How to Conduct a Meeting (if You Absolutely Have to)
Meetings are a waste of time. The only time you should ever have a meeting is if not having one wastes more time.
Meetings should be used to reach decisions that cannot be agreed upon in any other way. Decisions that require multiple perspectives on a problem, or deal with complex and/or controversial issues, are good examples of situations that require meetings.
Meetings should have a focused objective. Diffuse topics should be broken up into separate meetings, or the less important objectives should be discarded.
Meetings should have a clear start and end time. Everyone attending should arrive before the meeting is set to begin and a course of action must be decided before the end. Meetings that run long waste time.
A meeting should last the minimal amount of time required to reach an effective decision. An hour-long meeting takes up 12.5% of an employee’s workday (and whatever gets decided in a meeting needs to be executed afterwards). The duration of a meeting should act like a deadline to create a sense of urgency and purpose.
Meetings should be limited to the minimum number of people required to make the decision. Meetings are not the place for people to learn about changes in the company (public communication of goals should occur outside meetings); meetings are for making decisions. The people who don’t attend a meeting can get more work done.
Everyone attending should know the meeting’s objective as far in advance as possible. Not having time for critical thought and reflection leads to poor decisions. Poor decisions waste time.
Once a meeting’s objectives are shared with all attendees, everyone should submit their ideas/solutions/arguments to a public agenda with enough time for everyone else to read each other’s submissions.
The person who called the meeting is the Organizer. The Organizer is responsible for consolidating everyone’s agenda items into a narrative that does not waste time during the meeting. Effective meetings require effective Organizers.
People who don’t take the time to submit their agenda items should not attend the meeting. (They must be thinking about something more important to the company than the objective of the meeting, so let them focus on that.)
When the meeting starts, the Organizer reiterates the meeting objectives, and everyone takes a turn to speak about their submitted ideas.
While people are speaking, anything not related to the objective should be quashed by the Organizer. Tangents waste time and organizations that permit people to go off-topic in meetings promote sloppy thinking and laziness as part of company culture.
Do not interrupt or distract another person when they are presenting their ideas. Only the Organizer can interject if they deem that the presenter has strayed too far from the meeting’s objectives.
(People in leadership roles should by definition be the most effective Organizers in your company. Effective Organizers who are not yet in leadership roles should be on the path to promotion. People in leadership positions who are ineffective Organizers should be fired before they inspire an exodus of top talent. Smart people despise having their time wasted.)
After everyone speaks, people may raise their hand to present counterarguments that elaborate on the ideas shared by other attendees. The Organizer selects who should speak and may halt the conversation if the counterarguments become tangential or long-winded. At no point should two people be speaking at the same time. It is the responsibility of the Organizer to ensure that all points of view are heard and nothing meaningful is left unsaid.
Notes should be taken by everyone when they are not actively speaking during the meeting. These notes should contain the key next steps on the meeting’s objectives, as well as the person who is responsible for each action item in the agreed upon next steps (more on this later).
When not taking notes or presenting, everyone should maintain eye contact with the person speaking and refrain from all distractions. Distractions waste time.
Technology used during meetings should be limited to devices required for presenting ideas or taking notes. Extraneous technology wastes time.
Discussing objectives in this way should ideally lead to a mutually agreed upon course of action. Once the course of action is established, the key next steps should be assigned to the various attendees of the meeting.
Make sure to not overburden a particular person with executing too many of the next steps from a meeting. Ideally, all stakeholders attending a meeting should have some share of the responsibilities that come out of it. When this does not happen, it often means ineffective people are hiding their uselessness through excessive delegation.
If an agreement cannot be reached after counterarguments are presented, do one of two things:
(1 If you have a company with a flat structure: vote. The Organizer can be the tie breaker.
(2 If you have a hierarchical company: the most senior person(s) attending the meeting decides based on the arguments and counterarguments presented.
The last 5-10 minutes of the meeting should be used by everyone to consolidate their notes. Consolidated notes are then submitted to the Organizer by all attendees as they leave the meeting (or shortly thereafter). Anyone who does not submit notes should be excluded from the next meeting.
The Organizer then aggregates and shares the notes with all attendees shortly after the meeting. The decided course of action should be written at the top, with next steps and the people responsible for executing them immediately below. The consolidated meeting notes should be stored in a place where it is accessible to all team members (even those who did not attend the meeting). Public communication of a meeting’s outcome is critical to a culture of trust.
The extra responsibilities placed on the Organizer should (hopefully) prevent people from calling superfluous meetings.