Executing Quality Meetings
Now that we’ve tackled the organizational chart for your business, we can move on to managing the org chart. The best tool for managing people in any company?
Meetings.
“A meeting is nothing less than the medium through which managerial work is performed. That means we should not be fighting their very existence, but rather using the time spent in them as efficiently as possible.” — Andy Grove
In his book High Output Management, Andy Grove outlines an excellent framework for running meetings. I’ve read several books on this topic and Grove’s still stands as the foundation.
Let’s start with some definitions
1) Types of meetings
There are a few meeting types to know about:
- The 1:1 meeting — Supervisor and subordinate meet to knowledge share, offer guidance, and tackle thorny issues. Meeting frequency should be based on the experience of the subordinate and nature of the job (i.e. marketing with daily feedback loops is more demanding than production or accounting). This is the subordinate’s meeting — they prep and lead.
- Team (staff) meetings — These could be recurring departmental staff meetings, multi-departmental project meetings, or anything in-between. Goals for these vary widely from status updates to completing projects. Combined with the recurring meeting, this is likely where the majority of productivity is lost.
They can be structured as either:
- Standing (recurring) — Same time, place, and attendees on a regular schedule (example: the marketing team of 4 meets every Monday at 9am). These are check-ins, progress updates, and 1:1s. Standing meetings are dangerous as a quality agenda takes a backburner after a few weeks.
- Ad hoc meeting — Usually project or task-driven with a specific goal or outcome needed from the meeting. Example: your company is pushing toward a product launch and pulling together multiple departments to solve issues along the way. Alternatively, these could be brainstorming sessions if the goal is generating ideas.
Think of each as a venn diagram… your 1:1s can be standing or ad hoc; and your team meetings can be standing or ad hoc.
2) Why this matters
Meetings are not a panacea for solving business problems, they can actually be counterproductive if executed poorly. A well designed meeting structure should clarify goals, projects, and tasks while maintaining accountability (i.e. who’s tackling what, where the roadblocks are, etc.).
There is a ton of lost time and productivity in meetings. Studies show the average worker (not company) loses 3-6 hours per week to unproductive meeting time… that’s 20-40 full workdays lost per year! A good structure will go a long way.
If it doesn’t feel like you’re getting more done via meetings, then you likely have a problem.
So what should you do?
3) How to execute good meetings
There are many good books and articles on running effective meetings, so I’ll keep this a short list to either get you started on the right path or to improve your existing meeting setup.
Here are simple rules that will handle 90% of the output for good meetings
- Agenda — Have an agenda or plan before the meeting (at least 24 hours in advance). The agenda should establish the purpose of the meeting and desired outcome. Without an agenda, your meetings will quickly devolve into “how are things going” with wandering commentary and no progress. Rule #1: if a meeting does not have a purpose, then it should not take place.
- Kick-off — Level set when the meeting begins: very quickly establish why you’re meeting and what the objective/outcome should be… this should be conducted by the meeting owner. Don’t neglect this for recurring team meetings either.
- Meeting owner — There needs to be a meeting “owner” — they’re individually responsible for keeping things moving, tabling items for later discussion, setting the agenda, etc. Without a meeting owner, you’re destined to spin wheels.
- Timely — Every meeting needs to start and end on time. Full stop. Build the habit of tabling items and tracking follow ups. Drifting on tangents will kill your meeting.
- Actions — For virtually all meetings, but especially project-driven meetings, there should be actions or outcomes. A decision is made or someone needs to do something. Without actions, you’re not meeting, you’re just sharing information.
- Takeaways — After the meeting, the owner should send out key takeaways in a concise bulleted list. This is a great way to reinforce what was discussed, who’s responsible for follow ups, actions decided, etc. (Notes are very underrated when it comes to meetings.)
Before using this list, you should step back and ask yourself: What am I trying to accomplish with this meeting? Should it even take place?
That’s always the best place to start… you may want to kill several meetings on your calendar and build them back from scratch using the structure outlined above.
A nice tip for recurring team meetings: circulate a reminder to the team 24 hours in advance, if nothing is added to the agenda, then the meeting owner has the discretion to cancel the meeting entirely. This will force everyone on the team to make good use of the time.
Meet less. Do more.