How to Run Your Meetings

Every leader’s fear

“A leader that doesn’t want to have meetings is like a surgeon that doesn’t want to operate people.” — Patrick Lencioni

Every beginning of the month, my company had an all-hands meeting. In this meeting, each team showed what they have been doing for the past 30 days. Each month, a different person should present. It was time for Allan to share what his team has been doing.

As we were a company 100% remote, we used Zoom for all of our meetings. As the time for Allan presents arrives, he shares his screen to start. Everybody now sees his first slide, containing the name of his team and the presentation’s date. As he moved on to the second slide, all the company started to laugh. Why did that happen?

Meetings remain one of the most unpopular and underestimated activities in business. We’ve come to accept that they are unavoidably painful and unproductive — one of the necessary organizational life evils. But the fact is, bad meetings are a reflection of bad leaders. They don’t need to be bad at all.

All the meetings I had

I didn’t like to have meetings when I started my first company. As I worked in places before where there were many unproductive meetings, I thought they were a waste of time and completely unnecessary for my own company. After all my three partners left the company, I moved into remote work and started using text for all my communication. I sent tasks through email and talked through the chat from Gmail. I had no idea how to run a productive meeting.

As we became a profitable company and started to grow, I realized that I should improve its operations. To do that, I had to improve its communication. I started studying the agile methodology and tried to incorporate a few of its ceremonies, which meant that I should start having meetings. However, I didn’t want to have unnecessary and unproductive meetings, so we added more little by little.

All the meetings I ended up having helped me make better decisions and create a better company environment. After some time, we had a fair amount of scheduled meetings — each one of them with a clear focus.

Daily meeting (15 minutes): That was our fastest meeting. Everybody should say what they have done the day before, what they are going to do today, and if they need any help from anyone. This meeting helps create a better commitment to the work as people see others finishing stuff and don’t like to be left behind. It also helps to solve problems faster, as people have a clear opportunity to ask for help instead of waiting days for that.

Bi-weekly meeting (1 hour): In this meeting, we talked about the work we have been doing for the past two weeks. People could share with everyone what they have finished, so everybody could see how things were progressing. We also had a moment to praise others using our company values to help create a more integrated team. And in the end, we talked about our feelings related to the last two weeks to try to minimize the negative things said and maximize the positive ones.

Monthly meeting (1 hour): That was our all-hands meeting, where we brought the entire organization together to share updates and ask questions. We talked about our three pillars: product (how much we are making); people (who we want to hire, who started or completed an anniversary); industry (events that we are about to participate in and talks to outside companies). Also, each team had a moment to share the main things they have been doing with the others.

Quarterly meeting (30 minutes): Every quarter, we talked about our goals. We had two meetings for that. The first one was at the end of the quarter to talk about the new goals for the next one, so everybody can ask questions and understand the direction the company intends to go. The second one was at the beginning of the quarter to review how we did relate to the past quarter’s goals.

The secret sauce

Last year, a friend of mine invited me to help him to create a mastermind group. It was four people. We had our first meeting, and after it was over, I called my friend to tell him how awful it had been. It was way too long, and we talked about a lot of different subjects without solving anything. We needed to do something to avoid that from happening.

The first thing I suggested was to have a clear topic and goal before the meeting. When you know what the meeting is about, you come prepared and can help better. If something else comes up during the meeting, you set a time for a new meeting later. Yes, more meetings. It is better to have more meetings than a long and awful one that won’t solve anything.

The second thing I suggested was for us to put a maximum time for the meeting. Parkinson’s law says that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. If you don’t have a time limit, you lose focus quickly. However, if you have a 30 minutes meeting scheduled, you will figure out a way to achieve the meeting’s goal within this time. The free version of Zoom allows for group meetings for up to 40 minutes, and it closes automatically after that. As ours was online and I use the free version of Zoom, my suggestion was to conclude the meeting within this time.

We went for the next meeting with a clear topic and goal. As the conversation progressed, news subjects appeared, but I shout “this is another meeting” every time that happened, and we would come back to the meeting’s focus. Zoom shows a countdown timer for its last 10 minutes. When that happened, I shouted about the timer and started to move the meeting to its conclusion.

The meeting worked fabulously this time. It took us less time, and we could decide about the next steps for the mastermind group. Everyone liked the Zoom idea and told me that they felt much better about having a productive meeting. We also schedule three more encounters to talk about other subjects.

Final thoughts

The second slide that Allan revealed contained a photo of him with a funny face to help illustrate his message. His team had achieved incredible results for the past 30 days, and he wanted to share funnily all of that. There was another photo of him every new slide, plus a sentence with the information he wanted to share.

As you can see, Allan was excited about this meeting. He wanted to share with everyone how his team was doing. It was an opportunity to share critical data and have fun at the same time. He wouldn’t have done any of that if he thought that this meeting was meaningless. Besides him, many employees of mine told me how they liked the meetings at our company. That was something that made me very proud of my work as a leader for running meetings.

Patrick Lencioni, the author of Death by Meeting, says that bad meetings demand a lot on the human beings who must endure them, which goes far beyond mere momentary dissatisfaction. They also generate real human suffering in the form of anger, lethargy, and cynicism. While this certainly has a profound impact on organizational life, it also impacts people’s self-esteem, families, and outlook on life. Improving meetings is not just an opportunity to enhance the performance of our companies. It is also a way to impact the lives of the people around us positively.

Meetings are where you share information, discuss problems, and make decisions. They are essential for every organization. If you want to have great results for your company, you need to learn how to run productive meetings. Otherwise, you will be wasting everyone’s time with unproductive discussions. You can’t allow that.

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