311. Your Best Meeting Ever: How to Fix Broken Meetings with Rebecca Hinds

What if your calendar isn’t a badge of honor but a map of wasted potential? We sit down with Rebecca Hinds, PhD and author of Your Best Meeting Ever, to challenge the idea that more meetings mean more value—and to rebuild meeting culture from the ground up. Rebecca unpacks the visibility bias that equates busyness with status, explains why meetings multiply when clarity disappears, and shows leaders how to design time together like a product with purpose, users, and measurable outcomes.

We dive into the 4D rule—only meet to decide, debate, discuss, or develop—and how that single filter slashes status updates and nudges real work back to async. You’ll learn why eight is a magic ceiling for decision meetings, how to include voices without overinviting through pre-reads and transparent notes, and the art of closing the loop so people feel heard even when their idea isn’t acted on yet. Rebecca shares counterintuitive time design: odd-start meetings to beat Parkinson’s Law, strategic buffers to prevent “meeting hangovers,” and the cultural signal sent when you end early because the purpose is done.

Ready for a reset? This episode explores “meeting doomsday,” a 48-hour calendar cleanse where every meeting must earn its place. The biggest gains come from small redesigns like shorter meetings and fewer attendees. You’ll also learn how to use ROTI feedback, clearer agendas, and technology the right way to improve focus and decision-making. 

If you’re tired of back-to-back Zooms and wondering when real work happens, this conversation gives you a practical blueprint. You’ll gain clear norms, language to protect your team’s time, and leadership moves that turn meetings into a competitive advantage. Subscribe, share with a teammate, and ask yourself: which meeting will you redesign first?

🌐 Connect with Rebecca:
• Website: https://www.rebeccahinds.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-hinds/

📚 You can purchase Rebecca's book on Amazon:
• Your Best Meeting Ever: https://www.amazon.com/dp/166806748X/

Transcript

The Case Against Bad Meetings

Rethinking Meetings As A Product

Introducing Rebecca Hines

Mick Spiers 0:01

Have you ever looked at your calendar and thought, when am I actually supposed to get any real work done? Have you ever left a meeting feeling drained, frustrated, or wondering why you were even there in the first place? And have you ever asked the uncomfortable question? What if meetings aren't just a nuisance, but a leadership failure? Today's episode is about rethinking meetings. Not as a necessary evil, but as a leadership product that deserves intentional design. I'm joined by Rebecca Hinds, author of Your Best Meeting Ever. This conversation will challenge the visibility bias that equates busyness with value, why meetings multiply when clarity disappears, and how leaders can reclaim time, energy, and focus across their organizations by rethinking the architecture of your meetings. So if meetings frustrate you, like many, then this episode will give you a new way forward. Hey everyone, and welcome back to the Leadership Project. I'm greatly honored today to be joined by Rebecca Hinds, and this is going to be a conversation that's going to be impactful for all of you. Rebecca is a leading expert on organizational behavior and the future of work. She has a PhD from Stanford, and she's the author of a book called Your Best Meeting Ever: Seven Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done. And I think this is the universal truth. I think if I spoke to every organization in the world, there's two things that will come up. The CEO will talk about, oh, we we have silos inside our organizations, and people don't work across those silos. And the second thing would be, oh, our meetings. And in fact, for those that are watching the video, the visceral reaction that some people have to meetings to go, oh god, here's another bloody meeting. Or they look at their their calendar for the day, and it's just back-to-back meetings, and they don't know when they're going to get anything done. So I think this is a universal truth that we all need help with. So without any further ado, I I need personally need to get deep into this one so I can improve my meetings, and I know the audience needs to as well. So, Rebecca, could you please say hello to the audience? And I want to start with a really crucial one, which is where did we go wrong? How did how did meetings become this beast, this time sponge, and this thing that people can have a negative reaction to, even the thought of going into a meeting?

Visibility Bias And Busyness

Rebecca Hinds 2:45

Hi, everyone. It's so nice to be here. And Mick, thank you for having me. It's such an important question. And there are multiple different dimensions in terms of why and how we got here. We know that face-to-face communication, you know, being part of a tribe, feeling a part of an inner circle is so innate to who we are as humans. And our natural knee-jerk reaction is often to solve problems by bringing everyone together. You know, for our ancestors, it was bringing everyone together around the fire or the campfire. Now that's manifested into this innate tendency to bring everyone face to face synchronously to solve problems. There's another aspect of this that I think is underappreciated. And that is when we think about collaboration and how we work together in organizations, so much of that work is invisible, right? It's hard to see someone thinking deeply or helping a teammate, collaborating through technology. But a meeting is a very visible form of communication, right? We can often see people's calendars in our organizations. We can certainly see people in a conference room. We can often see the Zoom screen or the team screen. And because of that, we also know that as humans, we associate visibility with value and presence with productivity. And what I often find to be the bigger piece of the puzzle is workers and teams lack clarity in terms of what they're responsible for, how to show progress, how to show that they're making progress towards key business outcomes. And so scheduling a meeting becomes a way of showing progress, a way of showing productivity, regardless of whether anything meaningful happens in the meeting. And we all feel this. If we see someone's calendar and it's packed full with meetings, or they show up saying, Oh, I'm double booked for this meeting, we associate it with busyness and importance and status within the organization, such that I think a bigger part of the picture here and the solution is overcoming this visibility bias that incites us to schedule more meetings on the calendar.

Mick Spiers 5:10

This is a powerful takeaway already. And I recognize it in myself, I have to say, Rebecca, that being busy becomes a badge of honor. And if you're not busy, then you start questioning your own value. You you brought the word value there as well. So we we start questioning our own value, but it doesn't have to be this way. So what's how do we start breaking that visibility bias?

Role Clarity Beats Calendar Cramming

Rebecca Hinds 5:36

Mm-hmm. It's it's hard. And the most effective way to do it is to ensure that people have clarity in terms of what they're responsible for, what business outcomes they're responsible for, and not just outputs. This is a major problem we see across the board. Organizations tend to over-index on measuring outputs or incentivizing outputs, the number of codes, code lines written, the number of blogs published, the number of meetings on your calendar, even if we're not formally uh rewarding or incentivizing that, that's the default, as opposed to if we give employees clarity in terms of what they're responsible for, what key business objectives they're responsible for, and how those ladder up to business objectives, all of a sudden you start to see a shift because they're able to show that progress, they're able to visibly show that progress in a way that doesn't require physically being in a room with someone.

