Read Reid’s Blog

Reid Hastie wrote a really good article about meetings in the New York Times and thought I’d add my own thoughts. You should read Reid’s article. Coincidence that my name is Reid? I think not.

The premise of Hastie’s article is that we all to often have unproductive meetings and we should be held accountable for that. Nothing bugs me more than having an unnecessary meeting or one where there’s no clear agenda or outcome. All too often, meetings I’ve attended have too many people, nobody is paying attention, or the content could easily be covered in email. And, when you work an 8 hour day and 1 hour is spent going over content in a random manner with 20 people in the room, you’re wasting the most valuable resource: time.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve run some pretty ineffective meetings. My first experience leading meetings was when I was part of a student organizing group at Stanford. We had weekly meetings and I learned a lot of my organizational skills from flat-out failing: not having an agenda prepared, not doing pre-meeting preparation, and not keeping a discussion on track during the actual meeting. And after fighting so hard to get everyone on the same point, action and follow-up items were rarely assigned, making the next meeting even more ineffective.

I also ran meetings as an RA for my dorm staff senior year. My co-RA and I were pretty diligent about having meeting agendas finalized before we had our staff meeting, but I can remember a few distinct times when we were lazy and just winged it. And it showed – our co-staff, who depended on us to lead the meeting, were tuned-out, there was little focus to our meeting, and I knew I came off a lot less confident. Lack of preparation is easy to see and it multiplies the difficulty requires to keep people engaged.

Reading Hastie’s article reminded me again that two of the most important aspects of meetings take place before and after having one. Doing your homework before sitting down to meet is extremely important, as is providing follow-up, whether that be meeting notes or follow-up questions for a specific individual. Here are some other tips, common as they may sound, that I think all meetings can benefit from:

• Ask if you even need to have the meeting. If the content can be made in an email update or just talking to someone one on one, don’t schedule it.
• Have concrete goals for your meeting. Let participants know that you wish to come out of the meeting with those goals accomplished.
• Have a clear agenda and moderator for the meeting. Usually that’s you who is holding the meeting. Make sure you keep the meeting on track. Cut off people who are going off on tangents and respectfully ask them to take that conversation outside of the meeting so you can cover everything. If you think the tangent is useful, ask participants if it’s okay that you might miss some later agenda items. This also brings up the point that the most important content should be discussed first.
• If necessary, provide action items for participants to follow-up on. This again ensures the meeting is productive and people leave with a sense that the meeting has resulted in them doing something positive. Someone should have taken notes in the meeting – assign that in the beginning if someone didn’t volunteer. Make sure people who attended the meeting get those notes.
• If you’re jointly running a meeting, briefly breakdown how the meeting went. You can often gain some helpful pointers on what you did well/wrong and what to do to improve.

Since I know some co-workers read my blog, if I fail to do any of these points, you should also have the right to call me out. Nobody is perfect and there is never a meeting that goes as scripted. That’s why you get people together in a room to talk in the first place. But, by doing your homework before and due diligence after the meeting, you can ensure that whatever happens in that 30 minute or 1 hour slot of time is as productive as possible.

My final thought – I know many people don’t read all their email or skim through a lot of things, which makes my point on providing updates via email in lieu of a meeting hard to digest. The simple solution? Learn how to manage your email. More on that later, once Reid Hastie writes an article about that…