Five Steps to Running Meetings So Effectively, Your Team Will Thank You!
Meetings can be surprisingly good at wasting time. But they don’t have to be. With a little structure and intention, meetings can become one of your team’s most valued rituals.
💡 This article shares five simple but powerful steps for running meetings that are focused, effective, and genuinely appreciated by your team.
Meetings are so infamous for their pitfalls that professionals all over the globe can relate when you speak of meetings that didn’t need to happen, went off track, or were unproductive due to a lack of guidance. The pain even breaks into pop culture. Check out this “Smells like this could have been an email” candle, which was sold out at the time of writing and has reviews averaging 4.9/5. In the book “Remote – Office Not Required,” Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, founders of Basecamp, touted the reduction in time spent with M&Ms as an advantage of remote, managed-by-results teams.
This is why I wrote this article on how I’ve run meetings. Not only have they become vastly more productive, but my team has expressed gratitude and appreciation for the structure. If your organization is struggling with keeping meetings focused and effective or struggling with the long-term execution of the decisions made in those meetings, then try some of the five steps I outlined below. Unless you already have a better process, I am confident you will be hooked!
1. Prepare a meeting plan and share it with the team beforehand.
This may go without saying for some, but sometimes a meeting can be derailed due to a lack of preparation. The meeting plan should be a written document. This document includes an agenda, meeting guidelines and a full brief in notes of what is to be covered in the meeting (an idea borrowed from how meetings are conducted at Amazon.)
- Agenda
Write down the phases your meeting will go through, and who (person, team, group of people) is leading the phase. Estimate how much time should be spent during each section, and be the referee throughout the meeting. Have a stopwatch with you to keep track of the phases.
- Guidelines
You will need your own set of guidelines. But here are the guidelines used in the last meeting I ran.
– Read this entire document before starting (10 to 15 mins)
– Discuss what is tagged with hashtag#discuss
– Build a list of tasks at the bottom of this document and decide who will tackle each
– Phones are prohibited for the period of the meeting (I wish this went without saying)
– The decisions made here are final; changing course requires a conversation and re-agreement with affected managers
Meeting brief
- Meeting brief
Start your meeting with a written brief of all the thoughts and ideas to discuss. Reserve the first 10-15 minutes for the participants to read silently. This can be very useful because it will force the meeting organizer to think through all of the issues to be covered during the meeting and allow them to convey many thoughts effectively and quickly.
Additionally, in the brief, I typically use some of the following tactics:
– Areas that need discussion are tagged with the hashtag #discuss
– Ideas that need validation are tagged with the hashtag #validate
– Terms that may need clarification before starting are highlighted in the brief and are explained before everyone dives into reading the brief
2. Get commitment on the decisions made.
If you’re a leader frustrated by the lack of follow-up on meeting decisions, this point can help you keep things on track. At the end of our meetings, I highlight how many “team hours” were consumed. A 1 hr meeting with 6 team members will feel like a 1 hr meeting to the individuals, but it will actually take 6 team hours! So I add the following to the end of my meeting document to emphasize the cost of the decisions made:
This meeting took X team hours. And I agree to the decisions made. _______________________ (mental signature)
Note. I don’t collect these. People signing or not. It’s in there just for the effect, not to sue a colleague.
3. Share and manage publicly
During the meeting, take notes on a publicly available page on your documentation system (Slack/Teams, Confluence, Notion, etc.), paying special attention to the decisions made and tasks assigned. Were more meetings called for? Who’s responsible for leading these? With the commenting functionality in these tools, you and your team can continue to collaborate asynchronously.
Inevitably, new tasks and initiatives will come up in the meeting. During the meeting, agree on who is taking charge of which tasks and keep track of them in your notes. You can tag people using the documentation tools listed above.
4. Pre-run the meeting asynchronously
Share the meeting plan days before the meeting, and allow people to start commenting ideas and thoughts. This may also allow their subconscious to start brainstorming days before the meeting.
5. Assess why you are running a meeting, if it isn’t needed then simply don’t do it.
You may be running a meeting for several valid reasons. Most of them boil down to needing collaboration from the rest of your team, which is most effectively done in real time. Sometimes you just want to make sure everyone is on the same page to get some decisions made. Whatever the reasons are, think them through. If you still need a meeting, that’s great, go ahead and have one. But take the reasons and write them at the top of your meeting document:
Ex:
Reason for this meeting: We are gathering because we’d like to have the product, customer success and marketing teams to brainstorm on XYZ topic for our Q1 and Q2 Go-to-Market plan.
That’s it. If you do this right, it may take you, the individual running a meeting, an extra 60 to 90 minutes of work in preparation and follow-up tasks. But investing this time will empower those involved, get better results out of your meeting, and may just inspire your colleagues to do the same! No matter how you slice it, meetings involve multiple people’s time and effort, so running more effective meetings creates compounding benefits for your organization.
About My Articles
This article is part of a collection of actionable thoughts and lessons from the intersection of founding a company, acquiring knowledge, and seeking wisdom. I’m writing for my fellow entrepreneurs, the entrepreneurial ecosystem, my own team, and those interested in working with Keepers.