Mick Spiers 6:41

Okay, interesting. So I'm I'm hearing two pivots there. One one is the role clarity. And I think there's a lot of people that get confused with this. They uh when they're going home at the end of the day and they're trying to measure whether they had a good day and oh, yeah, did I get much done today? If they don't have a lot of role clarity, that's gonna be a messy conversation. In their own head, I'm talking about. Maybe some people talk it out aloud as well. So so they're on their way home and they're questioning, oh, did I get anything done today? And if there's not a lot of clarity around roles and responsibilities, that's gonna be a confused conversation. And they might go home going, well, yes, I did go to seven meetings, but did I really get anything done? And then the second one, what are we measuring? And I know this is gonna come up when we talk about your principles, but are we measuring output or are we measuring impact? Is what is what I'm hearing, Rebecca. And measuring impact would be connected to, well, my role and responsibility is X, and I measure X through Y. Is that what I'm hearing?

Rebecca Hinds 7:45

Yes, and ideally there should be a system in place where it's very clear and visible to others too, in terms of what is this person responsible for? What are their KPIs, what are their goals for the quarter, and being able to see that across individuals, across teams, across organization, because then you also eliminate so much of this fear of missing out associated with meetings as well, where if it's clear what work you're responsible for and how to achieve it, you start to minimize the fear we all feel in terms of not being in that meeting because perhaps something important is going to be said, or perhaps we need to contribute in a certain way, that clarity helps us be much more judicious and intentional about do we actually need to be in that meeting? And also, likewise, when we're organizing a meeting, how do we ensure that given how expensive meetings are, we're bringing the right stakeholders into the meeting and not overinviting.

Mick Spiers 8:50

This is a powerful one. And I had this one ready to ask you because this is one I've struggled with in my career, and and I think everyone listening would have this. I'd say early in my career, getting offended that I wasn't invited to a meeting, and then later in my career, having those moments through a lack of clarity, I've got to say, and a lack of communication, where we've had some kind of meeting, and then someone's found out about it later and go, and they're mortified that they they weren't invited. But if there was no need for them to be in there, we're the way I try and reframe it in my own mind is I'm giving them the gift of some time back that, yes, we we just had a 40-minute meeting on topic X, but you didn't have to sit through that meeting. We g we gave you your time back, but it's hard because they wanted to feel included, and and that's a fundamental human need to feel love and belonging and to feel included. So I understood the clarity point. What about the communication point? How do we communicate to that person that we're having this meeting? It is an important meeting. I don't want to downplay the importance of the meeting, but you know, you're not needed on this meeting. How do we communicate that?

Inclusion Without Overinviting

Rebecca Hinds 10:04

It's such a great question. And I've even seen, you know, in organizations where, you know, unfortunately, there's there's not this intentionality around meetings, and you get into a situation where no one is showing up for the meeting. And I've even seen leaders start to shrink the attendee list to create that fear of missing out. And all of a sudden, when a meeting goes from 25 people to 10 people and you're not in the 10-person group, you start to want to attend the meeting just because, you know, there is this fear of missing out in a way that's that's really toxic for the organization. The best way to overcome this is to be very transparent, to be very transparent in terms of what is the agenda for the meeting, what are we hoping to achieve in the meeting? What are the specific roles of the people in the meeting? And then make sure that to the extent you're able, given privacy or what's being discussed in the meeting, share the transcript, share the notes from the meeting because that eliminates the fear of missing out. If you know what was said in the meeting, you're much less likely to feel that fear of missing out because you're able to consume self-serve that that information afterwards. A lot of the fear of missing out that we feel happens because we're worried that something is going to be said about us or something involving our team or a project is going to be discussed in a meeting. If you give people that clarity in terms of knowing what's been discussed, they're much less likely to feel a need to be synchronously in the meeting because they're consuming the information asynchronously.

Mick Spiers 11:46

Okay. I can see that for sure. I've got a second challenge there, though, around value, right? So what if the person doesn't feel valued and they go, well, well, person X was invited, so their opinion must be more important than mine, is it? Like they they start feeling like they're not seen and heard and valued. How do we address that part?

Rebecca Hinds 12:07

It's hard and it's so dependent on the individual. You know, ideally, we operate in a world where we understand the purpose of the meeting and we understand that maybe we are, you know, involved in the decision that's taking place in the meeting, but we're not a key stakeholder. And this is why, you know, this is the specific role for my peer in the meeting. You start to get a better sense of, okay, this makes sense that I'm not not in the meeting. But the best thing a leader can do is to articulate, as you mentioned earlier, that they are being a steward of the employees' time. They're giving employees back more time because they recognize how important that focus time or that time with customers is for the business objectives. And it's important to be clear on that in particular and be clear on how important different priorities are in the grand scheme of things relative to the time spent in the meeting.

Communicating Value When You’re Not Invited

Mick Spiers 13:13

Yeah. Okay. So I'm hearing an element there of pre-communication and then post-communication to make sure that they don't feel like they were excluded. But we did it in this way, and here's why we did it. So so I often believe, Rebecca, that people will accept a decision that maybe they don't fully like as long as they understood why that decision was made. Now, I feel like I'm borderline on free free coaching and consulting here, Rebecca. So bear with me for a second, because I've got a challenge at the moment that I'm dealing with. I'm gonna share with you how we're doing it, and you can give me some tips of whether we're doing it well or not doing it well. So we're about to have a workshop, it's gonna be a half-day workshop where we're dealing with a a pocket of our organization at 70 people dealing with one particular collaboration topic between two job families. I'll just leave it at that for now, but it's 70 people. But you can imagine that having 70 people in a workshop is gonna be a disaster. So we've handpicked six people that are gonna come in to be the representatives of the group. But before the meeting, we have sent a survey to all 70 to get their inputs. And after the meeting, we are gonna have a mini town hall meeting where we broadcast the outcomes. How are we doing here? Is it how's that technique work?

