4 Ways to Run More Effective Meetings

Lots of articles with titles like ‘10 Ways to Improve Your Team Meetings’ are really ‘10 Ways to Improve the Author’s SEO’ with little actual value for managers.

The latest on this topic from the First Round Review isn’t one of those.  

They’ve pulled together 20 ideas from various contributors, many of which could genuinely improve the way you run your meetings.  We’ve picked out four of the best.

Book cameos

It’s no secret that recurring meetings are the ones most likely to descend into drudgery.  They often follow the same format and the routine becomes stale. 

Assuming you do actually need to hold the recurring meeting (try the ‘Should it be a Meeting’ tool if you’re unsure), getting others from elsewhere in your company to attend and participate can be very useful. 

It introduces new perspectives to your discussions and enables your team to build professional relationships with others who they might not routinely meet.

Be wary of spillover effects

When a meeting doesn’t go well, it may not be your fault - it’s often spillover from whatever was distracting your participants beforehand. 

‘Maybe they saw some discouraging data, or had a rough call. People go from meeting to meeting without thinking that one influences their performance or responses in another. We give ourselves zero transition time, and the result is emotional transference.’ Leadership Coach Katia Verresen.

Try not to arrange back-to-back meetings and before beginning your meeting, consider asking where people have just come from or how their day’s going to judge the mood.

Introduce speed

Making progress at speed is exciting.  Not to mention beneficial for getting things done in most organisations.

When you’re sitting in a meeting slowly discussing the minutiae of the latest internal initiative it can feel like this opposite is happening.

Upstart’s Dave Girouard has a simple question for solving this: ‘Why can’t this be done sooner?’

Asking it may provoke a constructive discussion about the true mechanics of the problem you’re trying to solve, and ultimately help you towards a speedier solution.

Spotlight what good looks like

‘It’s not just that someone did well, it’s the explanation of how they did it that often goes missing on remote teams’ Maggie Leung, Executive Editor at Andreesen Horowitz

Giving credit for good work is a staple of team meetings.  But often it’s done briefly before moving onto more ‘pressing’ matters.  

If we do this, we miss out twice.  Once on distributing the learnings from doing something really well.  But also on demonstrating that we value people taking the initiative.  

When someone does something really excellent, take the time to dig into how they did it so others can really understand what happened.

Leung found this so constructive at her last company that they ended up creating a dedicated meeting called ‘What Good Looks Like’ just to break down these examples.

If you liked those, consider checking out the First Round article in full.