People keep complimenting me on my meetings, and I don’t like it. It’s not even just my meetings! I get compliments for meetings that people on my team run. “Wow, people actually get stuff done in your meetings.” “I love that people don’t interrupt me.” “That could have been a really hard discussion, but for your team it went really smoothly.”

I appreciate the compliments, but Past Matt is horrified that “runs good meetings” is what I’ve done with my career. The pleasantly ironic side of this story is that the compliments only come from people who have attended my team’s meetings. The people who’ve never been to them think that they are bad and that I might be insane. “That will never work…” is usually uttered when I’m describing my meeting process.

Their reactions are understandable. After all, I go against many of their cherished best practices:

• No agenda.
• No meeting minutes.
• No action items.
• No virtual post-it notes or anonymous voting, or other gamification.
• No open door policy.

I described this to a group of coworkers once and had someone derisively describe it:

You’ve removed all of the structure. There’s no plan. There’s no goal. There’s no steps to be taken. At this point, all you have is people talking to one another!

And they were exactly right. Unlike most meetings, mine actually involve people talking to each other.

That’s the goal after all: people talking to one another. If I wanted one person talking to many people, then I’d be having a presentation. If I wanted people to provide anonymous feedback, I’d send out a survey. If I wanted people to comment on some document, I’d post a link on slack. Meetings exist for synchronous discussion between everyone involved. If that’s not what you need, don’t have a meeting.

Of course, people talking to one another isn’t enough to make meetings good. While I despise many of the meeting best practices that other managers follow, I hate wasting time even more. There needs to be some structure in place.

Have a single topic, not an agenda

My meetings have a topic for discussion, which I share ahead of time. It’s the subject line of the invite, and that’s it.

This is important because it acts as a forcing factor on the scope of meetings. When the scope gets too big or broad, your audience gets larger; people tune out until the part they care about, and people stop talking to one another. If you can’t boil the discussion down to a one-line topic, the scope is too complex — split up the meeting. If you always seem to have multiple topics, you should meet more frequently or slice your responsibilities differently. If your topic is something like “stuff this audience cares about”, then I guarantee you that you’re not talking about stuff your entire audience cares about. Stop occupying people’s calendars and have smaller, more focused meetings.

Not only are smaller meetings much easier to manage and reduce the need for a list of action items, but they create a culture where people are encouraged to have lightweight ad-hoc meetings (and talk to each other) when warranted.

Manage your audience

My meetings are pretty open. If people want to join them, I am happy to forward an invite and welcome them to the group. But I’ve also been known to ask politely (and occasionally impolitely) for people to leave.

Meetings only work if people talk to one another. If they feel unsafe, then they will not participate. Sometimes that’s due to someone being an asshole. Far more often, people feel unsafe because they are other. They aren’t part of the group. There are these strangers here, or my boss, or a bunch of The Opposition, and I wish I wasn’t in this meeting right now.

A key part of managing that psychological safety is the audience of your meetings. Try and keep meetings around 7 people. More than that and people lack shared clarity of your topic, and the knowledge differential causes an imbalance in meeting participation. If your meeting is between two teams (or two factions), keep about the same number of participants on both sides. When people feel outnumbered or a discussion seems imbalanced, it feels unfair. Their ideas and opinions were overwhelmed by volume, not merit, so why even bother voicing them?

On the other hand, not inviting people can quickly lead to follow-up meetings, meeting minutes people never read, and the sort of bureaucratic treadmill that we’d all rather avoid. The key here is the feeling of inclusion, not literal inclusion in every meeting.

Keeping the scope of meetings small helps keep your audience small because fewer people naturally care about a focused topic. People are fine not being included on a topic they don’t care about. Having teams send representatives rather than the whole team can help keep your audience small because people can feel like their interests are being addressed without having to attend the meeting. Which is great — they didn’t want to go to another meeting anyways.

Set the stage

Right as a meeting starts, it’s useful to do an introduction. This is what we’re going to talk about. This is what we’re trying to achieve. Please remember that we’re all working towards the same goal… that sort of stuff.

The introduction is important because people are pretty bad at context switching. Half of them probably forgot what this meeting was about, and almost all of them are still thinking about the meeting/lunch/coding/cat-video that they were just focused on. The introduction signals that something new is happening while giving peoples’ brains a few moments to set the old stuff aside.

Having an introduction is also a way to prime people towards behaviors you want. By stating a goal (if there is a goal), you let people know what will cause the meeting to end. This helps your discussion not carry on indefinitely and can also help people chase the goal to escape the meeting. Reminding people to, for example, “argue against ideas rather than against people” can prime people towards more cordial discussion. The shared message also helps bind your audience together in the sense of shared purpose, helping with feelings of inclusion and safety.

Introductions are particularly important for decision-making meetings. The meeting introduction lays out the scope of the problem and who the decision-maker is. When a problem isn’t well-scoped, people tend to try and solve all of the problems vaguely related to what is being discussed. When there is no clear decision-maker, meetings drag on until someone is brave enough or foolish enough to decide.

Have a Referee

Running a meeting is work. Good meetings tend to have best practices like agendas and action items and post-it voting, but the meetings aren’t good because of them. Plenty of meetings follow these best practices and are still decidedly mediocre. Like other disciplines, cargo-culting best practices can prevent the worst outcomes but isn’t enough to produce good outcomes. To have good meetings, someone has to put in the work.

So what I do is to make that explicit. Every meeting has a Referee. They are responsible for the meeting going well. They push back on the ramblers. They correct folks that interrupt others. They keep people from bikeshedding too much. They invite quiet people to participate. They make sure the decision-maker is respected. They usually provide the introduction, and they are usually the ones to declare the meeting over if it has accomplished its goal or the discussion is over or if you’ve run out of time.

Ideally, they are someone who doesn’t have any stake in the discussion so that they can remain a neutral party. In any case, “who is running this meeting” should be known to all participants. That lets them focus on talking to one another. When one person is running the meeting, everyone else is free not to. And remember that running a good meeting is a skill like any other. It takes practice to get better, and it will be a little bumpy as people figure it out. Like any other work, it is good to spread this responsibility around.

Look, I am not particularly great at running meetings. It just looks that way because so many meetings are soul-crushing dumpster fires. A modicum of joy and productivity is glorious by comparison. These four guidelines work for me, and I would love for them to help you run smaller, more effective meetings where people actually talk to one another.

But the reality is that these guidelines are more dangerous to follow than the best practices I avoid. A single-line topic is vaguer and misunderstood than a half-read agenda if the topic is poorly crafted or communicated. An audience poorly managed will make people feel excluded or unsafe. Badly formed introductions can make people defensive. And a domineering or absentee Referee is worse than having none at all. A bad agenda, meeting minutes, or action items simply waste time rather than undermine the meeting itself.

These guidelines work for me and my team because we put in the effort. Even bad meetings work when people care for them because the process really isn’t the important part.