Rebecca Hinds 14:36

What you're doing here is you're you're delineating between what needs to happen synchronously in the meeting and how to achieve that best outcome and what can happen asynchronously. And this is one of the healthiest practices an organization can adopt is understanding how do you still get that input from key representatives asynchronously outside the meeting so that you have full context and then bring in the people who are right to make the decision, solve the problem, debate the important topics within the meeting, and then make sure again, you're being transparent in terms of what's been discussed. The key gap I often see is organizations will go through this process. The best ones will do a share out after in terms of the lessons learned, what's, you know, what's the decision that's been made, what are the next steps. But often they'll leave out the connection to what was submitted pre-meeting. They'll leave out that link. And so employees might understand the next steps, but they don't feel like their input has been heard or acted on. And that's the critical link that you know enables this type of practice to work is yes, we heard this, we heard A, B, and C pre-meeting. We're only going to address B right now. But here's what we're going to do related to A and C in the future. That's the often the critical gap that organizations miss is making sure, because if you're the person who really cares about A and C, you're not going to feel a sense of ownership or a sense of voice regarding the decision.

Mick Spiers 16:23

Yeah, really good. So a nice, powerful closed-loop communication. So the people do feel that they were heard and that even if their idea isn't being acted upon now, it wasn't ignored. It was thank you. And that one's in the next rhythm or or it's in the future, we're going to deal with topic A and topic C, for example. Okay.

Rebecca Hinds 16:44

Yes. And and the other aspect of this that I think is important is often when this type of activity takes place, it's very well intentioned. And often, you know, you bring together the team leads of the functions rather than the entire, the entire team. What's really important is think about is it more important to have that leadership voice in the room? Or is it more important to have the person who's the subject matter expertise in the room, the subject matter expert in the room? Because often, you know, you'll bring in the leaders of the functions by default. And in reality, there are people, you know, perhaps lower down in the org chart that have a better perspective and viewpoint and are more intimately involved and familiar with the scenario. And it can be a really powerful leadership move to bring together the people who truly have the expertise, regardless of where they sit in the in the org chart.

Who Should Be In The Room

Mick Spiers 17:50

Yeah, now we're getting into some powerful territory on who we select. And I fully agree with you, Rebecca. Like I think about if you're trying to understand a problem andor find a solution to a problem, it's usually the person that's closest to the action that's that's got a good detail. You need people with helicopter view and horizon two and horizon three views. Like you need people with vision. But if you want to know a problem on the production line or a customer-facing problem, well, you better talk to the people that are closest to the action.

Rebecca Hinds 18:24

And understanding, you know, what is the intent of the meeting? Is it to gather perspective so that we can make the most informed decision? Or are you explicitly trying to move work forward in the meeting? Because that has a different impact in terms of who you invite. What I also see organizations air wrong with is not bringing together the decision makers, the people who can actually make the decisions post-meeting. If you only bring, you know, the frontline workers to the meeting, that can be extremely valuable and getting perspectives and deciding what you know decision you're making and what perspectives need to be incorporated. But if you're actually trying to make the decision and ensure that the next steps are going to be followed through on, you absolutely need to have the people with the decision-making power. And often that is the leaders within the within the organization.

Mick Spiers 19:27

So I'm hearing a lot around purposeful design and intentionality with this. And you might even need two meetings. You might need the collecting of perspectives and options in one meeting and then the decision making in the next meeting. Okay. Really interesting. All right. So I don't know that there is a perfect answer to this, Rebecca. I'm really keen to hear. Is there a perfect number of people?

The Magic Number: Keep It Under Eight

Rebecca Hinds 19:52

There's no perfect number. We do see from the research that as soon as you get above seven or eight people in a meeting, we start to see a whole host of negative consequences kick in. People start to social loaf. We feel less responsible for the outcome of the meeting and making the meeting meaningful. So I rarely recommend, you know, more than eight people in a meeting, especially if it's a decision-making meeting. But the right number of people is the right number of people who absolutely need to be in that meeting to achieve the purpose.

Mick Spiers 20:28

Yeah. Okay, perfect. All right. So I want to put a little pin in what we've covered so far. So some key lessons for me taking away is thinking about this visibility bias that we have that shows up in how we feel about ourselves and how we kind of measure and reward value. Are we measuring outputs or are we measuring impact? And we're going to use clarity and communication to make it clear for people what their roles and responsibilities are. And then that can then frame all kinds of discussions about what meetings we're having, how many people are coming, why this person's coming and why you're not coming. And yeah, I think we're we're starting to get somewhere. The number of people in the meeting is not the only problem, though. What in your research, what else do you see in dysfunctional meetings?

Beyond Headcount: What Else Breaks Meetings

Design Length To Fit Purpose

Rebecca Hinds 21:20

I often think about four key dimensions of the meeting. So the first is the length. The length is extremely important. We know that meetings suffer from what's sometimes called Parkinson's law, meaning work expands to fill the time allotted. If you give a meeting 30 minutes, it's probably going to take 30 minutes. And a good test is take a look at your calendar and look at the proportion of your meetings that are either 30 minutes or 60 minutes. Because if most are, it's a sign that we've accepted our calendar's default in terms of what our calendar says should be a meeting and haven't very intentionally designed the meeting. Because all of our meetings should have different purposes. They should have very intentional purposes. And there are a few cases where, you know, a meeting should be exactly the same length for different purposes. Can you make that 30-minute meeting 25 minutes? I studied an individual in the book who ran 27-minute meetings. The more we can be intentional about the length, it also signals to the attendees that, you know, I have been intentional in designing this meeting, thinking about the length, the natural responses for the attendee. Okay, I'm going to reciprocate that in showing up engaged and ready to contribute to the meeting because I see that thought and intentionality put into the meeting.

Buffers And Beating Meeting Hangovers

Mick Spiers 22:42

Okay. So I'm hearing two chapters there. One is we've got a clear purpose of the meeting. And the second is we're intentionally designing the meeting length around that. I'm going to share a little tangent and then come back to that, Rebecca, because I was feeling guilty when talking about this. This is something I've tried recently. So I'm I'm your typical 30-minute, 60-minute calendar. And if you looked at my calendar, you would cry and go, What on earth are you doing, Mick? That is that is ridiculous. But when I before I did the the switch to 25-minute meetings, which is not as intentional as what you're describing yet, I'll I'll openly admit that. But what happened is previously I was going 30 minutes, 30 minutes, 30 minutes, or 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 30 minutes. And what was happening is the meeting before the meeting one would finish, and it would finish on we didn't quite nail it, or something wasn't quite right, and maybe it even bled and became a 32-minute meeting. And then I'm then I'm dropping off meeting one and I'm going into meeting two. First of all, I'm late, which is rude, and you know, disrespectful to the people in meeting two. And then for half of meeting two, I'm still thinking about unresolved business from meeting one. And that's disrespectful. Then I'm not present. I'm not present with the people in meeting in meeting two. So I had to do the 25-minute thing just to give me time to decompress and prepare for the next meeting. So it's not as intentional as what you're talking about in terms of designing the time, but I needed that five-minute uh gap. What are your reflections on this?

