(TL;DR at the end if you’d rather.)

I promise, I’m not anti-meeting.  I love a meeting.  They energise me.  Ideas spring into life and run a gauntlet of minds before emerging all the stronger for it.  The unimaginably complex gets dragged down to our human level, chopped up, handed out, and mastered.  Meetings are necessary wonders of a world too complex to be captured in a single mind.

But my god, some of them are awful!

So, to add to the great corpus of writing on meeting etiquette (and I can’t quite believe I still need to do this) here are my guiding principles:

Is it actually a meeting thing?

A couple of considerations here (it’s not quite as simple as it seems).  Is this a thing that needs minds to interact in live time?  Meetings really aren’t effective ways to communicate something or canvass opinions and are probably the worst way to receive an update on what everybody’s doing.  Maybe a 10 minute stand-up… maybe!

(Let me know if you need one of these: 📒)

And, please, NEVER to try to dress a decision which has already been made in the illusion of collaboration. It just doesn’t work. (Being an instinctive, solo decision-maker doesn’t work most of the time, but) if you want to be autocratic, just be autocratic.

However, we all have differing cognitive styles and some people definitely think most clearly while they’re talking face to face.  But that still doesn’t justify a meeting. It definitely deserves to be catered for and is probably most effective in a one-to-one. 

Don’t let meetings become the default!

OK, it is a meeting thing.  So, who’s in?

Just take a moment to picture this meeting, who are the actual contributors?  Who’s going to get stuck into the ideas?  Who might bring an alternative perspective we’d otherwise overlook?  

Don’t default to inviting groups (the Board, the Exec Team, the Department) and then wonder at the people who never seem to say a word meeting after meeting after meeting.  They won’t open up because you invite them to more meetings and they won’t open up because you put them on the spot… at least not in meetings.  Have a chat to them first, gather their thoughts and advocate for them.  And remember to give them credit in the meeting.  And thanks afterwards.

What are we here for?

Don’t. Call. A. Meeting. Without. An. Agenda.

Ever.  

Seriously, just give it a moment’s thought: 

• What’s our scope?  
• Who’s going to run the meeting (it really doesn’t have to be the most senior person there)?
• What do we want to achieve by the end?  
• Who’s overseeing the next steps?

If you can’t manage that, you shouldn’t be allowed access to your own diary, let alone anyone else’s. OK, I’m sounding grumpy.  Let’s move on…

Oh look, a 60 minute meeting.

Let the agenda dictate the time you allow.  Not all meetings need to be an hour.  If you’re going to overrun there should be a pressing reason but nobody should ever spin a meeting out to the allotted time (yet they do… it’s crazy!). 

Oh, and I don’t love recurring meetings, at least not outside of a project sprint (and then they should be stand-ups).

Manage the meeting, cover the agenda, and wrap up.

Just a note.

Let’s encourage note taking.  It keeps people focussed, it helps embed memory, it permits more complex thoughts to remain manageable (I also love a whiteboard) and it creates a retainable record which we can organise in any number of ways (probably not on paper).  If you disagree with a conclusion, keep a note of it (and why) we might need to come back to that later.

Now what?

(I’m going to keep my cool on this one but I feel just as strongly about actions as I do about agendas.)

If actions aren’t agreed, shared, and followed up, you didn’t have a meeting.  You just didn’t.  You had a natter.

There’s a reason this note is still needed.  Meetings are hard but fixing them is probably the easiest thing to do to unlock the potential of a team and energise them too.

It’s absolutely worth getting this right.  Let me loose on your team’s calendars and we’ll have you flying in no time.