Unfortunately, most meetings are not good meetings.  A good meeting can be a catalyst for innovation and action and a boon to morale.  A bad meeting at the very least is a massive waste of time, and can also destroy morale, halt momentum, and drive people away.

While there is a lot of nuance to be considered when trying to identify the factors that are critical to making a successful meeting, I do think that for the most part we can boil it down to a handful of key principals.

Anyone who has enough power to call a meeting should know how to manage a meeting.

And most of those people don’t.  Especially managers.  Oddly enough, managers are notoriously bad at managing meetings.  Worst of all is a meeting between managers who are all peers.  Or peers in general.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  A better way of rephrasing the above point is

Each Meeting Should Have a Single Owner

This is the one that everyone tends to neglect.  This is probably more important than any meeting methodology.  No matter how much other art and ceremony goes into your meetings, this is in my opinion the single greatest factor in the success of a meeting.

A single owner, who everyone recognizes as the ruler of the meeting.

This does not mean the most powerful, high ranking person in attendance.  The owner of the meeting does not necessarily have any other power other than to keep the meeting on track.  In fact, it’s usually better if they don’t have any other authority and if they don’t have a lot of opinions they are trying to get across.  That way, the people with all the ideas and authority are free to let their minds and mouths ramble around, and the meeting owner will keep everyone focused.  Of course, this is usually not the case.  In most cases, the person who calls the meeting is the person who owns it, and the meeting is usually called by someone in a position of power over all the attendees.  This has potential for tyranny, but that’s mitigated if the meeting has a clear goal.  In any case, the meeting owner’s job is to drive the meeting towards the accomplishment of that goal.

To some, the whole “single owner” principal sounds ridiculously obvious, but how many meetings have you attended lately where everyone in the room (1) agreed on who was running the meeting, and (2) the person running the meeting took appropriate control to keep things focused?  If you’ve been to any meetings like that lately, I’ll bet you would call it an effective meeting.  Tell me if I’m wrong.  It’s still possible to get other stuff wrong, but having a single meeting owner covers over a number of evils.

And as already mentioned, they should know how to run a meeting as well.  Which brings us to…

Every Meeting Should Have a Single, Clearly Stated Purpose / Outcome

I hope this one is obvious enough to everyone.  But I’ll spell it out.  Most people don’t decline meetings or even try to clarify the purpose.  Most people don’t want to be “that guy”, the one who says “what is the purpose of this meeting?  I don’t think it is warranted”.  So once someone schedules a meeting, it means that the requested resources are almost always committed unless the original meeting caller calls it off.  If I wanted to sabotage an organization, the easiest way to do it would be to start calling a bunch of meetings.

Similarly, without a purpose everyone is confused, some people want to leave, some constantly change the subject, some talk too much, and no one knows when the meeting is over.

Oh yeah, part of that purpose should be to end on time!

That sounds a bit extreme…

Granted, most meetings usually need to address multiple issues.  However, in that case you need an agenda, and the single purpose is to get through the agenda on time.  Preferably the agenda should anticipate how much time will be devoted to each subject.

Also granted, meetings should not be overly rigid, and often it makes sense to pivot (but not drift) to some other subject matter.  But

Certain Meeting Goals Never Not Be Combined

In general, you should not combine these more than one of these goals into a single meaning:

• Gather Input / Ideas
• Explain Something
• Planning
• Designing
• Reviewing
• Deciding / Approving

The main reasons for this are that it’s inefficient and almost always leads meetings to run long.  Inefficient, because in order to go from gathering input to making decisions, there usually has to be some processing time.  And what that means is that people just keep on restating their points over and over until everyone has digested everything to the point that they are ready to make a decision about something.  It would have been better for everyone to go to lunch and come back and then decide.  But even that is a flawed approach.  The simple fact is that sometimes a decision just can’t be made.  People inevitably underestimate the amount of discussion it takes in order to truly get everything out on the table so it can be evaluated.  The problem with combining any of the items I listed is that before moving from one to the other you have to stop and ask whether you’re done with the first one, and you need to be prepared to keep going with it if you’re not.

One of the tragically flawed meetings at a previous company was the occasional “all hands” marathon meetings wherein we tried to “boil the ocean”.  It was a combination of everything listed, with no agendas and no single owner, and a cross-section of a bunch of different roles, all of whom had different agendas and priorities.

it is dangerous, and is one of the many reasons why…

Sometimes You Just Shouldn’t Meet

Even if you have a single purpose for the meeting, a single owner, and know how to run a meeting, it still might not make sense to meet.

For example, if a lot of people have a lot to say, a meeting just isn’t a great format.  It’s inefficient to make everyone sit around and listen to each other’s viewpoints one at a time, especially as people usually end up repeating themselves and even re-inventing their position on the fly, since they are usually thinking it up on the spot.  A better solution is to have each person write up their position in full, send it out to everyone else, comment on each other’s ideas, and eventually have a meeting to determine action items.

I’m defining “organization” fairly broadly here.  Companies, nations, families, churches, clubs, etc.  However, I’ll probably drift in the direction of discussing small to midsized companies, partly because that’s where most of my experience lies, and partly because most of the books and articles I’ve seen focus on either super-huge, multinational corporations.  Of course the big stuff merits discussion, but I’m always annoyed when people hyperfocus on big stuff.  Developers are often measured by scalability or code-base, rather than quality, for example, and most development articles are not targeted at writing, say, a small-to-midsized business application.  Granted, most stuff that applies at a large level can be applied at a smaller level.  But it doesn’t really work the opposite way.  In engineering for example, the bigger the system gets, the more limited you are in the types of things you can do.  The smaller the system, the greater our options, such that we might be able to solve the problem with a paperclip and some duct tape.  Let’s not limit ourselves to what the big guys do.

Decide, Collectively, To Be Effective and Productive

This one is kind of obvious, but I can’t remember ever having worked for an organization where people agreed to make a concerted effort to be productive and effective.  Perhaps they did as individuals or as lip service to a fiat issued from above, but not as a group.  I’ve tried to do it with the small teams I led, and I hope that rather than mandate it, I persuaded everyone that it would be better for them individually to do this.

I was having a conversation with an executive who was charged with creating a “learning organization”.  It sounds just great.  Essential, even.  But it’s kind of like wanting your kids to learn stuff in school, getting horses to drink, etc.  There’s only so much you can lead them to that point.  And if an organization wants not to learn, improve, change, grow, then you’ve got problems.

Given the general societal tendency to find a job and then cruise along, to protect our territory and job security, to  avoid commitment at work in order to throttle our work load or avoid work altogether, I’m not surprised that we do this.  But I am disappointed.  It’s just not a wise decision in the long run.  Perhaps I should write some other posts about this, i.e. “Why You Should Love What You Do” and “How to Love What You Do”.

With a big company, there would be a digression about how to market this idea to the entire company.  Road shows, emails, memos, etc.  Let’s focus on everyone else.  Grass roots.  Conversations.  That’s the best way to get people on board with the idea of pursuing quality and productivity.  Like multi-level marketing.   Get two people on board, then have them get two others on board.