Post-pandemic, meetings have acquired a really bad rep. This isn’t without reason - bad meetings are - well, really bad. Like pulling teeth, soul leaving your body bad. However, there is another way.
At their best, meetings can be intentional, productive and creative. They can unlock moments of connection, build trust and give people context that is deeply important to their work. They can help your team get on the same page, quickly. They can help solve issues that have been bugging you for months, in minutes.
In this article, we’ll share some tips to help you get the best from meetings with your team and avoid some common meeting ‘mares.
One of the most common meeting pitfalls is a lack of clarity. This can show up in many different ways. To be successful, all meetings need clarity on:
Purpose: Ask yourself - what is this meeting actually for? Is it to make decisions, solve a problem, share information, or generate ideas? All of these different types of meetings require participants to show up in slightly different ways.
Getting crystal clear on the purpose of a meeting can also eliminate that ‘should have been an email’ feeling. If you realise that your objective is sharing some fairly simple updates, rather than something highly nuanced and likely to provoke a lot of questions - then you might want to give people time back and share it async.
Agenda: All good meetings have a clear agenda, circulated in advance. Not only does this help your team understand the flow of the session, it’s important to guide prep - and preparation is key to ensuring your meeting actually achieves its stated purpose.
For example, if you run an operational management meeting with the goal of solving challenges cross-functionally, getting people to share an overview of their problems, progress and plans before the session allows people to build context async. That way, when you’re in the room, you can focus on resolving issues, not catching people up on the status quo.
An agenda also shouldn’t just be a list of items. It should be clear what you want to achieve by the end of the meeting. When you kick things off, reminding people of your end goal will help things stay on track.
Invite list: It’s super important to be clear about who actually needs to be there - is this a whole team thing, or could you get further, faster with a smaller group?
This can get a little awkward - but inviting people who won’t actually help you achieve your stated goal in order to flatter their ego can be distracting and disruptive (not to mention the fact that it will be a waste of their time.)
Avoid quietly removing people from an invite and just be transparent about why you want to give them the time back. Be open to challenge - and clear about alternative ways to keep them up to date with any need to know information. Remember, you can always keep the core meeting group small and invite ‘guests’ when you need broader input.
Roles and responsibilities: Yes, it’s boring - but someone needs to lead the meeting, keep track of time and be responsible for following up with a clear record of decisions and actions - and they don’t all have to be you. In fact, having rotating roles can help everyone build good meeting habits and confidence - as long as you are all clear on expectations.
Length: This one is pretty simple. Make your meeting only as long as it needs to be. If it’s a long one, ensure you plan for breaks - and always start and finish on time to stop a calendar domino effect.
For any recurring meetings, it’s helpful to agree on a set of meeting principles. These go beyond the hygiene factors mentioned above and should govern things like how you deal with conflict. Co-creating something like this can be a great way to reinforce your shared values and ways of working as a team.
This is also a great way to integrate some inclusive meeting practices - such as enabling captions as a default, inviting contributions in different ways (e.g. using the chat as well as raising a hand if you’re running virtual or hybrid meetings) and ‘sharing the air’ rather than letting loud voices dominate the conversation.
Explore tech that helps you to operationalise these principles - platforms like Butter have features that will tell you how much time each meeting participant spent talking, so you can assess whether your principles are lived and breathed.
Being a really good leader of meetings also involves a lot of experimentation. Your team will not always need the same rhythms and rituals - as it evolves, grows or shrinks, you will need to continuously reevaluate whether your core touchpoints are the right ones.
Keep it fresh by gathering feedback on what you need more or less of - and really think about the best way to weave it into your time together. If you’re a team that works mainly async - you might find it valuable to weave in a moment of connection at the beginning of your session. If your meeting is focused on problem solving, you could start by sharing some recent learnings. However, every team is different. Don’t be afraid to try things or be discouraged if they don’t land quite how you expected the first time around.
Creating purposeful meetings can be a true gamechanger for your team - building trust, alignment and the kind of deep context that enables better performance. So if your regular weekly team sync is feeling a bit stale, try experimenting with some of the tips we’ve shared to shake things up.
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