6 Steps for Successful Meetings (Classic)

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. Before we get started, I want to share a little update with you all. For the next little while, we are going to be republishing classic episodes of Founder’s Journal. Why? Well, one, I think these past episodes are really good, and with so many new listeners over the last few months,  it's very possible you haven't actually heard some of these older episodes. And two, I am spending the month of May evolving Founder’s Journal so that we can make this show as good as humanly possible for the next generation of builders. I would love your help as I dream up the future of the show. So once you've listened to the episode, shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com and tell me what you'd like to see from me. All right. That's the update. Now time for the episode. In today's classic episode, originally published June 21st, 2021, I offer up six timeless lessons for taking control of meetings in your professional life. 

6 Lessons for Conducting Successful Meetings

Over the last six years building Morning Brew, I've been in thousands of meetings. I've run many of them. I've been an attendee in many of them. And if I'm being honest, a majority of those meetings have been ineffective or unnecessary. As much as this episode is for you to level-up how you think about meetings, it's just as much to hold me accountable for making meetings better within my professional world, too. So here are six timeless lessons for taking control of meetings in your professional life.

#1: Meetings are a last resort

 Lesson one: Meetings are a last resort, not a first option. A meeting is a form of communication with the highest opportunity cost of time. The bar should be super high for when you call a meeting; otherwise, you're at risk of wasting time, taking people out of their productive workflow, and not respecting the time of several people. It requires everyone to sync up their calendars, which at times means moving things around to accommodate the meeting, and a one-hour meeting with five people isn't a one-hour meeting: It's a five-hour meeting in terms of the trade-off for all people that are in attendance. I find meetings are oftentimes honestly, just a lazy attempt to get something done. Something needs to be done, and the easiest way to do it is for you to just throw time on a calendar to get that thing done in the future. You're basically just kicking the can down the road without respecting people's time. Take it even more seriously when you're setting up recurring meetings. Now you're not just talking about taking an hour of someone's time this week, you're talking about taking an hour of someone's time for the foreseeable future. That's lesson one.

#2: Make meetings two-thirds as long as you think they need to be

Lesson two: Make meetings two-thirds as long as you think they need to be. One of the worst practices is when a meeting goes the full time just because that's what the calendar said. How many times have you been in a 30-minute meeting? You're like, okay, 20 minutes in, and I think we've gotten everything out of it, yet you still keep talking for the next 10 minutes? If a meeting is 30 minutes, schedule it for 20 minutes. If a meeting is 60 minutes, schedule it for 40 minutes. It respects everyone's time and forces you to keep things on track, versus allowing tangents to happen. Because you know that there's more than enough time allocated for the meeting. What this also means is that the meeting leader or an appointed person should own the role of facilitating the meeting. That means making sure the agenda is followed, not allowing tangents to derail the entire meeting, and pushing things forward once a clear decision has been made. That's lesson two.

 Lesson three: If as the meeting leader, you haven't shared a meeting agenda, meeting prep, and meeting goals, don't expect the meeting to go well. It's this crazy thing. People just expect that meetings will happen and they will be great. When else in life would you expect anything to go well if you haven't set expectations or planned ahead? As a meeting leader, if you are asking people to give their time to you, it is a non-negotiable that you take on the responsibility of creating the best chance for the meeting to succeed. That means every single attendee should know what the agenda is for the meeting, what purpose they serve in the meeting, if there's any homework or brainstorming they need to do prior to the meeting, and what the desired outcome or outcomes are for the meeting. Just to give you an example, our head of audio, the producer for Founder’s Journal and myself had a meeting two days ago. The agenda was discussing my audio equipment first, then second, my scripting and recording schedule, and finally, the musical experience of my show. The goal of the meeting was to walk away having a clear framework for how we produce the show moving forward and the agenda mapped to that goal exactly. And the only prep that needed to be done for the meeting was me easily outlining to my producer and the head of audio exactly how I script and record the show now, what equipment I use to record, and what equipment has been recommended to me as I think about upgrading. If you're a meeting leader and you're not doing the work to make the meeting run well, you should not expect attendees to take you or the meeting seriously. 

#4: Meetings are not most things you think they are

Lesson four: Meetings are not for most things. Meetings are not for catch-ups. I'm not suggesting you don't do coffee catch-ups with someone, but I wouldn't consider that a meeting. A meeting has a very specific desired outcome, involves three-to-five people, and leads to an important decision that must be made. Meetings are not for initial brainstorms. Those should be done independently and then shared over docs or email, and then you can come together to make a joint decision via meeting after the brainstorm. Brainstorms should always happen before, though. It gives you time to think creatively, and it gives other people time to pressure-test the ideas that you brainstormed on your own time. Meetings are not for status updates. Those should be sent via email. If people have questions on the updates, those can be answered over email as well. And if questions on those updates turn into some sort of debate that leads to an important decision to be made by several people, then that can turn into a meeting. So meetings are not for most things. What meetings are for is for three-to-five people to make an important decision that has cross-organizational implications. If it impacts more than two people, and if it impacts several parts of your organization, then a meeting can happen. In any other scenario, a meeting probably should not happen.

#5: Treat a meeting like a product

Lesson five: Treat a meeting like a product. Solicit feedback; make it better. Similar to what I was saying about meeting prep, people just assume meetings will be great and get better over time. That would be like launching any new product into the world and then just completely going on to autopilot, not measuring engagement, not soliciting feedback from your customers, just none of that. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. A meeting is a product and its customers are its attendees. Would you ever think about not making your product better for your customers? No. So don't think about not making meetings better for your attendees. By asking attendees three simple questions after every meeting, you will learn a ton and have the information to make your meetings better over time. Ask them if they think the meeting was a good use of their time, ask them if they think the goal of the meeting was accomplished, and ask them if they would do anything different for the next meeting. 

#6: Meetings are ephemeral

The sixth and final lesson: Meetings are ephemeral. Make sure you preserve their learnings. When you have a meeting, it is only being experienced by the people present in that meeting. But if we go back to my definition of when it makes sense to have a meeting, you should have really important decisions and discussions that come out of every meeting you have. If that's not the case, it shouldn't be a meeting. Whether it's for people that couldn't attend the meeting or people who the meetings’ outcomes, impact, memorializing the meeting is just as important as having the meeting itself. You, as the meeting leader or an appointed facilitator, should always take meeting minutes and make it glaringly obvious to people not in attendance what the major outcomes were. If people read your minutes and have lots of questions, it probably means you weren't clear enough with how you articulated the meeting’s outcome. And by the way, keeping meeting minutes is also a great force function to keep the meeting on topic, on time, and not go on tangents, because honestly it will be pretty embarrassing and awkward to write a whole bunch of minutes that have nothing to do with the purpose of the meeting. 

I want to hear from you

And those are the six timeless lessons for taking control of your meetings. I'd love to hear if you have any questions about these lessons or if you have any additional meeting lessons that I haven't shared, but you think are really important. Shoot me an email at alex@morningbrew.com or DM me on Twitter @businessbarista. And if there are any good, new ideas, I'm going to share them on social media with my followers. Thanks so much as always for listening to Founder’s Journal. Be sure to share the episode with friends and co-workers and I'll catch you next episode.