How to Build Better Meetings
Using the Six Meeting Blocks to Keep Meetings on Point
[Note: This post is a slightly edited excerpt from Chapter 9 of Team Habits.]
How many times have you walked into a conference room or logged into Zoom with no clear idea of what the meeting you’re about to attend is for?
Building better meetings starts with understanding that not all meetings are cut from the same cloth. Every meeting falls into one of six categories, or is made up of blocks of those categories — many of which mirror the categories of team habits in the other chapters of the book.
The Six Meeting Blocks
Decision-Making Meeting. The point of a decision-making meeting is to get the appropriate number of people at the table to go from information to decision. Decision-making meetings are called either early in the process, when you know a decision is going to come up, or later on, when you have gotten stuck and need a decision to drive work forward.
Planning Meeting. Planning meetings are designed to get the team on board with a certain course of action and align your activity with a timeline. In an ideal world, most of the preliminary decisions would have been made before going into a planning meeting, but some planning meetings are designed to help inform the decisions that need to be made in order to execute the plan. Once you’ve had your planning meeting, you can then have a shorter decision-making meeting that includes just the required people.
Brainstorming Session. The goal of a brainstorming session is to generate potential solutions and courses of action. For a brainstorming session, the goal should be to keep expanding possibilities rather than distilling those ideas and options into actionable solutions.
Bonding Meeting. The main point of a bonding meeting is to build belonging and rapport by getting to know each other better. The topic of conversation should be work only insofar as it makes people more comfortable socializing. I want to slow down on that point for a moment.
A lot of facilitators tend to be extroverted quick thinkers and don’t see the problem with ambushing teammates with a bunch of thoughtful icebreakers designed to get conversation flowing. But a lot of people would rather not just show up and talk about themselves without being given time to prepare. Having work-related conversations invites them into the conversation, as opposed to putting them on the spot with questions that can seem intrusive, like “What are your dreams?” or even “What are your plans for this weekend?” In the chapter of Team Habits on belonging I suggest: “What are your nonwork wins?” In my experience, anyone can engage with that question without feeling as if they are participating in some sort of public journaling exercise.
Review Meeting. The point of the review meeting (or debrief, or after-action review) is to look over a previous activity and see what worked and what didn’t work and to develop insights that you can apply to current or future plans and projects.
Update Meeting. The job of the update meeting is to keep people informed about what’s going on, distill the key information, and provide a place for people to ask questions. An update meeting is a sense-making meeting where you just help people make sense of what’s happening around them. I hesitated to put update meetings on this list because I’ve been to far too many update meetings that could have been an email or that were so packed with such high-level communication that I left feeling less clear about what was going on then when I went in. A good rule of thumb for update meetings is that people should leave feeling more clear, aligned, and engaged with the work ahead. “Engaged” doesn’t necessarily mean inspired and excited; resolute will do.
Using Meeting Blocks
Think of the six types of meetings as building blocks. You can choose from the blocks to create a meeting that builds belonging, helps you brainstorms ideas, and leads to decisions. Or you can create a meeting that provides updates on progress, then helps you decide on a path forward. Here are a few suggestions for applying this concept to your meetings:
Build Complementary Meetings
Not all meeting blocks play well with one another. For example, having a bonding block after a review block can be difficult. If you are brutally honest about what went well and what went wrong during the review meeting, people might feel too defensive for a bonding exercise. There are ways of debriefing that build belonging, but it’s tricky. As a facilitator, you need to know you’re potentially playing with fire when you combine these two blocks. While brainstorming, decision-making, and planning meeting blocks seem as if they naturally complement each other, they can also be problematic when included in the same meeting. Switching between those three mental states can be tough, which means that as a facilitator, you need to be very clear about what state you’re in.
Call Out Block Switches
When a meeting slides from one type to another without the facilitator calling out that there has been a switch, it can feel confusing. People aren’t sure how to engage, and they might not be sure what you need from them. Calling out what type of block you’re in during a meeting lets your teammates know how to partner with you better at every step. Sometimes, meetings can make an unplanned shift into a different block. As a facilitator, it’s your job to call out those unplanned switches as well, such as: “I appreciate what you’re saying, but the point of this meeting is to update. We’ll schedule a separate conversation for brainstorming or planning.”
Avoid Overstuffed Meetings
As you learn how your team works, you’ll also develop a sense of how quickly you can get through topics and types of meeting blocks. If I see an agenda that has us brainstorming six topics in one hour, I know we will never get through it. Our team takes twenty minutes on average to get through a brainstorming block, which means we either need to reschedule the meeting to a longer time block, break it into parts, or find another way to do the brainstorming.
When looking at an overstuffed meeting, resist the urge to squeeze out the bonding block at the beginning or skip noting the next steps at the end. Both of those are hugely important parts of the meeting, and the five to ten minutes you’ll save by cutting them will create downstream problems in team performance, belonging, and collaboration.
If you do need to squeeze something out of an agenda, do the hard work of triaging what needs to go into this meeting and deciding how you can get through the rest of the work elsewhere. And if you need multiple meetings to cover it all, then schedule multiple meetings. Don’t try to crush everything into too short a time.
Set Clear Agendas (with Clear Facilitators)
If I was king of meetings for a day, I would create two rules. The first would be that you don’t get to request a meeting without an agenda. The second would be that you don’t get to ask for a meeting when it’s not clear who the facilitator is.
Those two things are intimately connected because if they are not set, we’re back to the “somebody” problem. Somebody will figure out the agenda, and somebody will lead the conversation. But when we all log in to the video call at 11 a.m. Team Standard Time, “somebody” hasn’t shown up to lead the meeting.
My rule is that if you call the meeting, you are the facilitator.
If you want the meeting, it’s now your job to come up with the agenda and drive the conversation. This is considerably harder than most people think, which means that in the future, they might find another way to obtain that information than a meeting.
Thinking about meeting blocks makes the job much easier for both the facilitator and the rest of us who are showing up. If you tell me the meeting is to “talk about” Project X, I don’t know what I need to do to prepare. If I know the meeting is so that we can come to a decision on Project X, I know exactly what is expected of me when I show up.
As well as assigning a facilitator, it can also be useful to assign other meeting roles, such as a scribe for note-taking and a timekeeper who can keep an eye on the clock and make sure enough time is left for alignment and next steps.
Using Meeting Categories to Define Necessary Meetings
When you start a team habit of defining meeting categories, it helps you put into perspective what meetings are necessary for what reasons. It might also help you diagnose other team habits needing improvement.
Example: too many “update” meetings might mean your other modes of communication need improvement, because you’re defaulting to having a meeting to do what another vehicle (like Slack, for example) might do — and do better and faster.
Hopefully, this team habit also relieves your teammates (and you) of the frustration of stepping into a conference room or logging on to a Zoom call without a clue as to what’s going on.