Most Meetings Are Annoying. Here Are 5 Tips To Running A Great One. - Forbes

It’s never been easy to host a good meeting, and the rise of remote and hybrid work and the pressures of the Covid-19 pandemic have made it more challenging than ever. Ask pretty much anyone in a company, all the way up to the CEO, and they’ll tell you that most meetings are, at best, only partially successful, even under ideal circumstances. This is a major problem in a challenging business environment such as we face today thanks to uncertainty about the trajectory of the pandemic, disruptions in the labor market and distractions, stress and pressure at home.

Executives and teams simply can’t afford to waste time and attention on non-productive tasks. Even before Covid-19, meetings often ran too long, wasted people’s time and catered to grandstanders and big egos. In 2019, consulting firm Korn Ferry found that 51% of workers surveyed felt that excessive time spent on calls and meetings limited their impact at work, and a whopping 67% said an excess of meetings made it difficult to reach peak performance. Only 11% believed that every meeting they attended was productive.

Yet sometimes you need to get everyone on the same page and the most efficient way to do that is, in fact, a meeting. Sometimes you need the brain trust to figure out a tough problem. Meetings can be good, but there’s a reason many meetings fail. Simply put, most meetings are not planned or managed correctly, if at all. Managers will call a meeting because they feel like it’s the thing to do, but once they have everyone in the room—whether that’s a physical space or a Zoom room—it often goes off the rails

 As organizations experiment with different models of hybrid and remote work, the challenges of running a great meeting have intensified. Here are five steps to ensure that your meetings aren’t just painless, but actually benefit your organization:

1. Don’t Have The Meeting Unless Absolutely Necessary: The most important thing to do is trust your team. Don’t micromanage. “Check-in” meetings without any clearly defined purpose tend to be a waste of time, especially if they are stretched to fill a predetermined amount of time. Before you host a meeting, think about whether everyone in the room needs to hear from everyone else. If they don’t, it will be more productive for everyone to either check-in individually or break it up into smaller working groups. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ “two pizza rule,” which says that there should never be more people in a meeting than can be fed by two pizzas, is helpful here.) The worst meetings are those that are planned because of a failure of delegation. A strong team with a leader who is good at delegating will know how to work, and will execute well, without meetings for the sake of meetings. When planning a meeting, the first thing to do is to look at whether you can cancel it.
2. Be In Charge: The number one mistake people make with meetings is they set a date and time and invite the team, but when it’s time to start, there’s a leadership vacuum. A lack of clear leadership in a meeting can lead to crosstalk, meandering conversations and difficulties sticking to an agenda. From the moment a meeting invite is sent, it needs to be made clear who is leading the meeting, and from the moment it begins, they need to direct the conversation. There should be a simple, clear agenda, and the meeting leader should follow it. If someone is going on too long, move the conversation ahead. If there are people in the room you need to hear from but haven’t, encourage them. If the meeting drifts off topic, say so and bring it back. If there’s something that needs to be more fully explored, say so and engage the room on the topic.
3. Have A Shared Purpose: Being in charge isn’t just a matter of managing the play-by-play. It also means having a clear sense of what the purpose of the meeting is. With any meeting, whoever is leading it needs to be able to quickly and clearly articulate what the purpose of the meeting is, what they hope to achieve, why the people in the room are the right people, and how it will benefit the company. If any one of these elements is missing, people’s attention will wander, the team’s time will be wasted, and the outcomes of the meeting will be limited.
4. It Doesn’t Matter How or Where You Meet: It can be tempting to blame the format of a meeting for its failure, but here’s a secret: It doesn’t matter whether a meeting is on Zoom, conference call, in-person or any combination of the three. Things like bad internet connections and crackly speakers can be disruptive, but the potential for technical difficulties actually make the proper planning and management of a meeting all that more important. If technical difficulties could disrupt a meeting, it falls on whomever is leading the meeting to account for that ahead of time. If there’s someone who consistently has technical trouble, encourage them to plan accordingly or look closely at whether you must have them in this meeting.
5. Plan Ahead, But Don’t Over-program: Leadership needs to understand how much time is required to talk about each subject and display a willingness to guide the conversation if it lags or someone takes up too much oxygen. Packing too much in will shortchange important items, while allowing too much bloat in the schedule simply wastes time. If there’s a presentation, be sure it’s needed. Could the conclusions alone have been shared? If it consistently feels that a regular meeting could be completed in less time—a half hour versus an hour—reduce the time on people’s calendars accordingly.

Of course, there are many techniques for leading a great meeting. These are just some principles I stick to in the boardroom and on the gridiron.

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