Seth Dobbs (he/him): You see a meeting on your calendar… Are you excited and you just can’t wait? Are you curious as to what it might be about? Are you filled with a sense of dread and loathing, or is this meeting just a drop in the ocean of meetings that form your life? Hi, I am Seth Dobbs, and this is the Principle Driven Leadership Podcast where I share principles of leadership, along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be.

These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building organizations and in coaching others to become leaders themselves. And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential in helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact.

And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results. And leadership is a journey, one that often feels like it’s just rife with meetings. In fact, certainly in my role, my days are filled with them and it’s because meetings are essential. But unfortunately so many of us hate them.

And I get it. My time is precious, very much, at least to me. So I’m cautious even as how I think about committing a 15 minute block of it, nevermind, maybe half a day. But before we get too deep into that, I want to talk about what I think a meeting is in terms of what I’m talking about today. It can be one-on-ones, it can be brainstorming.

Basically, if there’s a gathering of more than one person to discuss stuff, I consider it a meeting for the purposes of this conversation. And for leaders, so much of your job is communication. It’s working with people, it’s driving forward. Motion meetings are very important tool for accomplishing all of that.

And yet, so many meetings that we’re in could easily be an email, a wiki, direct message, an internet page. You really need to get these right because they are so important. Now, there’s a mantra out there: “No agenda, No attenda,” and it’s not bad thinking. But I actually think we’ve elevated the agenda as being the ultimate fix to bad meetings.

But an agenda is a means it’s not the end. And I actually think that mindless adherence to agendas has often been a part of what’s made some meetings very bad. So with that, I offer five steps to creating a better meeting. One, defining the desired outcome and impacts of the meeting. Two, identify the possible pool of participants based on value.

Three. Size the meeting appropriately. Four. Set the duration of the meeting appropriately. Have a plan and then when it’s done, and five. Make sure everyone’s present. So step one, defining the desired outcomes and impacts of the meeting. I’ll start briefly by just enumerating a few things that aren’t actually outcomes, which is reading status.

Knowing status, informing people of something, gaining visibility, or FaceTime, all that kind of stuff. None of those are really outcomes of a meeting. They’re just things that can happen, their actions, stuff like that. And this is important because if the outcome isn’t clear at the start of a meeting you’ve been invited to, you should ask what it is.

What problem are you all there trying to solve? Because if that’s not clear, if you don’t have a good sense of the outcomes you’re trying to create. Probably need a new discussion before the meeting starts. So said another way. You need a vision for your meeting. You and your attendees need to know why you’re there, what you’re trying to achieve, and understand what kind of forward motion is needed as a result of this gathering.

So things like informing, that’s not an outcome. Why are you informing people? Are there decisions people need to make? Are you helping them understand your decisions and needing them to take action? Are you making people feel more connected? What kinds of things do you need to have happen as an outcome of informing them?

And last I also think about not mixing levels of outcomes, meaning I think it’s difficult to have a meaningful discussion as an example of both trying to determine a strategy and the detailed plan to execute it. You need to finish one before the other. You need to understand the outcomes of the strategy before you can have a plan, and you might actually need different people in each of those discussions.

So step one. Make sure you have clear outcomes for the meeting, and it can be many things. The outcome might be something like you need to reach a decision on such and such so that you can do something, or it might be to ensure alignment so that folks can take action outside and after the meeting, or maybe you need to resolve disagreements and misunderstandings so that you can move forward again.

Maybe you’re hoping to brainstorm what’s keeping you from reach and your objectives so that you can form next steps to break through. Perhaps you’re using the time to review insights that you’ve gathered so that you can brainstorm around new opportunities to increase revenue and maybe form a plan on how you’re gonna take next steps.

You might even be trying to build a relationship or keeping people feeling connected and motivated. But in all of these, there’s a pattern. All of those are outcomes that drive further action and require some amount of discussion, some kind of input, some kind of interaction with a group. Because of that, the attendee list is actually very important, which brings us to step two, identifying the potential attendees based on value.

So you need to think about who can provide value to reach the outcomes of the meeting, and who is receiving value. Don’t consider anyone else. Meetings aren’t honoraries. They’re not rewards. They shouldn’t be punishments either. For what it’s worth, they should serve a purpose without knowing that purpose.

It’s hard to figure out your potential list of attendees, right? If you don’t know what outcomes you’re trying to reach, it’s hard to figure out who should attend and help with that or benefit from that. It’s also important to think through this because when you’re scheduling meetings, you should be somewhat sensitive to who’s providing value to you.

I’ve seen meetings where it says in the invite something like, I couldn’t find time for everyone. Please just try to make this look. Either the meeting matters and the people you invited are important to it, or the meeting doesn’t matter and or the people you invited aren’t important. And personally, if someone doesn’t care enough to get that sorted, I wonder why you should care about attending.

So the value of the meeting is measured ultimately by forward motion, by the desired outcomes of the meeting. So in other words, if someone is helping to reach those outcomes, they can be providing value. And I find typically that people that are benefiting from the meeting are often the ones that are scheduling it.

Sometimes they’re providing it. But again, you should think about the whole value chain in terms of who should be involved and how you go about scheduling it. So a good checkpoint. Do you have a real purpose, a real outcome you’re trying to reach from step one. And do you understand who can contribute to making that happen and or who can benefit from it and take action?

And if this is fuzzy, it’s probably not something that needs to be a meeting. It’s interesting. I’ve seen meetings where teams bring in executives for an hour or more to give various business updates, project updates and stuff like that, and I’m amazed at how often these just feel like a big waste of time because people are just reading a deck for that hour.