Rebecca Hinds 24:20

It's so important. And, you know, I've done research with my colleagues on something that we call meeting hangovers, meaning, you know, and we've all felt it. We leave a meeting, the meeting doesn't leave us. We're ruminating about what has happened in the meeting. These can be good meetings too, because if we've intentionally designed meetings, they should be hard work. They should be cognitively taxing because if they're not, we can probably handle that asynchronously. It probably is more close to information exchange than real discussion debate that absolutely needs face-to-face time. And so those buffers, I call them, you know, strategic pauses between meetings are so important in us, you know, A, showing up on time, as you mentioned, because we also know that people start to resent, even, you know, if not very consciously, subconsciously. As soon as someone is three or four minutes late, people start to resent the person because it's a signal, regardless of your intent, it's a signal that you view your time as more important than anyone else's. And the second aspect is we're showing up engaged, we're showing up ready to contribute, we're showing up respecting the other attendees' time in, you know, this very expensive form of communication that should, in the best cases, be taxing us cognitively and extracting, you know, real mental horsepower that is going to be necessary to make the best decision or have the most productive debate in the meeting.

Mick Spiers 26:01

Yeah, really good, Rebecca. So I I feel like I'm oversharing here a little bit, but I had a breakthrough moment with my CEO where she's usually on time every meeting. But there was this one meeting where she was late and she was she had a legitimate reason for being late. And she was only a few minutes late, by the way. But when she walked into the room and said, Oh wow, I must be late. Mick is already here. That was when I realized I had a problem. But then when I what I want to share is when I changed it and I changed that rhythm, I feel so much better. And and everyone else feels my presence, like I'm I'm really present in the meetings now. I feel like every meeting flows better. I'm I don't have the meeting hangover of thinking about the previous meeting, et cetera.

Start Late To End Strong

Rebecca Hinds 26:48

And it's it's such a human, you know, we we all have different perspectives on time. And in particular, you know, I do a lot of work across the globe and different cultures very much have a different, you know, treatment of time. It's important also to, you know, have those conversations around most people, you know, if you if you arrive one, two, three minutes late, they don't think twice about it. And so it's important for the leader within the organization broadly to communicate just how valuable time is and convey that time is not something we spend or extend. It's it's something that expend, it's something that we invest. And, you know, we're going to collectively recognize the importance of our collective time investment for one another. Having that conversation often does a lot in terms of encouraging people to, you know, think about punctuality in in new and different ways and more productive ways.

Mick Spiers 27:53

Yeah, yeah, really, really good. You're giving us so many powerful tips already. I've got one more question on the timing thing, and then I want to head towards some of your concepts, like a meeting doomsday, and and then your seven principles. Coming back to the time thing, let's use a let's use a 55-minute meeting. Let's let's go with that one for a second. And you mentioned about Parkinson's law before. How do we develop the discipline that if we've called a 55-minute meeting and it had a clear purpose and we have achieved that purpose in 37 minutes, the natural tendency is people drag it out. How do we have the discipline to stop it? That's n that's number one. Sorry for two questions at once. Number two is when we get to 52 minutes into a 55 meeting and we realize that, oh wow, despite our best intentions, we're not going to solve this topic today. We're not going to meet this meeting objective. What do you do there? So number one, discipline to what do you do if you're already done? And number two, what if you're getting towards the end and you're not done?

Rebecca Hinds 29:02

So number one, there are a couple different strategies that I think are are helpful. One is again being explicit, having explicit meeting norms around as soon as we're done the meeting, and as soon as the purpose has been achieved, as soon as we've achieved all the agenda items, we're going to stop the meeting. And, you know, it's okay to end a meeting early. There's a lot of research to show if you give people back the gift of time, that has enormous positive impacts. And so explicitly making that a norm within the organization does a lot in terms of helping people understand and abide by, you know, the opportunity to end the meeting early. There are also practical strategies in terms of we know that if we're going to shorten a 60-minute meeting to a 55-minute meeting, it's much more effective in terms of minimizing the potential for Parkinson's law to start the meeting five minutes late rather than end it five minutes early. Because if you start five minutes after the hour or five minutes after the half hour, you're eliminating the potential for Parkinson's law because the work can't expand when the meeting hasn't even started. Whereas if you take it off the tail end, there's still usually that potential for Parkinson's law. Usually someone is not going to schedule, you know, the next meeting to happen exactly at the 55-minute mark. And so that can be a practical way to sort of minimize the potential. But ideally, we're creating cultures in which, you know, once we're done the meeting, once we've achieved what we need to achieve, we're giving people back that time as a gift.

Mick Spiers 30:53

Really interesting. You've given me something to try, and I'm guilty as charged on this one. So I I mentioned to you that I've made this change to 25 and 55 minute meetings, but what you just said is happening. It's we get to 25 minutes and it bleeds to 29 minutes. And yeah, but if I if I take the five minutes off the front, what will happen? So I'm going to try this. I'm going to write you an email back here, Rebecca, and tell you if it works or not. This is really cool.

From Individual Hacks To Team Norms

Rebecca Hinds 31:19

Please do. And what I what I find interesting about these sort of, you know, they're a little bit quirky, but because our meeting habits are so ingrained, because they're so, you know, part of our day-to-day motion, it's much less intuitive to do it on the front end, to take the time from the front end. And people also, you know, not only is it more effective because it minimizes Parkinson's law, but also people start to take the time more seriously when it's unconventional. They start to think, oh, wow, it's odd this meeting is starting at 1235. The time must be important. The meeting must be important. And they start to show up in a different way, in a way that I think is really fascinating. And some of what we see with, you know, something like a 27-minute meeting, it can jolt people out of a sense of inertia and they start to take the meeting much more seriously.

