How to Run Meetings Effectively: 8 Principles to Cure Bad Meetings

Bad meetings are the doorway to weak results. And great work sessions are the accelerator to great results. How do you avoid bad meetings and replace them with high-octane work sessions? In this guide to running meeting effectively, we offer a different approach with 8 key principles and some specific work session times you can use. These principles have been honed over years with distributed and in-person teams. They've proven out in environments from the Fortune 500, to the Inc 5000 and startups.

Full transcript below

Principle 1: Focus on Results

The first principle is to stay hyper-focused on the outcomes we need from our work session. What that does is allow us to select an agenda type or some of the other constraints we want to put around this work session to ensure that we get those results. The different formats, agendas, and styles all exist to serve the result.

Principle 2: Choose Format Based on Desired Results

Choose the best format to get the results you need. Once you know the result that you need to get from your work session, it’s much easier. I also want to introduce another principle - since we’re thinking about results, let’s make sure that we’re being intentional about whether the session is for some kind of social or relational goal, or the session is outcome-focused.

That outcome focus requires a very specific way of managing the session. Sometimes, people jumble the two together and try to achieve too many things in one work session, which gets very confusing. If you need to have a one-on-one with somebody to talk about work overall or reconnect with them, that’s a subject for a different article.

Principle 3: Harness the Power of Constraints

What we mean by the power of constraints is this: if someone told you to get as much as you can done toward writing a new article vs. to write an article and you only have five minutes to do it, that will change how you approach it. You’re using the constraints - maybe you can’t write an entire article in five minutes, but you might be able to knock out a pretty solid outline. This idea of choosing constraints is really empowering, because with those constraints, we’re able to say, “Look, we might not solve every single problem we have, but we’re going to use this time effectively.

Principle 4: Practice Time Management in Every Session

Your work sessions are a time management practice. If you can constrain things using the theory of constraints based on time, it allows you to set up a certain rhythm of work sessions that keep your business driving forward, and you can keep it focused on results. One other aspect of the theory of constraints, which is really its own principle, is that there will be times where you’re in a work session optimizing for a specific result, not time. An example for this would be: the website is down. I was interviewing a friend of mine who is a CEO. He was reminiscing about the old days when he only had 20 people in his company. If there was a problem on the website, everybody gets in a room and works on it until it’s fixed. Those types of things come up.

Principle 5: Minimum Number of People Required

In product, we often talk about the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or the Minimum Viable Valuable Product (MVVP) as a way to use constraints to whittle things down. This is another technique for using constraints in a way that doesn’t create unnecessary friction for anyone on our team. You need the minimum number of people necessary to achieve the result you need from your work session. This will let everyone else move forward on whatever they’re working on without distracting them and without bringing them in just to be a witness. If you need to have a work session with a small group of people but you also want to clue everyone into what you’re doing, we’re going to give you a format you can use to do that at the end.

Principle 6: Time + Digital Spaces as Choices

The final constraints-related principle is to open your mind to the different possibilities that come with time and space. The old school meeting from the 20th century almost always had people in the same place, same room, and then all kinds of crazy conference call technologies to make other people feel like they’re in the same room.

It’s a different world today. We have hybrid teams, all-digital teams, we can be all together in a Zoom call or whatever your favorite platform is. Meetings can already be freed from constraints, and our work sessions are going to be freed from the constraint of needing to be in the same place. Through some techniques I’m going to show you in the next portion of this article, you can actually free your meetings up from everyone needing to use the exact same time bucket to interact and achieve the goals of the work session.

Principle 7: Different Types of Work Sessions

Strategic Work Sessions

These are where you’re looking up from the road, looking up from day-to-day concerns and taking in the larger map. What’s the terrain we’re facing? What’s the weather like? What are the conditions around us? What’s changed in the marketplace? What are the factors we need to take into consideration knowing the direction we’re heading and the destination we’re trying to get to? With all of that in mind, what are our most important priorities?

You’re going to be setting a very small number of highly-focused priorities in a one-year time frame in your annual meeting, and then in your six-month strategy check-in, so that you’re making sure your big picture for the year is moving you in the right direction.

Another related type of a strategy work session are the monthly and quarterly check-ins where you’re seeing if anything has changed: are the assumptions/information you had when you did your annual planning still reliable or has anything changed? Is there a new disruption? Is there some new emergence in the environment that is forcing us to change our priorities?

Having these sessions will create a ripple effect of focus for your other work sessions, because you’re laying out priorities in a very clear and specific way that everyone can take in, and that allows everyone to make decisions in much shorter time.

Weekly Workshop for Prioritization / Alignment / Sync

Our weekly work session is the glue between the big picture and our every day. It’s going to bring those two things together in a meaningful and focused way that, again, allows you to adapt very quickly as changes occur. This is designed to help high-growth, adaptive teams be able to adapt quickly.

On this weekly cadence, we’re going to block 60 to 90 minutes. At a minimum, you need 60 minutes; often, you’ll find you’re going to use all that time if you’re really coming together and leaning in. In this weekly workshop, you’re going to focus on checking in with your scoreboard - the health indicators you came up with in your strategic work sessions. You’re going to check in with progress against your strategy - the targets you set up in those bigger strategic work sessions. Then,you’re going to solve for any challenges that have arisen, that may have some of those numbers or targets in your strategy off-track.

