today we're going to talk about something really interesting meetings now G do we have a lot of meetings probably we have more than 100 million meetings every day just in the US um many of them are great many of them are not very good and we're going to talk about that today how to improve them we have the world leading specialist Stephen rogelberg warm welcome.

oh it's so good to be here.

great and you're coming to Oslo to have this meeting I am.

I am and this is the this is a meeting I wanted to have.

that's good now how come you became interested in this?

oh my my gosh I have no idea other than just the sheer frustration of having a day filled with meetings and not feeling like I accomplished anything and my concern was is that a shared feeling amongst the millions and millions of people out there working and the answer is yes when you have days full of meetings you just end that day feeling more drained feeling like you have yet more work to do and yet you don't have that sense of accomplishment.

what's what's the key to a successful meeting because some of them are successful right sometimes we come out on meeting and said wow that was good what's the key to that?

so there's a there's a host of keys um it starts with intentionality so what we have found in our research is the best meeting leaders have something in common and what they have in common is the mindset of being a good Steward of others time and when you think of yourself as a steward of others time you become intentional with your meeting choices you design the meeting with intentionality you facilitate the meeting with intentionality and you close the meeting with intentionality and interestingly we always we have have this stewardship mindset when we're meeting with critical stakeholders but we when we're meeting with our team or peers we tend to step back and not act like a steward so we will talk about some of that intentionality I'm sure in terms of specific choices but it definitely starts with this mindset that if people leave your meeting saying that it was a waste of time that is so uncomfortable to you that you try to do things to prevented.

when should we call a meeting in the first place?

meeting should be called when there's a compelling purpose that that requires interaction and engagement if you don't need interaction and engagement then you don't need to bring people together right.

this should we have them regularly in the in the diary should we just have them every Monday bang bang meet this person?

if there's a compelling reason to do that but we just don't want to meet out of habit which is what calendars are being filled with right it's just habits and habits are tough to break so we definitely want to be more thoughtful that we only schedule a meeting when there's is absolute criticality to do so.

when should we just send an email instead?

so let me give you because some emails should probably be meetings and some meetings should be emails I think it keeps going back to that the need for engagement with the content that really is what if you need engagement with the content meetings are a perfect mechanism so let me give you a technique let me tie this to a technique and we all know the importance of creating an agenda well I have an alternative approach to agendas and it speaks to when you should have a meeting and when you should not so instead of framing your agenda as a set of topics to be discussed what I want to challenge folks to do is create an agenda as a set of questions to be answered by Framing your agenda as a set of questions to be answered now you have to step back and really think why am I having this meeting it's to address these questions by Framing your agenda as questions you have a better sense of who has to be there they're relevant to the questions by Framing your agenda's questions you now know if the meeting has been successful the questions have been answered and if you just can't think of any questions it likely means you don't need a meeting absolutely.

no you have something called a stur mindset right what what what is involved in that?

so that is just this this notion that you are inviting people you are asking people to give you the greatest gift that we all have our time and by asking for that you want to honor that time you want to make sure that that investment is Meaningful to them and to you so when you have that stewardship mindset you are trying to create good choices that intentionality to elevate this meeting time so that people feel at the end that it wasn't a drain but instead a gain.

who should be in a meeting?

the people that should be in the meeting are critical to answering the questions of interest because during I think during covid when we were at teams we kind of included everybody left right and Center in order not to offend anybody that's right nobody should feel excluded everybody should be part of it you know meeting and and I think we just kind of continued that philosophy exactly this so This desire to increase meeting size comes from three forces the first force is a force of goodness you just want to include people so you invite them right that's a coming from a good place the second force is laziness right it's very easy for us just to hold captive people's calendars and invite them to a meeting right so we're not thoughtful or deliberate we just say when in doubt invite the third force is insecurity namely as people became working more remote leaders just didn't have that confidence that they were actually managing so how do they express their management you bring them into a meeting and so these meetings just keep increasing increasing in size.

what's the optimal is there um like a Max size of a meeting?

