How to Run Effective Meetings

Most meetings suck.

I’ve sat through meetings where the organizer didn’t follow the meeting agenda, or they were disengaged and not respectful of everyone’s time, or the most extroverted person hijacked the conversation and ended up steering the meeting direction. These meetings do more harm than good; I’ve come away from these meetings feeling uninspired and disappointed at having wasted all this time that I could’ve used more productively. However, meetings are a necessary evil and an effective collaboration tool.

Over the last few years, I’ve run lots of meetings – many successfully, and some not so much. Effective meetings are hard and I’m by no means an expert. This is a living document that attempts to outline the lessons I have learned over the years about running effective meetings.

Do you need the meeting?

Be ruthless about when you need to have a meeting. If you’re on the fence about whether to have a meeting or not, see if you can accomplish your goals via other avenues such as texting over your internal comms tool, email, or creating a Github issue/JIRA ticket.

Here are some scenarios that may warrant a meeting:

• Information sharing i.e. getting feedback, socializing new processes, communicating decisions, or brainstorming ideas. To reiterate, as much as possible, it’s important to create a culture where critical information is shared asynchronously.
• If you need multiple stakeholders to achieve consensus on cross-cutting concerns such as a brainstorming session to design the processes for software config management for all software teams at a startup.

Agenda

Never send a calendar invite for a meeting without an agenda. An agenda should describe the background context, purpose, and expected outcomes for the meeting. Ideally, each agenda item should have a time associated with it. Having an agenda with time slots makes it easier to moderate the meeting and not get stuck in rabbit holes. If any background reading is required, include an estimate of how long it’ll take to prepare for the meeting. The presentation/documents/other-relevant-material should be sent along with the invite. This allows people to review the documents before the meeting, digest information, and even provide early feedback before the meeting has taken place.

The meeting organizer (i.e. you, the reader) is in charge of sticking to the agenda. If your attendee goes off-topic, it’s your responsibility to steer the conversation back to the main agenda. If the discussion ends up pulling on important threads that weren’t planned for or will likely not fit within the meeting’s dedicated time, use and maintain a “parking lot” to get back to these offline or in future meetings. This helps make sure these tangents get discussed eventually. This keeps everyone engaged and makes all the attendees feel heard.

Attendees

Be ruthless about who you invite; it is people who have something explicitly to contribute or who you know wish to be included. If people in your meeting didn’t meaningfully contribute or learn something valuable that could not have been learned from a shared document, you have wasted their time. In the meeting invite, communicate everyone’s role in the meeting so that the person knows what’s expected of them.

At the end of each meeting, I always like asking myself:

Did everyone in the meeting contribute or learn something they couldn’t learn by reading? If the answer is ‘no’, there were too many people in the meeting or it should not have happened at all.

Notes

It’s important to jot down decisions that were made and any action items that were agreed upon. If you’d prefer having meeting minutes, assign someone to take brief notes during the meeting. After the meeting, send the meeting notes to everyone who attended the meeting and make sure that the relevant stakeholders for the actions items are tagged in the document. The relevant stakeholders may not always follow up on their actions and it’s your responsibility to check-in with them and nudge them in the right direction.

Moderating effectively

Effective moderation is more art than science. And this is one skill you’ll learn as you gain more experience running meetings. Try and understand the personalities of all the attendees. This will give you strategies to make the meeting more effective. For example, a stakeholder is always diplomatic in their opinions and takes forever to make a decision – you may want to gently nudge them to arrive at a conclusion or take an opinionated stance. Or if you know one of the stakeholders is introverted and won’t voice their opinions unless asked, you may hold space for them to ask questions and give feedback, or you may follow up with them after the meeting to get their feedback asynchronously.

Timing

Avoid pre and post-lunch meetings. Hold meetings early in the morning, or later in the afternoon to make sure that there is nothing else distracting your team. Create a culture of blocking off ‘Focus time’ on calendars so that scheduling meetings where everyone is available is straightforward.

Finally, be punctual. If the meeting was scheduled for 1 pm, then it starts at 1 pm. Don’t wait for latecomers. Soon enough the latecomers come in on time because no one likes to be embarrassed by barging in in the middle of a meeting.