These teams are being given access to some of the most powerful folks in the organization. Some cases, the most experienced and insightful. Not always a guarantee in leadership, I understand that, but folks scheduling the meeting squander that opportunity. You wanna impress your leadership. Don’t just invite them to listen to you.

Read a deck. Invite them to engage in meaningful discussions where you seek their input and, and help gain forward motion or help them understand how you are working with them to provide that forward motion in the organization. Also consider the fact that sometimes you need input from the people you lead.

That’s right. They are often closer to the action that you than you, depending on your level. And so to be clear, the people you lead are often the ones providing value to you in a meeting, helping you see reality, see problems, see possible paths to resolution from a viewpoint that you don’t have. So with this clarity, why are you meeting the outcomes and who needs to attend or who is in the pool of people to attend to help reach those outcomes or might benefit?

It’s time for step three to size that list and make sure you get to an appropriate size. Because I’ll say once you look at that list, it might be giant. So you need to ask yourself, do you need all of those people in your meeting? Depends on the type of meeting. I think of myself as a minimalist. I like to find the minimal set of attendees for meeting.

Now, this is gonna depend and very widely on the desired outcomes. I’ll have town halls sometimes that are very large, hundreds of people. These are fairly one sided, they’re not discussions. And flow is mostly going from, giving value from a few of us to receiving value from most of the team and some q and a and stuff like that.

But like interactions, working meetings, et cetera, have other considerations. And one of the big ones is under understanding sort of the rhetorical style between advocacy and inquiry. Advocacy is people, is when people sort of dig in and just assert their point. And inquiry is more emotive interaction, where you’re working together to learn something new, to move forward and sort of explore.

You often need inquiry in a typical meeting, and there’s a lot of research basically that passed a certain number of people in a meeting. It can take very strong facilitation to maintain a state of inquiry and like six or seven people. So I typically think of a minimum set by getting to the fewest number of people I can include to still achieve all the outcomes and benefits that I need.

And I think about, do you need three people from the same team? If they represent essentially the same point of view, do they provide the same value? Are you inviting multiple people? But really one can carry the benefit outta the meeting and communicate and drive things forward. It’s funny because I know on the one hand people hate meetings.

I hear that all the time. And on the other hand, so many have fomo. They have that fear of missing out when it be, when it comes to so-called important meetings. Sometimes I recognize there’s value from involving people above and beyond that minimal set. But again, you shouldn’t be thinking about meetings as rewards or anything like that.

You should think of this step three as right sizing the meeting for what you need to accomplish. Step four is thinking about the duration of the meeting, having a plan and ending when it’s done. How much time do you really need for your meeting? You really need to have a guess. You know, given the desired outcomes and the number and the people that are attending, how much time is needed to reach those outcomes?

This is finally a good place to discuss agenda, and I think of it as a plan, right? You should think of it more as the structure. What is the plan of attack to reach the outcomes that are needed? Rigid adherence can be problematic. Time boxing, however, is an important, skill. It’s an important sort of tool in your toolkit and facilitation, but you don’t wanna just hit the time limit and say, oh, time’s up on that discussion, time to be done.

I mean, that can be useful maybe for keeping things on time, but not necessarily for achieving results. So there’s value in time boxing, but you need to make clearer if you’re doing that, that there’s a time limit when, when the time limit’s approaching and so forth, and stop and ask, has this discussion produced what we need?

And if not, how do we get what we need out of it? Do we need more time? Another important thing to consider in duration rightsizing, the attendee list and setting the duration are very related concepts. Are you setting up an hour meeting to have 20 people have a deep discussion? That doesn’t give anyone a lot of time to actually contribute value to the discussion.

So with all this information, create the agenda, but remember that the agenda is the means to the end, not the end itself. And I think of the old adage, planning is everything. Plans are nothing. And with that, a meeting should end precisely when it needs to, no sooner nor later. Don’t fill the space just because you’ve scheduled all this time, but really be cautious of the, Hey, since we’re all here and we finished because there’s extra time, certainly take advantage of a group gathering if you can honor the first three steps.

Make sure you understand the outcomes, you understand the value of the people there. You have the right people there. If not, you’ll need to find different time. Step five, then be present and make sure everyone is present. Many people, many, many people multitask when in meetings are really more to the point.

I think they’re actually ignoring the meeting that they’re attending to so that they can work on other tasks, and they do that until they’re called out or until whatever more important thing is resolved. This is a lot of why meetings can be such a waste of time. You get these meeting samplers, they don’t know why they’re there.

They don’t know what value they’re gonna provide. They’re listening in a little bit. Jumping in when they need to, not paying attention the rest of the time. So if you’ve done a good job with the first four steps, making the outcomes clear, understanding people’s roles, making sure they understand it, they should recognize that importance, why they’re there and they should be present.

And if you have people that can’t stay focused, especially if there’s a repeated pattern, I have to ask if they’re really providing or receiving value. And consider if there need to be a part of that or future meetings. So getting good at meetings very important. I spend a lot of my time moving from meeting to meeting.

The more clarity going to into each meeting, the easier it is for me to shift context. So remember these five steps. One, make the outcomes clearer. Two, make sure everyone understands if they’re providing value, receiving value, or both. Three, keep meetings to an appropriate number of attendees. Four. Give your meeting enough time to accomplish what needs to be accomplished.

Have a plan to achieve that, and then when it’s done, and five, be present and make sure that everyone else is. So with that, what are you gonna change for meetings you have scheduled tomorrow? And how are you gonna encourage others to clean up their meetings and looking at your calendar? Are there meetings on there that you shouldn’t attend this week?

And what are you gonna do about that? Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe and share with a friend if you’ve liked it, and join me next time where I’m gonna talk about the second core principle of leadership that Leaders Resolve Problems.