How to have meetings that don't suck (as much) - Danielle Leong

This resource first appeared in issue #71 on 23 Apr 2021 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Meetings

How to have meetings that don’t suck (as much) - Danielle Leong

More and more collaboration occurs asynchronously these days, but meetings are vital for coordinating that collaboration. Meetings are also routinely done really poorly, and academia is (or should be) famous for how poorly they’re done. Whether we’re having a meeting to make a decision, solve a problem, gather input, share information, or point everyone in the same direction, Leong calls out some things that should be crystal clear:

• Who is leading this meeting?
• Why are we having this meeting?
• What is the purpose?
• What is the agenda?
• What are the action items?

The middle item, “what is the purpose”, is badly under-used. I used to think that having an agenda was enough; but having a really crisply defined purpose, especially for recurring meetings, is in the long term even more important. You can’t evaluate whether a meeting was effective or not unless there’s a goal or purpose in mind. An agenda should serve the purpose, and it often implies the purpose, but having it explicitly stated makes it much easier make a meeting better.

Having a purpose also makes it clear when a meeting should be multiple, smaller meetings. If a meeting turns into a grab-bag of purposes, it should be split up. Leong has a list of suggested (short) lengths of times for many different kinds of meetings.

There’s a lot of other stuff in Leong’s article, including links to other good resources like designing useful meetings.