it it depends if you're trying to accomplish genuine interaction if you really want to create interaction you know more than eight people is super hard you have to be a very skilled facilitator yeah how long should they be they should be as long as absolutely necessary given what you're trying to answer but they tend to fill up the time they have exactly so there's something called Parkinson's law and Parkinson's law is the idea that work expands to fill whatever time is allotted to it so a meeting scheduled for 60 minutes will take 60 minutes but we can actually use that science to our advantage if we schedule a meeting for 25 5 minutes we will get it done in fact the research shows that if you identify a meeting time and then decrease it by around five minutes it actually creates positive pressure and more focus and those groups perform better that's interesting.

now how do you make meetings good how do you make them engagement engaging?

so I it starts from that agenda and that intentionality so that questions based approach when you frame your agenda as questions to be answered people will be drawn into it right we as early as young school kids we are drawn to answer questions so when we frame it as questions and then when the leader starts the meeting what was so interesting in the science is that the leader's mood is actually the best predictor of the meetings mood so if you come in there in a negative mood state it pervades the meeting and it affects engagement and openness to new ideas so the meeting has to start well the leader has to recognize that they are a host they called everyone together so what does a host do a host welcomes people a host makes introductions a host expresses gratitude and helps people make separation from what they were doing before they walked into the meeting and then into the meeting itself and then once that meeting is going that leader is facilitating right if you invited someone to this meeting it's because you wanted to hear what they had to say so that leader is dialed in and saying oh I haven't heard from you Gordon I'd love to hear your thoughts on this or or Sandy I know you were working on something similar right so they're helping bring the voices out they're encouraging conflict conflict of ideas right so they're they're doing all that and then when the meeting is coming to a conclusion they help promote an ending.

the common thing is that the most senior person speaks the most right unfortunately that is and what has generally been found is these most senior folks who talk the most they are not picking up on the meeting Dynamics when you do a lot of talking you love it you think this is great the more people talk the better they feel about the experience so these leaders and the more senior you are the more endorphins you get from hearing your own voice exactly so they leave the meeting saying this was great but everyone else doesn't feel the same.

how do you get um what's good listening who's a good listener I think it's interesting sometimes you give speech or a seminar or something and you some people in the audience are just better listeners and you can just see it I think it's the way they're notd I guess uh.

so listening has multiple components um so let me answer that question by telling by telling you a related piece of science which I think speaks to it have you noticed that when people make introductions you learn someone's name next thing you know you've forgotten it sure and so there were studies to look at this and basically one of the principal reasons well there's a couple principal reasons we don't remember the names is one we don't really care we don't really care so that now tells us one key clue to listening is caring what that person says Y the second reason we often forget the names is because we are rehearsing what we're going to say while that person's introducing themselves so active listening is all about caring truly engaging with what that person has to say say taking as a challenge to truly fully engage with their words so the the types of utterance such as help me understand tell me more what are your thoughts right these are all overt attempts to truly engage with another person's content and that's where listening takes part.

you mentioned the important of um kind of conflicts in meetings um so we had um Ed KML who was the founder of Pixar on on the podcast and he talked about Steve Jobs I mean they they co-founded pixa together Steve Jobs he he sacked two board members at Pixar because they never disagreed with him in in meetings and he said you know if you don't disagree you're not adding anything to this company so how do you create an environment where people are feel okay to disagree?

yeah that's great we definitely want conflict in meetings but we want conflict of ideas not conflict of personalities y and to create a culture where conflict occurs of ideas it starts with the leader expressing values that this is actually what they want right so so many meeting leaders never express what their hopes are in this meeting but if you start the meeting saying we have some important things to talk about that there's no way we all 100% agree so we want people to go to battle over ideas right so create the expectation then once that me happens encourage it right so you can make comments Sasha what is the alternative perspective on this give me something different right so the facilitation could help keep promoting alternative perspectives and then I want to share one other way because this next way is the most different one of the greatest ways of creating conflict in meetings is silence namely if groups interact with no voices and basically are just typing into a document so for example let's say we're brainstorming around alternative approaches to penetrate a market right we could do that with our mouths or we could type into a shared document with everyone putting in their ideas and then adding you know comments on others ideas when brainstorming is done with silence the range of ideas is much greater and you get so many different ideas because when you were doing it in silence everyone could contribute at once and they weren't being most influenced by the first voice they heard because everything occurred simultaneous.

