As a manager, you’ll be responsible for leading a lot of meetings. I know a lot of people complain about bad or unnecessary meetings. We’ve all seen the “this meeting could have been an email” memes. So how do you avoid a meeting that someone’s going to make a meme about later?

It starts with a little bit of background, followed by setting expectations, defining roles, clear takeaways, and following up.

Before the meeting

What are we here to do?

If you’re meeting online (which most of us are these days), you can put together a briefing in the calendar invite. When I create a meeting invite, I try to put a little bit of context in the description about what the purpose of the meeting is.

A few months ago, a few of us gathered to discuss professional development opportunities for someone on my team. In one of the meetings, we began with a document outlining what the anticipated outcomes were for the meeting. It went something like this:

• Quick intro and why we’re here
• Meeting outcomes:
  • Shared understanding of [the team members development so far]
  • Establish how we can ensure alignment between [their current work] and [where they want to go]
  • Defined areas of ownership for [myself] and [the team member]
  • Clear next steps for [the team member]

With this sort of meeting brief attached to the invite, it made it clear what we were meeting for and what we were hoping to come away from the meeting with. If your meeting is just to dump information on people, then it could have been an email. With some well defined background, everyone will walk into the meeting with a clear set of expectations for what needs to be discussed.

Debate vs decision meeting

The next step is to make it clear how you will discuss things in the meeting. Generally there are 2 types of meetings. Debate meetings and decision meetings.

In a debate meeting, the idea is to come at the issue from all angles. It’s a deep dive into the issue to develop a greater understanding of all the aspects. As a manager, you’re trying to gather more information from people who have different views and context. A debate meeting couldn’t be an email because everyone is expected to provide input. It’s a real conversation, not just watching your boss present stuff and nodding along.

Now, you might ask, if we aren’t making a decision in this meeting, then what are we spending all this time debating for? If you remember the DACI framework, contributors have a voice, but not necessarily a vote. In the case of a debate meeting, it could be that there are many contributors and the approver needs the context consolidated. There will be other situations where feedback will be taken to another group for a decision, but this is what I have found to be the most common example of a debate meeting.

In a decision meeting, stakeholders will gather, possibly with the additional context from their respective debate meetings, in order to come together and reach a decision. In these meetings, the stakeholders won’t necessarily do as much of a deep dive into every aspect of an issue (unless there are major red flags that make specific details necessary), but all of the context will be represented by all the people in the meeting. Each person can make their position known and make recommendations based on the context they have collected beforehand.

Who is here and why?

The next critical step in running the meeting is clarifying everyone’s roles. I don’t mean doing a round of introductions or assigning someone to take notes. What I mean is to explain why each person is in this meeting, and what they’re expected to contribute. That could be something like

Alice, you’re here because you understand the technical aspects of the software development needed to complete this work, we will be relying on you to provide estimates of how many people we’ll need, how much time will be required, and what sort of infrastructure requirements we will have. Bob, you are here because you understand the design aspects of the work. We’ll need you to define the solution and roughly what we want it to look like. During the work, you will also be working closely with software developers to ensure the solution they build is what we have actually required. Charles, you’re here because you have insights into what our customers are looking for. You’ll be responsible for providing the customers’ perspective and scoping what we’ll be building in the next 2 weeks.

What are our action items?

At the end of the meeting, make sure you come out with a to-do list.

Each item needs 1 assigned name beside it. Only 1 person. The approach that we take on our team is that “if it’s everybody’s responsibility, then it’s nobody’s responsibility.” 1 name goes beside each action item, so that someone is responsible for making sure the box gets checked. They don’t necessarily need to do the work, but they need to make sure the work happens.

Just as important as the “who”, is the “when”. Each action item has a due date. As the meeting is wrapping up, the assigned person can suggest when they expect to be done with each action item. Other stakeholders are free to push back on due dates and explain why they might need something sooner.

As a leader in the organization, you may need to jump in to help organize the due dates, or reassign action items to other people in order to meet deadlines if someone is overloaded.

After the meeting

After the meeting, make sure that you follow up on those action items. If the action items are never completed, the boxes are never checked, and whatever work was dependent on them is still blocked and can’t progress. As the manager, our whole role revolves around unblocking issues for our teams. If the work remains blocked, we need to follow up to make sure the necessary tasks are completed.

Wrapping up

To run a meeting well, make sure everyone knows what we’re here to do, if we’re collecting perspectives or making a decision, who’s here an why, what do we need to do after the meeting, and make sure it actually gets done.