Mick Spiers 32:17

I love the pattern interrupt. That's what it feels like. It's to me, it's going to be a pattern interrupt. When when I do this, I'm going to, I am going to do it. It's going to feel like a pattern interrupt where you go, oh, this is a bit different. And all of a sudden I'm I've taken autopilot off and I've and I've engaged, right? Yeah, that's really interesting. All right. Now, one thing that's stuck in my head as we go is like so you and I talking as individuals here, there's going to be people listening to this podcast as an individual. People don't typically listen to podcasts as a team. Maybe they do, like I'm not sure. But this can't be an individual sport. If you're going to reset your meeting habits that you spoke about, and you're going to have a conversation about it, is also something I'm hearing, Rebecca. How do we do it as a team? Because if if I change my habit and no one else around me knows about it, well, all of us all of a sudden I'm going to be one that's out of rhythm and it's going to be a bit weird. How do we do it together?

The 4D Rule: Decide, Debate, Discuss, Develop

Rebecca Hinds 33:15

It's so important. And, you know, meetings by definition are interdependent on other people. And as much as we want to, and there there are things we can do as individuals in terms of protecting our time and having personal norms and rules around what we're willing to tolerate or not, blocking off no meeting blocks, you know, is it can be a very effective strategy, for example. But we need to be changing the culture at the team, an ideally organizational level. And this differs in terms of if you're an individual contributor versus a leader, you know, this the strategies and the liberties you can take and feel autonomy to take differ. If you're an individual contributor, you know, you might need to be broaching the conversation differently and bringing it up to your manager, hey, you know, the meetings that we have as a team aren't working for me, or I see opportunities to make them more productive in service of, you know, our team and organizational objectives. Can we try XYZ? Leading with curiosity is often an effective tactic. If you're a leader and you are able to implement some of these strategies across your team, that's going to be more effective. So having clear norms, one of the most important things a team leader can do or an individual contributor in sharing this with the team leader is being very explicit about what deserves to be a meeting in our organization, what deserves to be a meeting on our team. Very few people have that clarity. And a good test is ask two of your teammates or ask three of your direct reports what deserves to be a meeting in our organization or on our team. You'll probably get more than one different answer. And we know that as soon as the answers start to differ, we again default to meetings as a knee-jerk communication tactic because we aren't clear on what the purpose is. And this is our natural tendency. So in the book, I talk about the 4D CEO rule, which is essentially a two-part test to decide whether a meeting should exist. The first part of the test is a meeting should only exist if the purpose is to decide, debate, discuss, or develop yourself or your team. And so even that first test, it starts to eliminate a lot of the things that we often use meetings for: status updates, broadcast briefings, information exchange, all of these things should not be happening in a meeting and giving employees clarity in terms of this is the rule, this is the norm that we're going to, you know, we're going to stick to and implement within our team or organization, that helps them make much more disciplined calls in terms of scheduling that meeting on the calendar.

Mick Spiers 36:21

Yeah, really good. So two things I'm hearing there. One is that we are going to have a conversation. So if you're going to disrupt the pattern and you're going to try to get some better meeting habits and disciplines in your organization, it's going to start with a conversation. And it's going to start with a conversation around curiosity. Two things I was thinking there. One is you could start with something that everyone would all agree on. You could say, Does does anyone not agree that we can do better at the way that we do meetings? And I I seriously doubt anyone's going to have anyone go, No, our meetings are perfect. I would I paid, I'd put a thousand dollars down on that, but no one's going to have that answer, right? And then, okay, so what can we do differently? What can we do differently? What's working for you? What's not working for you? And identify those areas of differences which would expose a lack of clarity of purpose, lack of clarity of what are we trying to achieve, etc. etc. And then the second one, I think it's a golden question for everyone to take away here. Does this need to be a meeting? Does this need to be a meeting? And if it's not one of the four D's, the was it design, discuss, develop, debate, discuss. Debate again. Yeah, so if it's if it's not one of the four D's, make it a status update in some asynchronous way. Yeah. Really powerful, Rebecca.

Rebecca Hinds 37:44

And we have something going for us. You know, we have this visceral negative reaction to meetings that we all feel, you know, we've been socially conditioned in so many ways to believe meetings are bad because so many of them are bad and dysfunctional. We know, you know, bad is stronger than good, and negative experiences have a much greater impact on us than positive ones, but we can use that to our advantage when we're trying to redesign meetings. It's very important that we create, you know, a sense of energy and movement around this. And often a great way to do that is position meetings as the enemy. You know, meetings are coming at the cost of our best thinking, our best work, moving work forward. It's not about the person who's running the bad meeting. It's about the meeting as, you know, not being designed as a very important product that can help us move work forward. That type of, you know, it's a movement, it's a collective energy. It's really important. Everyone feels a sense of ownership and autonomy in, you know, fixing the problem together. And the problem is bad meetings. It's not the person who has scheduled the bad meeting.

Mick Spiers 39:00

I like the depersonalization of that, that it's not attack on the individual. That's really powerful, Rebecca. Now, I hinted towards this a moment ago. I've got to say, when I read this part, I was like, whoa, wow. Meeting doomsday.

Make Meetings The Enemy, Not People

Meeting Doomsday: A 48-Hour Reset

Rebecca Hinds 39:14

Meeting doomsday is, you know, it's the single most effective strategy that I've certainly come across to fix our dysfunctional meetings. Now, it's one piece of the puzzle. It's not going to solve all of our meeting problems. But if you're in a situation where you feel overwhelmed by meetings, you have a bunch of legacy meetings on your calendar that are no longer working for you or your team, doing a meeting doomsday and doing it very intentionally, right? This isn't something you do overnight. It's something that you do a lot of prep work and planning for. It's essentially a 48-hour calendar cleanse where employees are asked to delete the recurring meetings for those 48 hours and then very intentionally build their calendar back up from scratch. So add back the meetings that are valuable, but every meeting needs to earn its spot on the calendar. And this has several different impacts, both psychologically and behaviorally. One is it forces us to challenge the status quo. And we've done the comparison in terms of how does this compare to just doing a meeting audit? And it doesn't have the same psychological effect because with an audit, the meetings are still on your calendar and you're in the mindset of defending them because they're already there. Doomsday forces you to rethink from the ground up and critically, it also gives people the social permission to decline the meeting, where we are so hesitant, understandably, to decline meetings, to take them off the calendar because they feel so personal. We feel like we're hurting the other person's feelings. It's a social contract. In, you know, as soon as you put a meeting on the calendar, people feel obliged to reciprocate it. It's a natural human tendency where if you give people the explicit permission, if you take the meetings off the calendar, you're removing a lot of that social pressure, a lot of the social guilt in a way that, you know, enables you to create a much healthier meeting culture.

