Mastering Meetings: How to Design and Lead More Effective Meetings

Chances are, the weekly meeting you lead is not as effective as it could be. What's worse is that you may not even realize it. But don't worry, you're not alone. The Surprising Science of Meetings by Steven G. Rogelberg reveals that most leaders have an inflated bias regarding how well they run meetings. Even with over 55 million meetings taking place daily in the US, research indicates that almost half of the time we spend in them is perceived as time wasted. The main reason for this is that many leaders do not spend a lot of effort designing their meetings. It's common for meetings to be built solely on routine. i.e. We talk about a particular topic because we always talk about that particular topic. But it doesn't have to be that way. With a few simple adjustments, you can transform your meetings to be more purposeful, valuable, and yes, even enjoyable.

"Great meetings aren't just planned, they are designed"

Before the Meeting

Some of the most important steps needed to lead a great meeting happen before the meeting even starts.

Design the Purpose of Your Meeting — Starting a meeting without defining a purpose is like starting a road trip without a map. You might reach your destination eventually, but certainly not via the most efficient route.

The first step to leading an impactful meeting is to have a well defined purpose. Why are you having this meeting and what specifically do you want to accomplish. Even if a meeting is a reoccurring one, having the meeting simply because you have it every week is an inefficient use of time. Instead, think deeply about the meeting's purpose and what you want to achieve. By taking a moment to do this upfront, you have a better chance a crafting a meeting of value.

Choose Topics That Require Team Input — Never communicate in a meeting what could be better communicated in an email.

Great meetings aren't just planned, they are designed. And the topics we choose to include in our meeting are as much a part of that design as anything. While progress updates are necessary in business, they are not always the best use of meeting time. One thing you can try instead is to send progress updates in an email or slack ahead of the meeting. Not only does it give the meeting participants time to form an opinion about the updates, it allows you to reserve the meeting for topics that require input and ideation.
Assign Topics to Different Participants — Getting people involved starts long before the meeting.

One of the best ways to break up the monotony of a meeting is to make sure you have multiple voices leading the discussions. A great way to do this is to assign discussion leaders or DRIs to each topic. DRI stands for a Directly Responsible Individual. This person is not only responsible for driving the discussion, but for any follow up actions that may take place after the meeting. This increases ownership among the team and makes it easy to hold each other accountable.

Including DRIs in your meeting will keep the content fresh and help your team develop facilitation skills.

Order Your Topics Strategically — Don't play roulette with your topics.

It would be easy to organize your topics in the order that they came to you. But research on decision fatigue indicates that topic order plays a critical part to the success of the meeting.

A 2016 study shows that the average American can make up to 35,000 decisions a day. And while many of these decisions are of little consequence, the act of making decisions can have a negative impact on the quality of subsequent decisions. In other words, the more decisions we have to make, the worst the quality of our decisions become.

For meeting organizers, this means that it's best to place topics that require more creativity, decisions and alignment towards the beginning of the meeting. This will ensure that crucial topics are discussed when the participants are at their most focused and alert.

"Limit your contributions to the size of a tweet"

During the Meeting

Nail the Tone of the Opening — How you start plays a big part in how you will finish.

In one study, researchers brought two groups together to meet on a topic. In each group, the researches planted an actor with a key mission. In one group, the actor would start the meeting off with a negative comment. In the second group, the actor would start the meeting off with a positive group. After making the first statement, the actor continued to participate but in a deliberately neutral manner. Researchers found that the tone of the rest of the meeting was strongly influenced by how the meeting started. For example, when the actor started the meeting with a negative comment, the meeting continue to be combative and the discussion was less likely to end in alignment.

This was due to a phenomenon known as emotional contagion. First published in 1994 by Elaine Hatfield and John T. Cacioppo, emotional contagion describes how emotions are transmitted between individuals through verbal and non-verbal means. As a meeting host, this means the way you start a meeting will strongly dictate how well that meeting goes.

Plan you opening ahead of time based on what you want to achieve in your meeting. If you are looking to have a positive and creative meeting, starting the meeting with an upbeat tone, recognition or even music can go long way.
No Monologues — Limit your contributions to the size of a tweet.

If you’ve taken the approach of assigning a few topics to other participants, the time you spend talking in the meeting will already be reduced. However, you also need be aware of how often and how long your contributions are when others are leading the discussion.

It should come as no surprise that the opinion of the leader has a large influence on the meeting. The more often you contribute, the more likely your perspective will become the perspective of the group.

One best practice to curb this is to limit your contributions to the size of a tweet. While this may sound restrictive, doing so will compel you to think deeply on the need for your contribution;

Naturally, there will be times when this approach won’t work. But you should try to limit those instances to moments where you are the subject matter expert or your perspective is key to the success of the discussion.
Build Healthy Debate Into Your Meeting — If two people always agree, one of them is not needed.

Most leaders intuitively know that debate is good for their meetings. But healthy debate doesn't just happen on its own. A good way to encourage the critical thinking that comes with debate is to plan for it in your meeting. One way to do this is to have a participant assume the role of a key stakeholder that is not in the room. For example, if you’re meeting with a group of leaders, have one of them assume the role of a none-leader. That persons job is to think through how an employee may respond to the strategy or updated that is being discussed. The person assuming the role should chime and ask questions from the employees perspective. The rest of the participants then have an opportunity to think about how they may respond if they were ask that question

Many organizations utilize this approach to represent a diverse array of stakeholders. For example, a person may take on the role of the customer or play devil's advocate and responds accordingly. Regardless of how you foster debate, it's important to create moments where your team will purposefully consider other perspectives

"I know we're out of time, but if I can have just a few more minutes of your time" — Managers all over the world.

At the End of the Meeting

Plan an Overflow Section — "I know we're out of time, but if I can have just a few more minutes of your time"

No one likes a meeting that runs long. But many meetings still do. When that happens, the perception of how well your meetings run goes down sharply. Making sure that each one of your topics has a well defined time limit is a common approach to staying on time. But sometimes, conversations will run longer than planned.

One practice that can help is to plan an overflow section for your meeting. An overflow section isn't just a buffer for when a topic runs long, it's also a great way to handle new topics that come up during the meeting. For example, instead of telling a participant that you'll take a topic offline with them later, the overflow section allows you and that participant to stay back after the meeting to wrap up that conversation. This keeps the initial conversation on track and prevents you from having to find a separate time on the calendar to connect. Additionally, it prevents participants who aren't needed for the conversation from feeling like their time is being wasted.

It would be easy to grow accustomed to using the overflow section in every meeting. But it's best to reserve this section for only when it's needed. When it's not needed, you should always plan to end your meeting early. Although finishing early was a part of your original strategy, participants will likely perceive as a sign of a well run meeting. This will make it more likely for participants to feel that the meeting was a valuable use of their time.
Always End with Key Takeaways — A few moments to clarify now can save you hours of frustration later.

Most meetings are longer than the average person's attention span. Research shows that by the 45-minute mark, a mere 64% of participants remain attentive. If a key action is delivered at that point, there's a decent chance that the person responsible missed it. The best solution to this is to have shorter meetings. But regardless of how long your meetings are, a great practice is to end each meeting with a summary of key takeaways.

Taking a few short moments to discuss key actions and takeaways can increase accountability and make sure your team is on the same page. If done well, it can save hours of having to follow up later.