest opinions. Daniel Kahneman’s book Noise provides a lot of insights on this question, one of which is that powerful people’s views will sway the discussion. If the most senior attendees speak early, people with opposing views may choose not to speak (a signal of weak psychological safety), and those with neutral views will tend to support those views. Of course, this insight can also be abused if you have a very strong preference…

• Do not entertain the “meeting after the meeting”. One common dysfunction is for people to either not speak up or not advocate passionately during the meeting, but then try to lobby the decision-maker for a different outcome after the meeting has ended and a decision made. This wastes time, and is also unfair to the other attendees. So it was very well-known that I would not entertain any “meeting after the meeting”, unless there was some new information or development.

• Ensure someone takes notes, which are sent quickly post-meeting. This ensures that there is no ambiguity or confusion about what was discussed and decided. Speed is important; even if the note-taker needs time to generate longer notes to capture important points of discussion for future retros, they can always first send a short summary of what was decided and required action items (with WHO will do WHAT by WHEN).

• Ensure someone keeps time. Many people have back-to-back meetings, so it’s important to keep time. I would frequently just keep time myself and highlight the remaining time well in advance; telling the meeting that there are 20 minutes left in a 60-minute meeting could still enable a decision to be made, but maybe not if there are only 5 minutes left.

Please do share with me what you do to improve your meetings!