Mick Spiers 41:31

Yeah, really good, Rebecca. So I'm hearing, building on the chapter that we just had, which was we're going to have a conversation about our meetings, about our habits, about what we can do better. Now we're talking about really a real cleanse, a real reset where we're deleting those meetings, not the other way around. I would have done it the other way around, to be clear. I would have gone through, oh, does this need to be a meeting, etc.? But you're saying remove it. Now I only put it back on as an intentional action. And that intentional action is going to build some of the things that we're talking about. What is the purpose of this meeting? How long does it need to be? Who needs to be there? Who doesn't need to be there? And does it need to be a meeting at all? And it doesn't go back on if it doesn't need to be a meeting, and it doesn't go back on if it doesn't have a clear purpose, a clear design around how long is it going to be and who's going to be there and how are we going to run this meeting.

Redesign Wins: Micro Changes, Major Time Back

Rebecca Hinds 42:24

Yes. And Mick, what's fascinating is, you know, I would have expected going in when I first started doing these doomsdays and studying different renditions of them. I would have expected that most of the time savings would come from the meetings that are deleted, right? Employees deciding they no longer need to bring these meetings back on the calendar. What we actually see is most of the time savings come from the redesign. Yes, you end up, you know, eliminating a lot of meetings entirely, but most of the time savings tend to come from the small micro changes. You know, recognizing all those 30-minute recurring meetings can actually be 25 minutes or 15 minutes, recognizing that that eight-person meeting can be a six-person meeting. The monthly meeting can be a quarterly meeting. All of these small changes, because we have so many meetings, they add up in a way that, you know, we don't often appreciate when we're just looking at a singular meeting.

Mick Spiers 43:23

Yeah, really powerful, Rebecca. I'm loving every part of this. I feel like I'm I've got a long action list of things that I'm going to need to do starting next week, but this is going to be super powerful. Let's get to the seven principles then, in the time that we've got left to summarize the seven principles of what the people can lean into here.

Seven Principles Overview

Rebecca Hinds 43:46

So the first one we we just spoke about. The premise of your best meeting ever is we need to treat meetings like a product. Meetings are the most important product in our entire organization. They're where the most important Decisions get made. They're where alignment is set and culture gets gets formed or crushed. And this isn't a book about, you know, deleting all our meetings. It's also not a book about, you know, meetings are bad. There's a reason why, you know, there's a positive promise in the title, your best meeting ever, is there's nothing better than a great meeting. And we've all felt it. And so the first principle, all of the chapters are inspired by the world of product development. Because if we are to treat meetings like a product, we should be applying the same product design principles that make the world's greatest products great. And so the first one is around meeting debt. Just as we have technical debt in our products, we have, you know, patches and code fixes that build up over time that often don't work together. Sometimes we need a full code refactor. The same is true with meetings, where as we've spoken about, we have legacy meeting debt pile up. Our calendar no longer makes sense given our current objectives and priorities and ways of working. Sometimes you do need that complete meeting reset to reset not just your calendar, but also your assumptions in terms of what actually deserves to be a meeting. So this the second principle is all around metrics, right? Just as we would apply a discipline approach to measuring our products before shipping them and after shipping them to customers, the same should be true with our meetings. And so I outline in the book lots of different strategies around metrics. My favorite one is what I and my colleague Elise Keith calls the return on time investment, roti. So it's a simple practice. After about 10% of the meetings you organize, ask attendees was this meeting worth the time you invested? And what could I do as the meeting organizer that would enable you to boost your rating by one point? And what this does is it gets us out of this, I call it the meeting suck reflex, where we naturally, you know, are conditioned to rate our meetings poorly. When we ask specifically about time, we dislodge some of those natural biases because everyone has an intuitive sense of the value of their time. And you start to get more reliable insight in terms of is this meeting effective? Is it effective for half the group or the entire group? And we become much more disciplined. Now, analytics are also really important. And, you know, using data to understand different aspects of the meeting design are a really important complement to the roti. But I continue to believe that that roti assessment is the lightest weight way to get important feedback that can help you redesign the meeting.

Mick Spiers 47:03

Yeah, I can really see the power in here in terms of are we sticking to the habits that we said, but then fine-tuning and iterating and getting better each time. Do you do you continue that infinitum or is that something you need to do for a period of time and then stop? What do you do with these measurements?

Rebecca Hinds 47:21

It's a great question. So you should be, you should be doing them, you know, in perpetuity for forever, because if we treat meetings like a product, the last chapter of the book is all around innovation and iteration. If we consider meetings to be products, we should be constantly testing them, testing new approaches, testing new ways to bring in technology, AI into the meeting. And because of that, you know, we should also be constantly measuring any every tweak and inviting your employees, your attendees of the meeting to submit different ways that they think might improve different aspects of the meeting, just as we would take an innovative approach to product development. We should be taking that same approach to meetings. It also makes them more engaging and it also, again, creates this environment where you're jolting people out of the status quo and some of these ingrained ways of just going through the motions as opposed to thinking intentionally about how are we designing this space?

Mick Spiers 48:29

Yeah, really good. Okay. So number one, we're working on our meeting volume. Number two, we're looking at using the right measures so that we can refine and get better, be a learning organization that continuously improves our meetings. Very good. So number three is structure. What do you mean by structure and becoming a meeting min minimalist?

Metrics And ROTI Feedback

Rebecca Hinds 48:50

Mm-hmm. So just as the great products of our time and previous time are minimalist, we can think of Google homepage. There's just one action you're needing to take. There's no fluffer, there's no fluff, there's no filler. The same should be true with our meetings in general. And I like to think about those four dimensions of the meeting. So the length is we've spoken about the cadence, how frequently the meetings happen, the attendees, and then the agenda items. Thinking very carefully about across those four dimensions, how are we ensuring that we're minimalizing them to create a more effective meeting?

