How do I run an effective meeting that keeps people engaged and productive?

Alright, fine, I’ll say it.

Nerds expect order and efficiency. When nerds talk about order in the universe, we mean it. We want a place for everything. Nothing cuts harder against the grain than a room full of people stumbling aimlessly and calling it a meeting.

Yes, sure, some meetings are tidy and effective, but how can all meetings be that way? The question is why meetings are called in the first place.

You’re in the Zone, deep, eating sour apple taffy (yum) and Productive. You’ve been chained to a computer, alone, focused on your work, more productive than you have been all week. Nobody’s bothering you and then, suddenly, the door opens. Then your colleague Richard, barges in.

Richard: “Stan’s gonna kill performance.”

You’re already ready to work around him, you don’t even bother replying.

“Nobody reviews Stan’s code.”

“Want some taffy?” Offer him a piece of apple sour.

“Stan made a change to your component.”

You yell “STAN!”

What you were talking about was a conversation. No rules, no agenda, back-and-forth point and reply like verbal ping pong until someone wins. It’s a negotiation. Unstructured, it might be Richard making a point, you replying, Richard responding, you responding, back and forth and so on.

Meetings have rules. When do you interrupt? Who should interrupt you? That’s all rules.

The first sort is alignments, tactical information meetings. They’re rarely strategic and often weekly. Having a routine and keeping that routine helps them stay on track, but even with the routine they can fail.

The second sort is creation meetings. Creation meetings solve a tough problem with creativity. Each needs its own unique answer, and searching for it is where they fail.

A Meeting Requires Rules, an Agenda, and a Referee

Here’s the rules of a meeting. Some are obvious. Some are subtle, and those are the ones that matter.

Whether your goal is to get something done or solve something hard, it’s still a meeting. A meeting requires rules, an agenda, and a referee. The Agenda tells each attendee what they have to do to leave the room and return to doing actual work, which is all anyone really wants.

You can do it via email ahead of the meeting, or write it up on the whiteboard as you begin; but it’s got to be clear what’s required to get out of there. It doesn’t matter how you make the agenda. Unless you know what it takes to be done, you’ll wander.

And that’s where having a referee comes in.

A referee controls the shape of the meeting. People have a sense of moving or not moving. If you didn’t know, you should, that everyone in the room knows whether you are making progress or not. Without it, they start to tune out. They fidget, they start looking over your shoulder, they’re gone. It is this that the referee is measured against. The referee’s job is to align the meeting to the agenda and what people expect. A good referee senses when the people do not think the meeting is working.

Rule: You cannot do two things at once. If you’re doing something else, you aren’t listening to the discussion. If you’re checking email on your iPhone, you’re not listening to Stan and Richard’s irrelevant code chat. Often, a bunch of people slowly fade away. Look at their eyes. Their heads are elsewhere. Nobody pays attention to everything. Not every story will engage you, but check out and you’ll make two mistakes as referee:

First: the referee checked out. You, the referee, stormed over to get a piece of the action. You want a resolution, and you’re reading email. You have a greater interest than anyone here in resolution. You’re the referee. And you’re totally not here.

Second, you find yourself listening to, “blah blah Jira blah blah scales linearly”, and then you’ve missed something. There might have been a nugget in all that, but you didn’t find it. And when the meeting goes off the rails you have no idea how to yank it back.

Frank is sneaking Plants vs. Zombies on his phone during staff meeting. He says he’s listening, he gets about 50% of it, and he gives everyone else the excuse to be as bad as he is. He says he can listen and play at the same time. He can’t. No one can.

Yeah, Frank’s day’s already headed for hell, but whose fault is that? He checked out because he didn’t feel any progress, and that’s because you forgot something:

As a Ref, you have to constantly watch for unengagement. You notice, sometimes, that someone stops caring. Their eyes are there, but they’re not looking at anything. What you want is steam coming out of their ears, thinking hard. It’s hard.

So, you’re sitting in this seven person meeting. Three people are duking it out, the four losers aren’t saying anything. You’re referee. I’ll give you that battle, but how do you keep track of the four noncombatents and figure out whether the melee is over or not? That’s much harder. 7 folks, 7 personalities, 7 moods, and then we’ve a topic and everything’s different.

Good advice is usually situational. Humanity varies. There are personalities, moods, and topics. My advice goes so far and then it ends, but here are some small tips.

So… first hint - engage the disinterested participant. Ask them something topical like, “Stan, did you do a code review?”

Second hint: When it’s your turn to speak… stop talking. Count down silently from ten. Frank looks up from Zombies. “What happened?” he wonders.

So here’s third hint: move. Stand up, walk to the whiteboard. This might do nothing, or it might jolt someone out of the haze.

Meetings have a pace. They are slow or fast, but you know their speed. Meetings need a certain speed or they do not work. Your job as referee is to keep the pace. Sometimes the pace slows, and this is bad.

You know the player? The loudmouth? The guy who talks at every meeting because he was invited? That’s the guy I mean. He’s all there and he’s always talking. He surprises people… and he never stops. In fairness, it also means he’s paying attention, and sometimes he says something surprising. But, he’s talking because he was invited, not because he has something useful to say.

Say you’re the loudmouth and the referee showed you his dictatorial muscle and shut you down. Ow, that hurt, but it’s not about you. Meetings are not about you or your 15 minutes. Everyone wants out so they can work.

Breaking someone off in a meeting isn’t something you throw around lightly. Too many of them and no one talks and the meeting is as nonfunctional as having one guy running the whole thing. Your goal, when you shut someone down, is that a problem that happened in this meeting should not happen in the next meeting. This is a gut call. And this is all a judgement game and you’ll misjudge.

The Wise Referee Knows When to Forget It

There are two basic approaches to solving any hard problem: sudden brilliance or grinding. You can’t schedule brilliance, and grinding takes patience. This entire piece above is advice. Some is good, some is bad, but the wise referee knows when to forget it.

A good referee understands that sometimes off-topic conversation can lead to brilliance.

As referee, you notice that two knuckleheads are, in fact, talking about something tangential, but important. You read the body language.

The one running at the mouth might be very close to an answer, and that’s the reason the referee allows him to ramble.

And a good referee recognizes a meeting that shouldn’t exist. Prep is poor. Missing the key attendee. There is something else on the team’s mind.

It takes guts to shut down a meeting five minutes in, but that’s a job of the referee. Nothing useful can come of this. Nobody cares what’s about to happen at this meeting. Call it over and they’ll thank you for it.

Like every other management duty, running a meeting is in the moment. Some of the rules apply and some of them don’t. You’ll learn which ones apply when you sit down in the room. Those darn unique snowflakes.

More Meetings

Picture this: your little startup is growing. Everything is good and then shit is not fine. The roadmap is a mess. Folks leave. Finally, there’s yelling in the hallway. Somebody calls a meeting to figure it out and that’s the start. The outsiders looking in saw this meeting solve a big problem and think: “Here’s a tool I can use! This worked! I need more meetings!”

What happens next is more and more meetings. The trendy solution. Invites become status, more people, less time, more meetings. People vanished into meetings where they never came out. Happens every time, you look for someone, but find them at a meeting. Find a time with Bob, nope, there it is, a meeting. Another meeting. Soon the act of keeping track of the meetings is equivalent to the work and no one works.

But meetings must happen. There is no reason that they are an automatic course to make forward progress. A successful meeting is one that you never need to have again. So, before you shoot that next invite, ask yourself if a meeting is what you need, and if it is, run it so that you don’t have to have it again.