interesting how do you wrap up a meeting that's such an important question.

we know meetings end but meetings often don't have an ending and the best meetings haven't ending basically with five minutes left or three minutes left you stop you stop and you say okay we've had this conversation we now need to wrap this up here's what we decided for each of these things that was decided we've identified the Dr directly responsible individual so therefore no one leaves the meeting wondering what was decided and who's responsible as part of that ending you're also indicating outstanding issues that can be picked up at the next meeting so this General wrapup right this closing is so helpful not only for the people attending but also the people not attending namely if you document that it helps those people who are not attending feel it's okay that I wasn't there.

uh in this fund we rate our meetings uh after the meeting the leader group meetings is that a good a there or a bad a there?

it I lean good um but how we use the data that needs to be a little bit more Nuance so I I'd have to learn a little bit more how you leverage those data but here's why I think it's a good idea as I mentioned earlier leaders think they're much better at running meetings than others so there's this disconnect there's a blind spot that these leaders have and when you have this blind spot you're not very motivated to make changes right because you think it's going well so why would you change you constantly believe that the meeting problem is everyone else not you so the feedback and the data are critical pieces for helping to provide awareness and Enlightenment so I love the idea of people getting some type of aggregated data on how they're doing in this role another way of carrying it out by the way is to go to your engagement survey is there any content on meetings in that engagement survey and likely the answer is no and that's a tremendous missed opportunity to build into your engagement survey Reporting System content on how people are actually spending their time at work.

should we be standing up sometimes?

but not always so yes the research generally shows that meetings standing up take nearly half as much time and produce the similar quality outcomes so standing up was not a bad idea but certain meeting if a long meeting no one's going to want to be standing for a long period of time so we just have to be thoughtful but I think what's so important about your question and what it speaks to is that when you're leading a meeting you have choices there's lots of different ways you can run this meeting right you can do it in silence you can have people stand up you can have people get into pairs before they start talking as a group right you have a lot of things that you can actually make choices of that can Elevate The Experience so step back and make a choice at times a 15minute quick meeting where people are kind of coming together a standup could be perfect if you're having an8 hour Retreat a standing up meeting is probably not the best choice that's probably right.

now how does it differ um online uh instead of uh in person what are the things we need to be to be aware of?

great question um before the pandemic virtual meetings were ranked very very low right so face-to-face meetings were considered um by attendees to be a much richer better experience but people have gotten better with virtual meetings we're seing virtual meeting Effectiveness increase over time and basically people's perceptions generally see it around the same now as face to face interestingly virtual meetings have in some ways more potential why because the meeting room is inherently Democratic right everyone is on an equal plane in a virtual meeting you don't have head of table effects right so it's an open for much more accessible for people you have the access to chat and chat has been shown to be a great mechanism for bringing more voices into the conversation you also have these various plugins that allow for quick voting and consensus taking done anonymously so you're not just influenced by the loudest voices but you can quickly test consensus so there's so many reasons that virtual meetings can Excel and even be better than face Toof face.

multitasking what do you think what I think about multitasking yeah I love multitasking.

oh in meetings multitasking is really intriguing because generally when people are multitasking in meetings they're actually doing their work they're actually doing their work so it's a behavior that hurts the meeting but helps the organization it's crazy it's a very interesting phenomenon but multitasking is generally a symptom it is a symptom of a bad meeting yeah so it's just boring or you wonder why you're there yeah.