Mick Spiers 49:34

Yeah, very good. Okay. All right. So now we're looking at it from a minimalist uh aspect of making sure that it's just what we need and nothing more. Number four, flow. How does this come in?

Rebecca Hinds 49:46

Flow is is all about rhythm. So what we know is humans are naturally inclined for rhythm. And even the way we walk, we talk, you know, our word choices, our brain waves, they all f follow a natural rhythm. Yet so often we don't think about the rhythm of our meetings. And we talked about strategic pauses, buffers, breaks within the meeting. It's really important we think about what is the rhythm of our workday and how did meetings fit into that picture rather than thinking about, you know, our calendar and trying to fit the work around the meetings.

Mick Spiers 50:29

So what I'm hearing here is another element of intentionality to make sure that the design that we have fits our natural rhythms of what would what would work for us and what wouldn't work for us. Okay, very good. I said number five is engagement and user-centric design. What is how is that going to show up?

Rebecca Hinds 50:48

This is all about designing the meetings for the attendees. We know that disproportionately a meeting organizer tends to leave meetings more satisfied than anyone else in the room, right? We often, and it's a natural tendency. You know, we we design the meeting for what we perceive we need in the meeting rather than what do our attendees need? What is going to make this successful for them? And it's such a powerful mindset shift. If you think about treating the attendees' time as more valuable than your own, you start to design the meeting much more intentionally. And I think this for me has been the biggest mental unlock is how do I ensure that when I put a block on someone's calendar, when I schedule a meeting, you know, I'm asking for their time. I should be valuing that time in a very intentional way and designing the meeting for them as the attendees as opposed to me as the organizer.

Mick Spiers 51:51

That's very powerful. And I think I give myself an honest reflection here. I don't think I do this. So I think I'm always thinking about what do I need to get out of this meeting, or sometimes what do we, but I don't think about what do they, what what does the other individual need to get out and how can I design the meeting to suit their needs. Really powerful. All right, number six, timing.

Minimalist Structure And Cadence

Rebecca Hinds 52:12

Timing. So timing, timing is about rhythm. We talked about rhythm. We skipped over flow. Flow is flow is all about systems thinking. So when we think about great products, you know, the Apple ecosystem is a great example where our iPhone talks to our MacBook, talks to our AirPods. The same thing should be true for meetings. And often we think that meetings are the problem. Usually they're a problem of a bigger problem, a symptom of a bigger problem, and that is a broken communication system. So this involves giving people clarity in terms of what actually deserves to be a meeting. It's about ensuring that you do have not only tools that enable asynchronous communication, but also a culture that enables that. So a strong written communication culture is so important, having norms around the expected response times, having norms around what deserves to be an email versus what do we use Slack for versus what do we use a meeting for? All of these are giving people clarity in terms of the broader communication system and how I ought to, as a as a worker, as an employee, use various tools.

Mick Spiers 53:32

Yeah, really interesting. And I'm hearing a lot of intentionality here as well around organizational design and organizational architecture, but also data architecture. Like so these meetings aren't islands, they're interconnected in in some way. And if we design it with systems thinking, it the whole thing will make more sense. Yeah, really good. And the final one is the technology, uh, number seven technology. I feel like if we start on that topic, Rebecca, it's another three hours with what's happening in the world. But where does number seven, the technology, come into your principles?

Flow, Rhythm, And Systems Thinking

Rebecca Hinds 54:07

It's such a big one to unpack. The premise of the chapter is, again, we need to be very intentional about how we bring technology into our meetings and ensure, just as we would human attendees, that the technology has a clear role to play in the meeting. And we're using it in a way that enhances and augments human potential rather than, you know, automates it or diminishes it. And this is where, you know, I unfortunately see so many instances of AI in particular making our bad meetings worse than the reverse, because it's so easy to use this technology to cognitively offload the important work that we should be doing as humans, right? If we design meetings correctly and intentionally, there should be very few meetings where we feel comfortable sending a bot to a meeting instead of showing up as a human. And I worry that, you know, in so many ways, technology and in particular AI is giving us more liberty to exacerbate this knee-jerk reaction we have to scheduling meetings when there are so many positives that can come out of it in terms of being able to measure our meetings more effectively and being able to represent different voices in the meeting and play devil's advocate and enhance our creativity. There's so many positive benefits, potential benefits. But if we're not intentional about it, you know, it's going to create a situation where we have more meetings than ever before and we're less engaged in each one of them.

User-Centric Meetings And Timing

Mick Spiers 55:46

Yeah, really interesting. So intentionality is coming up again. It's come up, I don't know how many times in today's conversation, but intentionally using the technology to augment your skills and experience, not to replace and for to not allow it to become a form of disconnection or disengagement because oh, it's okay, copilot's got this or you know, whatever tool that you that you're using. Okay. Yeah, really, really powerful, Rubika. You've given us so much to think about. I'm gonna summarize a a few key points in a way that people can lean into this. So I'm gonna say intentionality was the key word for today, that we're going to get off autopilot, we're gonna lean into this problem once and for all, and we're gonna do something about it. Now we we started off with the visibility bias. So we do need to do some cognitive work here to look at our own biases around visibility and progress and and value, that our value isn't driven by being busy, our value is being driven by having an impact. So so are you busy being busy and wearing busy as a badge of honour, or are you busy being productive and the two aren't the same? The two aren't the same. And from there we can get more intentional about our design of our meetings. We can start thinking about every meeting having a purpose, every meeting designed so that the length is around that purpose, that we have the right people in the room and only the right people in the room. We don't have to have everyone. But we need to have conversations that drive clarity and communication around roles and responsibilities and the way that we're doing this. The doomsday, the meeting, doomsday, to have a think about this, to clear your calendar and only put things back in that truly need to be a meeting. Does this need to be a meeting, yes or no? And if it does need to be a meeting, what is the purpose? What is the length? Who needs to be there? How are we going to run these meetings? Start doing these pattern interrupts with make it a 25 minute meeting, but make it start at 105. Don't make it start at 1 and finish at 125. Make it start at 105 so that you don't fall into Parkinson's law here. And then we can start going through the principles. We can cut down the meeting volume and remove our meeting debt. We can measure the right things so that we get into a a learning and continuous improvement pattern. We can structure the meetings uh around being a minimalist. What is the minimal purpose of this meeting instead of trying to boil the ocean in one go every time? Get into the right flow and having the the right architecture of our data and information and and thinking about it from a systems thinking point of view. Thinking about every person in the meeting and making it a user-centric design. Is this meeting meeting their needs, not just your needs, having the timing so that it suits your natural rhythm uh as human beings in the organization, and then making sure that technology is augmenting our experience, not replacing our human experience into the organization. That's a lot, Rebecca. I'm going to encourage people to listen to this back again when they go to do it. Obviously, buy the book, but listen to this again and lean into it. Don't just go, yeah, our meetings suck and and accept it. Lean into this because you can do something about it. All right, Rebecca, thank you so much. I I've loved our conversation today. I'm gonna take us now to our wrap it round. These are the same four questions we ask Ola Vegas. What's the one thing you know now, Rebecca Hinds, that you wish you knew when you were 20?