This also serves to reinforce your strategy for everyone on your team, so that everyone is becoming familiar with it - not in an old-school way, “Here’s your paper, we’re going to test you on it at the end of the week,” but “Hey, this is really important to us, we’re going to meet weekly on it and we’re going to go over whether we’re on track or off track, how our numbers are trending, and what problems have arisen.”

This weekly one-hour workshop is available in so many different management methodologies. The reason it’s so popular is because it’s so effective. In big consulting environments, there are weekly steering meetings, a frequent way that these are done. If you’ve read any of Patrick Lencioni’s books, he has many ideas about how to run a healthy organization which include his weekly tactical meeting. The Entrepreneurial Operating System calls for a Level 10™ Meeting once a week. For start-ups, Dan Martell has a weekly sync meeting. All of these individuals and coaching frameworks recommend this meeting because it’s so powerful.

The format is fairly simple, and we’ll do a deep dive on it in another video. Use that weekly and keep it at the same time, or same link if you’re distributed, and use it to double check priorities every week and to talk through the different challenges that come up.

A bonus tip: sometimes, we hear people say, “We have a stand-up every day, we don’t need a weekly.” You do! This is when you step back and look at your plan more strategically. You’re still tactically focused and you’re connecting with the strategy, so it’s very important that you create space every week. You’re going to use it for things like removing blockers, improving processes, solving for challenges that may be in the environment, providing updates when disruptions such as a pandemic occur.

Day-to-Day Work Sessions

We’ll start with one that only takes 90 seconds. We call it the 90-second practice. It’s something you need to do every single day if you want to be a high-growth, highly successful, adaptive team. It is going to guarantee that you’re at your best and focused, no matter what comes up.

It requires you to simply answer three questions: What progress did I make today (even if progress was learning what didn’t work)? What’s the one thing I’m going to work on next (my top priority for the next time I’m working)? Is there anything stuck or blocked?

These three questions are so powerful, and they serve a multitude of purposes. First, they provide a record of the progress you make day-to-day, which is incredibly important. Studies have shown that we forget the progress we’ve made within a day or two. Our brains aren’t made to store that information, and it’s really useful for us to have it so we can see how we’re progressing every day, and so that we can see how things are playing out over time. It’s also incredibly important for our team to see what each other are doing - if we’re relying on face-to-face or water cooler conversations that happen by chance and circumstance, we’re not going to be communicating like the highest-growth teams.

With this practice, we’re wiring in a habit wherein we’re communicating what got done, what’s next, and what’s stuck, and we’re going to communicate that to our team so that everybody can see. This way, our team has this fantastic cohesion and any leaders/managers are able to see how things are progressing and whether we’re aligned.

As a leader, this is really important for everyone on your team to do, and one of the best ways you can get them to to do so is to do it yourself. Have a place where you put this. In ResultMaps, our Daily Update automatically pulls this update from everyone and keeps it in the Result Feed. It can push to Slack, Discord, and other places.

Ad Hoc Work Sessions (Stay Focused on the Outcome)

Everyone is familiar with these because it’s often someone going, “Hey, let’s go into that conference room,” or “Let’s jump on a call and sort through this.” It’s awesome to do it that way. The very best of the best always know their outcomes. What you don’t want to do is start an ad hoc work session and get completely distracted and off into left field. Know the outcomes you want for that work session, and when you ask someone to join, have a specific outcome you’re going to make sure everyone sticks with and goes for.

There are all kinds of ways to connect across space and distance to have a productive work session, so long as you know your outcome. The great thing about these work session is, when you’re in your weekly meeting or your quarterly meetings, and certain things come up that you can’t create an answer for inside the team you have allotted, you can just create a work session appointment to work specifically on solving that problem. You can come back at some predetermined time with the information or outcome you need. All of these different work sessions fit together to feed each other and create great momentum.

The Rollout or Launch Webinar

This is a format you use when you’re rolling out a big initiative or plan. Typically, it’s less about having time for detailed discussion and problem-solving, and more about letting everyone know the course you’re going to take, or some event that has happened out in the marketplace. This is best done in a webinar format, because if you try to take a regular old Zoom or meeting where everyone can chime in at different points, it can become very difficult to get the information across.

So, when you need to roll out your strategic plan for example, using a webinar format is great; you have the ability to recognize people at different times and they can chime in in a more structured way than ad hoc.

If you’re all in the same building, these types of meetings are typically done with a speaker on a stage or in a conference room presenting. With a distributed team, it’s really key to use a webinar format for this unless you’ve got a group of people that gel so well, they’ll wait until the end to ask a question.

Principle 8: Use (Digital) Space to Game Time Constraints

There are great tools and resources that aren’t constrained by time which get you the result you need. For example, if you’re designing a new piece of software or a new facility, you can create a document and assign people an action item: “Take 10-20 minutes to comment on this document.” You can do the same types of things inside a lot of different and cool tools that are out there.

If you’re in ResultMaps, the software supports team weekly meetings in just this way. People can log in to their dashboard and log their issues, answer questions, and resolve problems. You’re able to do this without everyone having to be in the same space.