Poorly run meetings are a slow, soul crushing drain on my mental reserves. Especially in a world of remote work, sitting on a zoom meeting without understanding why I’m there and having nothing of value to add to the meeting sucks my will to work incredibly fast. The worst part of being a part of a bad meeting is that it’s so simple to not have a bad meeting. As long as you take time to focus on a few key steps, any meeting can provide value to everyone involved. Here are seven tricks I use to manage meetings with real value.
1) Determine if it’s really needed
I have to start here because it is one of my biggest pet peeves to have a meeting that could have been resolved with an email. Meetings can quickly devolve into a time suck for everyone attending, and as everyone knows, time is money. The quickest way to drive the people you work with insane is to have a meeting without a clear required outcome.
In my experience, the most prominent culprit of the meeting time suck is the status meeting. It’s typically marked on the calendar as a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly meeting. The agenda is to generically “give an update” on anything that’s been done recently. Worst of all, the attendees on the invite is anyone remotely associated with the project. Because it’s a regularly scheduled call, it’s rarely well planned for. People off the cuff talk about what they’ve been working on, and somehow we drag it out for an hour every time. If status reports are needed, get the required information, consolidate it into an email, and move on to actual work.
2) Have a well defined goal
Once you come to the conclusion that a meeting is unavoidable, you need to ensure that the time spent will be valuable. In contrast to a meandering meeting that seems to jump from random topic to random topic, a successful meeting has not only a generic idea of a goal, it has a well defined target of what should be accomplished during the meeting. Fox example, by the end of the discussion:
- we will have well defined requirements for this particular feature that we aren’t clear about
- we will have a list of brainstormed ideas to take to our manager for a topic requested
- person A will have made a decision between option A and option B
- Group presentation will be reviewed and questions answered in a timely manner to send to client
Again, verify that these goals are most efficiently answered through a meeting. That last goal, reviewing and completing a presentation, can often be managed through emails, but sometimes it’s useful to have a meeting to quickly brainstorm and get everyone’s signoff at one time.
3) Only invite the needed people
This can’t be overstated enough. Time is valuable. The last thing you want to do is to waste someone’s time with a meeting where they get zero value. As someone who wants to run meetings where people perceive value, make sure you don’t waste their time.
- Don’t invite an entire team when a few members will suffice
- If adding people who might “like to know what’s going on”, add them as optional attendees
- Verify with your manager if they want to attend your meetings
My primary goal is to have a meeting with as few people as possible to still achieve my desired outcome. Remember, less is more. Bonus benefit to smaller group meetings – it’s easier to schedule because you have less calendars to work around.
4) Send an agenda in advance
Once you know what your meeting will be about and who you’d like to attend, make sure to send an invite with that information. The most frustrating invites I’ve received in my career have included a subject, a phone number, and nothing else. If I have to message you to ask you why I’m invited to a meeting, you’re already starting off on the wrong foot. The good news is that it’s super simple to create a template to follow for your calendar invite:
- Create signature that includes a block for everything you should have in your invite. I have an Outlook “Calendar Invite” signature that includes a section for Background, Required Attendees, Optional Attendees, Required Pre-work, and Target Outcome.
- Whenever I create a meeting, I go to Insert –> Signature –> Calendar Invite, and then my form is ready to fill out with all information I feel is necessary to run a meeting.
5) Stay on topic
This is an easy trap to fall into, especially in larger meetings. Work is complex, and many projects run close to each other, so it’s important to stay on topic and prevent getting sidetracked by related topics. I’ve been in countless meetings where one sentence starts to go down a rabbit hole in the wrong direction. This is where managing meetings is more of an art than a science. Going briefly down a side pathway usually isn’t detrimental. Getting sucked into a 10 minute discussion that has nothing to do with the end goal typically does have a negative impact. When I feel my meeting going down a dark path, I will use one of the follow phrases to get us back on track:
- Thanks for bringing that up, and I feel there’s more to discuss on the topic, but I don’t want to get too sidetracked.
- We seem to be getting off track here.
- How does this relate to (end goal)?
With all of these phrases, I also add, “Can we take that away for a separate meeting?”. It’s important to not ignore the discussion, but it needs to happen at an appropriate time with the appropriate audience.
6) Take notes and send to attendees
How this step always gets overlooked baffles me. We have so many meetings throughout the day, we rarely remember what was discussed or decided. Especially when a decision maker is in your meetings, it’s useful to send a follow up email covering the following”
- Who attended
- What was discussed
- Decisions Made
- Follow up tasks and assignments
Again, I use a saved Outlook signature with the above fields under “Meeting Summary”, and I go into my Outlook invite to Reply All to the meeting invite. This ensures that everyone got the same information and decisions, and it gives an opportunity to respond if something noted wasn’t clear or incorrect. As an added bonus, anyone on the invite who was unable to attend gets a summary of what happened without them, and they are made aware of any tasks that may have been assigned to them.
Bonus tip: Because this step is so rare, nearly every time I’ve joined a new team and started sending follow-up notes, I usually received a personal e-mail from one of my senior managers thanking me for taking good notes. It’s an extra step that does get noticed by important people in your career.
7) Follow up on the outcome tasks required by the meeting
I feel like this step will be expanded into its own topic at some point because following up on the things you say you will do is fundamental to being successful in your career. The sad thing is that people are so busy that often times they only do their follow up tasks when reminded. This leads to two very good opportunities:
- Do your follow-up tasks without being reminded. People will come to see you as someone who gets things done.
- Follow-up on tasks other people were assigned if not done within the assigned timeframe. Too many follow-up meetings have been completely wasted simply by one person saying, “Oh yeah, I didn’t get a chance to do that, let me get right on it”.
When you get your stuff done, and you remind other people to get their stuff done, suddenly your project blockers fall by the wayside and your life gets much simpler. Your managers will see you as dependable.
Do Meetings right
Time is the one resource we aren’t making any more of, and time wasted in a meeting actually feels like it’s moving slower. Successful meetings are an easy win for anyone given a few simple tricks. It’s amazing how much praise comes from senior management when they feel their time isn’t wasted.
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