The awesome meeting

Many meetings are terrible...

But they don't have to be it. Let's have a look how to make your meetings (remote or onsite) more productive and successful - more awesome.

Recently I attended a meeting that took place on Fridays every week. The Outlook invitation stated only the project name of the people involved and no further details. The participants were two product owners, two group leads, and a top-level manager. The meeting started. We exchanged some kind words. Someone had prepared a list of topics and we headed right into the first topic. The participants stated their individual opinions, the discussion went back and forth, became a bit rough and people started to interrupt each other to squeeze their word in.

This was when I stepped in and reminded everyone that it's ok to disagree and that we still must follow some ground rules, like respecting each other by speaking kind yet honest words and not interrupting other people. This brought the discussion back from the emotions to the facts. Soon everything that needed to be said was said and the discussion came to an end. But there was still this nagging feeling that we did not really achieve any results. People who had concerns voiced them but still didn't know what to do about it. No decisions were made. Not the best of all meetings.

How meetings usually run

There are a couple of problems with this approach:

• The small talk at the beginning of the meeting feels nice. If you are involved. In a positive way. If it's not organized well this small talk can exclude or even discriminate some participants. Hearing your colleagues brag about how they race with their new cars over the highway might be not the best thing to hear when your son recently died in a car accident involving another person that was driving too fast.
• Many meetings don't have a clear goal. They happen because they always happen, at the same day at the same time every week. Pakinsons's Law states that "Work expands to fill the available volume". There will always be something to talk about. But if it doesn't contribute to a shared goal, it's just a waste of time.
• There are meetings for coordination: short, with many people, and periodical. And there are meetings for doing work: long, with very few people, and on demand. Don't confuse those two. If you try to squeeze work in coordination meetings, you usually don't achieve the desired results in time, the unfinished piece of work is moved to the next meeting in a week or so, and the work is mentally parked and needs to be remembered next time. This leads to a lot of inactive work that occupies people's minds and leads to stress and burnout.

How meeting should be run

These are the elements of an awesome meeting.

1. Late Start: Give everyone 5 minutes to prepare themselves for the meeting and think about what's important for them and what they want to achieve.
2. Check-in: Create an environment of psychological safety. Connect on a personal level by sharing personal stories or doing a short awareness exercise. The goal here is to make it ok for everyone to speak up. Establish or repeat meeting agreements like "Listen to one another", "Repeat people's points", and "Avoid dominating or interrupting".
3. Goal & Contributions: Someone needs to lead through the meeting and explicitly state the goal at the beginning. This can be the manager, or a colleague, or an external facilitator. If you organize the meeting, make sure you do this yourself or that you find someone who can articulate the goal and set clear boundaries or a specified format for reaching that goal. When you have the goal, check if you have all the people and only the people that can contribute to reaching it. Make it ok for people to leave who cannot contribute.
4. Goal driven work: Everything said and done should move the group closer to the goal. Give everyone an equal chance to contribute and make sure that every participant is involved from the first minute. Conventional meeting formats like presentation, status report, or open discussion are doing a bad job at that. Check out Liberating Structures to find engaging and motivating meeting formats.
5. Conclusion: Establish a "Definition of Done" at the beginning of the meeting so that everyone knows when the goal is reached, and the meeting can end. Just talking until the time runs out is a bad "Definition of Done". Follow-up at the end of the meeting by asking questions like "Have we reached our goal?", "What decision did we make?", "Where your expectations met?", "What was your most important insight?", "What should we do different next time?", and "What do we do next?"
6. Break: Give everyone a break to catch-up on their follow-up tasks and have a moment of relaxation before they head into the next meeting.

By introducing some of those concepts I could help a colleague from my Friday's meeting to make that meeting more goal-driven, engaging, and fun. We even had that feeling of accomplishing something and it turned out that the meeting did not need to happen so often.

Now I invite you to include these elements in your own meetings to make them truly awesome.

Final Considerations

Don't be dogmatic about the agenda of your meeting. Not every meeting runs as planned. Be aware of the present moment and respond accordingly. Sometimes it is ok to change the goal or the agenda midway when you learn something new.

Have courage to speak up when attending a meeting that goes against good meeting practices. It might feel risky or awkward. But you will never be blamed or punished, when your intention is to help everyone achieve better results.

Finally keep in mind that a meeting is there to make decisions, achieve results and make everyone feel good in the process. If that doesn't sound like your meeting - change it and make it awesome!

Sources

• Liberating Structures - Introduction
• Meeting Agreements Poster in the Modern Agile Shop at Modern Agile