Running Effective Meetings

𝐑𝐮𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐄𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐌𝐞𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 👥👥

If you go into an academic or research career, chances are you'll spend a lot of your time in meetings.

I am by no means an expert (and don't always do a great job of following my own advice), but over the years I have refined my general approach to trying to run *effective* meetings, which is the topic of today's #HackingAcademia video. Today's focus is particularly on running project style meetings (this advice isn't so much for PhD supervisor type meetings, for example).

Whilst much of this isn't rocket science, it's surprising how often you encounter ineptly run meetings in the research or academic environment. It's not usually anyone's fault: they just haven't ever had any formal training or development, or haven't felt like they could invest the time and energy to really work on it.

Nevertheless it's incredibly important given the amount of time people spend in meetings, and also given the need for modern-day academics and researchers to, in general, be more effective at everything that they do.

It's also not trivial to pull off in practice - in part because the theory of an effective meeting requires a lot of work on culture and expectation management behind the scenes. And getting into the groove with a new project team can take a substantial investment of deliberate time and effort early on.

Some of the key concept I cover include:

💬 preparedness ahead of the meeting

💬 meetings are not there for anyone to justify their existence or show how hard they worked

💬 explicit overviews and intended agendas from everyone are great

💬 trusted zone for free ranging constructive criticism and suggestions and freed of the need for anyone to be defensive or have the last word

💬 time-capped tangents and spontaneous discussions - don't kill them, but be prepared to take offline

💬 regular recaps and contextualization - people are doing lots of different things and the reminder is helpful

💬 invest in communication development early on - especially the ability to switch between a five second summary all the way to a 20-minute detailed deep dive - this is not easy and takes some work

👉 A moderate and deliberate investment of time and energy in improving your art of running meetings will likely pay big dividends!