Rebecca Hinds 59:30

And I'll say Mick, that was the most beautiful, insightful summary of the book I've I've heard. So I I really appreciate that and how how comprehensive it is. It was incredibly impressive.

Mick Spiers 59:42

Oh, thank you.

Rebecca Hinds 59:44

So many things, but I think I I didn't appreciate just how important focusing on the team and organization is, not only for your success, but also the team's success. And so often we default to maximizing for our own individual productivity in organizations, where the more that you can invest in making things better for the team and making things better for the organization, sometimes it's not very visible. Sometimes, you know, there's not an immediate short-term impact or positive benefit for you in doing that, but it always makes a long-term difference. And people always remember the people who were trying to make things better for the collective group. And I think that's something that, you know, is is something I wish were more explicit early in my career. And, you know, recognizing that while it might not be incentivized formally, it is absolutely the single most important thing you can do to set yourself up and your team up for success.

Tech That Augments, Not Replaces

Mick Spiers 1:00:56

Yeah, really powerful, Rebecca. There's there's two things jumping in my head there is about being a multiplier, not just an individually prolific person. And and that the second one is that we can always co-create something that's bigger than any individual could do. But it takes the intentionality that you've been talking about today, Rebecca. It doesn't happen by accident. It takes intentionality. Really powerful. All right. What's your favorite book?

Rebecca Hinds 1:01:21

My favorite book, and there are so many of them, but I, you know, it's hard to compete for me with Adam Grant's give and take. I think that has fundamentally changed not only how I see myself and my role in this world and an organization, but also it very deeply inspired me to think differently about collaboration within organizations and how we measure it in terms of ensuring that, you know, we're creating or we're striving to create relationships where there's both a give and a take, and we're first and foremost givers as opposed to to takers.

Mick Spiers 1:01:59

That's also very aligned with our conversation today as well. Very good. And what's your favorite quote?

Rebecca Hinds 1:02:04

My favorite quote, which I think is also aligned, is the harder you work, the luckier you get. And, you know, I was a I was an athlete for a long time, and that was always something I tried to live by. You know, you can't, you can't ensure that every aspect of game day or race day is gonna go perfect, but the harder you work, the luckier you get. And I think that's very much true in organizations too. You know, your hard work isn't always visible. But I am so confident that the more you do the hard work, the more you do the intentional work in designing the great meeting, you know, the luckier you are gonna get in terms of that next opportunity, that next leadership opportunity, you know, because there's such a natural cognitive leap that happens when people see you can run a good meeting or steer a bad one back on track. The next natural, you know, assumption is wow, I I trust you to maybe lead a project or maybe lead a team or department. And I do believe that hard work, you know, tends to not always, but it tends to pay off.

Mick Spiers 1:03:11

Yeah, nice one. I love it, Rebecca. And and finally, um, there's going to be people that are listening to this. And I'm gonna say most of them looked at themselves in the mirror and went, wow, yeah, my meetings are dysfunctional. And I am wearing the busy badge and you know, all of these things. How do people find you and learn more about your work and how to put all of this into practice?

Rebecca Hinds 1:03:34

Sure. So my website's RebeccaHines.com, my first and last name. I'm on LinkedIn quite a bit, and the book, Your Best Meeting Ever, is at all your favorite bookstores.

Mick Spiers 1:03:45

All right. I strongly recommend it. And I can tell you that I'm going to be implementing the the lessons that I took uh from Rebecca and her book. This is just really amazing work, and I encourage you all to do the same. You will not regret this. You will you will get a huge return on time invested from this, but of the time that you invest, but also for everyone that works with you. This is the way to to make an impact, is by is by being more intentional with the way that you design your meetings and design your calendar. Thank you so much, Rebecca. Really good.

Rebecca Hinds 1:04:20

Thank you so much for having me, Mick.

Actionable Summary And Next Steps

Mick Spiers 1:04:23

What a powerful conversation with Rebecca Hinds. I quite frankly think this is the conversation we all needed to hear. If you take nothing else from this episode, take this. Bad meetings aren't inevitable. They're designed or neglected into existence. Rebecca showed us that meetings are one of the most expensive tools in an organization, that clarity, structure, and intention can change everything. And that leaders have far more control over meeting culture than they realize. So ask yourself, does this meeting actually need to exist? Is it designed for people attending or just for me? And what would change if I treated time as something to invest, not spend? Your action this week. Pick one recurring meeting and redesign it. Shorten it. Clarify its purpose, reduce the attendees, or remove it entirely. One better meeting can create hours of reclaim focus and send a powerful cultural signal. In our next episode, it we will zoom out and connect the dots of all of the great guests that we've had throughout February in a solo cast that will recap the key takeaways and actions that we all must take to lead better. You've been listening to the Leadership Project. If today sparked an insight, don't keep it to yourself. Share it with one other person who would benefit from listening to the show. Huge thank you to Gerald Calibo for his tireless work. Editing every episode. And to my amazing wife Sei, who does all the heavy lifting in the background to make this show possible, none of this happens without them. Around here we believe leadership is a practice, not a position. That people should feel seen, heard, valued, and that they matter. And that the best leaders trade ego for empathy, certainty for curiosity, and control for trust. If that resonates with you, please subscribe on YouTube and on your favorite podcast app. And if you want more, follow me on LinkedIn and explore our archives for conversations that move you from knowing to doing. Until next time, lead with curiosity, courage, and care.