Stephen we talked about um kind of bigger meetings now but you also written a book about one-on-one meetings I have you have for sure written books that's great now what is um what is a one-one meeting and why are they important?

thank you our days are filled with one-on-one encounters but I'm talking about something different so this book that I wrote It's called glad we met the Art and Science of one-on-one meetings when I'm talking about a one-on-one meeting in that context what I'm talking about is a meeting that's facilitated and orchestrated by a manager with one of her or his direct reports but it is a meeting not for the manager yeah it is a meeting for that employee it is a meeting for that employee to be able to express their thoughts and ideas and whatever is on their minds the manager is just reacting to what the employee it's a dedicated space to truly see your people and and the research on it is amazing that when managers have these regular one-on-ones with their people where they're not just asking for status reports because again that's for them but they're trying to understand your challenges your thoughts your concerns um your opportunities both shortterm and long-term when you fully engage with that person on their terms these individuals tend to be more engaged they your top talent tends to be more retainable they feel more committed to the team team and to the organization and people are better coordinated.

and how often should you do them?

well we looked at that from two perspectives first of all we ask people what is your preferred Cadence to meet with your manager in this one-on-one meeting and by far it was weekly then we looked at the outcomes so we examine how frequently you have them and then people's engagement on the job it lined up perfectly weekly one-on-ones or every other week one-on-ones where associated with the best outcomes for the organization when they're every month the relationship doesn't have the continuity right the the the conversations become stale and disjointed the story doesn't come through but a manager how many oneon-one meetings or how many relationships should a manager Have and Have one-on-one meetings with you think so you should be having one-on-ones with every single one of your direct reports yeah hopefully you don't have more than 10 direct reports but here's the super good news it's less about the amount of minutes in these one-on-ons and more about the regularity of it so if I give you 20 good minutes every week that had the same positive outcomes as even if I gave you an hour so as a manager looks at the calendar goes I don't have time to do one-on-ones really the question is if you don't have the time you're going to lose lose your best people right if you don't invest in these relationships the team won't Thrive we've all heard that adage that people don't leave bad jobs they leave Bad Bosses one-on-ones are your opportunity to prove to your people that you're not a bad boss.

why do you think people are hesitant to have them then if if they're so no-brainer?

because everyone is so pressed with time that they're constantly thinking of what type of meeting do I not not need to have and the alternative title for my book that I didn't use but I was tempted was the one meeting that should never be an email because that's really what a one-on-one is I'm a big believer in looking at this notion of signals As Leaders we are always sending signals to our people signals about what's important to us and what's not think about the signal you send to your people when you do not have a one-on-one you're sending the signal that they really don't matter that much to you.

yeah well we all need to be seen right so I guess it's part of that.

exactly.

where does mentoring come in here?

mentoring fits perfectly with this whole concept of one-on-ones because a mentor is not someone generally that has a Personal Agenda in the conversation right a good Mentor a good coach is helping to engage with a person on their terms and so the these one-on-ones are absolutely an opportunity to provide mentoring and coaching but the employee is opening the door for it right so you don't go into these meetings with a manager saying oh I have some feedback for you but the manager can say is there anything that I can share some feedback are there any topics or anything that you want me to share feedback on right so they they have the door available to the the individual but the employee gets to drive and the more that we drive and that feedback process the more we accept the feedback and internalize it right when you're mentoring or coaching someone in these one-on-ones if the employee says I'm having this particular problem now the manager can say oh here's a solution to the problem a mentor would say well what are your thoughts on how to address that problem in your mind is a um a mentor from the same company or an external Mentor the better choice it could be either one um it really depends on the in the role in question um generally and how new the employee is to the organization itself but generally speaking uh most mentors can emerge internally for some types of High Senior roles where um benchmarking with other competitors or other organizations could be particularly helpful an external Mentor could be better.

Stephen this has been a really really good meeting uh we could not have done it by email it's been really really exciting uh engaging I'm wrapping it up uh hopefully in a good way and uh look forward to staying in touch.

well I appreciate it and I will say this so we talked about the characteristics of a great meeting and we we emphasize this notion of stewardship you have been a fabulous Steward right you came into this meeting you were well prepared you read my content you listened you engaged I thank you so much for participating and being such a great uh partner in this content fantastic thank you so much.