YouTube: https://youtu.be/o3shRnMHAFo

#meetings #research #academia #University #careers

Transcript

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If you go into a career in academia or some sort of academic research environment, you are almost certainly going to spend quite a bit of your time and day in meetings. One of the cruel ironies of academic and research careers is that you get very little to no formal rigorous training on how to be effective at the millions of different things that you do in your job. And you often have to pick it up on the fly, and people don't always have time to, or they don't really take the time to sort of reflect on how they're doing things and try to improve how they do those things. One of the most egregious examples of this is in meetings. Specifically, uh the person who is running or I guess leading the meeting, and especially for meetings that are more of the sort of project management style meetings. Those are the meetings where you're meeting on, say, a weekly basis to discuss a particular project, often some sort of applied research project or project with an industry partner or government partner. And most people never get formally trained on how to run these meetings. Now, famously or infamously, if you go into the corporate world, there are certain companies, one big trillion-dollar tech company that is famous for having a very specific, very mandated way of how you run or should run a meeting and how you should be prepared for it. In this video, I don't want to go that far to prescribe an exact rigid way in which you should run meetings, but I do want to cover some of the key principles and concepts that I think are important to making the most of the meetings, to making sure people are happy to continue turning up to meetings rather than thinking, oh, this is going to be a disaster, and ones that help you progress and monitor whatever the key project is that the meeting is all about. The first principle is preparedness. So with your team that is in the regular meetings, you need to instill a level of expectation that everyone should be at least somewhat prepared for the meeting, and that if they are not prepared, they should let everyone know ahead of time so you can decide whether you're going to continue with the meeting even though they don't uh haven't done the prep, or whether you're gonna uh reschedule it. It's basic uh common courtesy, uh common etiquette, and it means that you're not gonna get people who are really disappointed or demoralized because you spend half of the meeting catching up people who really should have caught up uh before the meeting even started. Meeting time management is critical. If you want people to continue to prioritize coming to your meeting, uh to look forward to it rather than to dread it, one of the things is time management. So there is almost no excuse for not being able to run and keep a meeting strictly on time. Now it's easy to say that, of course, it can feel hard in practice, but it's things like uh cutting conversations short where you need to, uh accelerating or condensing the briefs or updates later in the meeting in order to hit your time target, and I guess anticipating early in the meeting whether you are likely to fit within the time or not, and adjusting on the fly so you don't feel like you're always screwing the people who give their updates or talk about stuff at the end of the meeting, feeling like they're always the ones who have to rush in order to fit to time. One thing I like to do at the beginning of a meeting uh is go around the room and get everyone in the room to give a very brief agenda of the key items that they're going to talk to. First of all, this necessitates that they've actually prepared a little bit and thought about what they want to talk about in the meeting, and I'll cover that uh in a moment. And it also gives people an idea of the amount of content and the broad topics that will be covered, sometimes as a way to consolidate or combine two topics once you've heard a brief description of them. And it's important during these agenda updates to not get derailed into lengthy discussions. These are short, snappy uh half sentences on the one or two or three points that each person wants to cover. Another critical concept for project style meetings is the meeting does not exist for everyone to justify their existence and to tell everyone all of the amazing things that they've done over the past week. The meeting is there to share the critical pieces of information, the critical uncertainties, the critical updates that might be of general relevance to everyone in the room. It is not to provide a blow by blow detailed account of every single activity that each person did during the last week. Now, to make that actually happen, you really have to create this culture where people are not feeling like they need to justify themselves in the meeting or justify that they've done a lot of work, and to really encourage people that inherently their leader fundamentally believes that they're doing a good job, that they're trying their best, and wants to hear about the particularly interesting points or particularly uh forks in the road decision type discussions that would benefit from an all-in discussion from the whole team. In keeping to time and keeping to strict uh agenda items, it's important to not suck all the life and fun out of the meeting. It's perfectly fine to have a little bit of collegial catch-up. What did you do on the weekend? Did you see that sporting game, whatever it is that you talk about. The idea is to keep these strictly capped so they don't derail or extend into extended uh tangents. The same goes for interesting tangents during the meeting. You don't want to prematurely kill all of them, you want to acknowledge and note if there's an interesting tangent that has spontaneously come up. If you have time, you can give it a time-limited amount of time to quickly discuss, but you want to really cut it short and table it as an offline discussion for a future meeting or for an offline discussion if it looks like you're not going to be able to come to a resolution within a very short time frame. Another sign of a really healthy functional meeting environment is where anyone in the team, no matter what their seniority is, feels sufficiently empowered that they can interject or make a constructive criticism or say that something might be a mistake without feeling like they're gonna get jumped on, and more importantly, without the person who is the recipient of that feeling like they have to get up and suddenly become super super defensive in response to that. The idea is for a free and open environment where everyone fundamentally respects everyone else, and we can have fairly pointy, fairly to the point critiques or discussions or suggestions for improvement or changes without getting bogged down in sort of defensive adversarial discussions. Of course, you don't want any of that in general, but in particular, you want people to be able to take uh constructive criticism without feeling like they need to justify or defend every nth point, uh, every nth detail in response to that criticism. If the meeting is one where or the project is one where the I guess the leader of the project is is substantially more senior and has much more of a bird's eye view of the entire project ecosystem, it can sometimes be helpful to provide a bit of an update on the broad issues affecting the project at the beginning. This is not necessary in all types of projects, but it can keep be a good way to keep everyone on track, and especially for a senior project leader who may have a lot of other projects, it's a way to make sure that they're honest and keeping up on what the specifics of their project are and prepared for the meeting ahead of time. In terms of what a typical person in the meeting might report on, as I said before, they shouldn't be itemizing every single thing they did during the week, just the things that are of particular importance, especially to the larger group, or where there's a particularly uh important uncertainty that they would like to resolve in the meeting. One way to do the individual updates is to for them to recap at a very high level, hand-wavy level, the broad sort of activity or goals that they have at the moment, uh, what was discussed last week, what they did in the week uh since then, uh, what worked, what didn't work, again without getting defensive or feeling like they need to explain to the nth degree why some things didn't work, and constantly reminding people because people are busy, people have lots of responsibilities about the context in which what they're describing occurred, what they tried to do, what didn't work, and then what they think they will plan for the next week ahead of them. Finally, being able to effectively communicate is a key enabler of good and effective meetings. And this is not a trivial thing. Again, uh, a lot of us don't formally get taught how to communicate. In the meeting format, one of the key communication skills is being able to take a section of activities or work or things that you want to describe and be flexible enough to be able to describe it in anywhere from a five-second half-length sentence all the way to a 20-minute detailed deep dive and everything in between, and being able to spontaneously adjust the level of depth and the level of detail that you go into based on what is needed and also what the time limitations of the meeting are. This is a skill that takes practice and it's worthwhile spending some time in these meetings, especially early on in the project with the new team, working on these communication skills, modeling it for those communication, modeling excellent communication skills and summarization capabilities for the more inexperienced team members. That sort of investment of time and effort will undoubtedly pay off dividends in the long term for the project. Some people like to take formal minutes and formally table action items. We would do that in a more sort of committee uh type setting, but for regular project meetings, we would basically just want to make sure that each of the people in the meeting is actually remembering and as necessary taking a record of the things that they need to do or update and then reporting back on it uh the next week. But I would not necessarily enforce or expect uh detailed minutes for a lot of style of project meetings, especially project meetings with limited team sizes. People often joke that it'd be nice to get rid of all meetings, and you can definitely die from an overload, die professionally from an overload of meetings, but I think they are a necessary part of a lot of careers, including academic and research careers. The trick is to make sure that when you're in the meeting, everyone is uh believes that they really need to be there, that the person running the meeting is making very good use of their time, uh, that uh the people are respectful enough to come to the meeting with uh being prepared. And those sort of things will mean that people will be willing to come back to prioritize coming back to that meeting and will mean that you get much more out of the meetings than just regularly running chaotic, haphazard disasters of meetings, uh, which are really destructive to I guess morale, and also just don't get what you need to get done for managing a project.