Good Meetings - Sara Drasner

This resource first appeared in issue #82 on 10 Jul 2021 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Meetings

The purpose of the meeting is clear
There’s an agenda (we’ll dive in to the complexity of this in a moment)
There are the right people in the room. Not too many where communication is overly complicated, not too few where the people you need to move forward aren’t there.
There’s some order. People aren’t dropping in and out, talking over each other, or being generally inconsiderate
There’s a clear decision, outcome, and next steps at the end

Some points Drasner makes that I think are particularly useful in our context include the fact that purpose isn’t the agenda, the agenda is a tool that serves the purpose; that different kinds of meetings need to be run different ways; that too many people in the meeting is a common failure mode; and that respectful conflicts are good, and that people not saying things that need to be said are bad.

She also suggests meetings can be started and finished with sentences that sum up:

The shared purpose
What you’re doing about getting to that outcome
Who is owning what
How
When, what are the timelines