Stop running meetings that waste time! Join Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo as they expose the hidden traps of traditional meetings and reveal powerful strategies to transform your team’s communication. Discover how to effectively design impactful meetings, utilize asynchronous communication, and leverage tools like Slack, email, and project management software to optimize teamwork. Whether you’re a meeting enthusiast or a staunch avoider, Gwen and Tonya offer valuable insights to revolutionize your approach to meetings and boost overall efficiency.
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Stop Running Meetings That Waste Time
Gwen, I can’t decide if this is my favorite or my least favorite topic. It depends on how we go with it, but that is meetings. We might even talk about the dreaded meetings about meetings.
Good God.
I was waiting for the reaction on that one. As business owners, our listeners might default to meetings as their primary form of communication, especially with their teams. Many entrepreneurs do. As you know, Gwen, you work with a lot of clients who are entrepreneurs. I work with a lot of clients who are entrepreneurs. I find, and I’d love for you to talk a little bit more about this, that we tend to lean this direction, especially if we’re relational by nature, which I think most women business owners are. This whole idea of meetings as your default form of communication can lead to wasted time. It can lead to frustration among your team. What I want to do is explore why it happens and what people can do instead. Sound good?
Sounds good. It’s interesting because I also find the other extreme to be true, which is I’ve had a number of clients who never would hold a meeting with their team, which is also as problematic as always holding meetings with your team. This, to me, is the classic example of how extremes are rarely useful. We’re talking about, are you holding too many meetings? That’s a problem. If you’re not holding enough meetings, that could also be a problem. I’m excited to talk about this as well because I do think whoever the leader is, we tend to migrate to whichever is our favorite.
Extremes are rarely useful. Are you holding too many meetings? That's a problem, and so is not holding enough meetings. Share on XI could see that.
If I hate going to a meeting, then I’m going to make sure that we never meet.
You have to get so personal there, Gwen.
If I love meetings, I’m going to have us meet anytime that we possibly could.
The Real Purpose Of Team Communication
If you’re on the team with me, I’m like, “I have enough friends. I’m good. I don’t need to chit-chat all day long. I need to work.” Which brings me to what I think should be our first question, which is, what is the real purpose of team communication? Because when I think of meetings, I think most of us view our meetings as a way to communicate with our team, same place, same time, all together.
A good meeting, that’s true. And I am emphasizing a good meeting as opposed to a bad meeting. Part of it is also related to is the discussion a valuable part of what’s on the agenda? Is it so that folks can ask questions, which may inspire other folks to ask other questions, or they may get a question answered that they didn’t know they had, when we’re all in that same room? That’s another good use for meetings.
Is there a timeliness that’s also associated with it? Because sometimes we need to make sure everybody gets this information pretty close to the same time. If we’re using any asynchronous type of communication, whether it be email, a text option, Slack, or any sort of chat-type option, people may not be getting it at the same time, which could also be problematic in some cases. I think that’s where meetings matter. The other is sometimes it’s just about creating some bonding between various folks that may not bond otherwise. There’s only so much bonding you can do through chat and email.
I’m curious, how? I’m thinking, and maybe this is what we need to talk about. Maybe we need to talk about meeting design a little bit, or what are the mile markers in an effective meeting? Because I’ve been in several meetings where there’s an agenda, and we go from top to bottom, and I don’t see where relationship-building occurs in that environment.
That’s one of the things that I think a lot of people miss in their agenda, which is having a little bit of time to do some relationship stuff. It doesn’t have to be a big networking thing where people are like, “Don’t make me do this.” It can be, “Share a success that you’ve had since we last met,” whether it be a month ago, a week ago, or whatever.
One of the things that a lot of people miss in their meeting agenda is having a little bit of time to do some relationship stuff. Sharing a success or a win can create bonding that we'll never do in an email. Share on XNot that we’re going to go into this big, giant thing, but it helps people think, “They see that as a success. I didn’t know they were doing that. I didn’t realize they were the one that helped make that happen.” Those are things that create that bonding that we’re never going to do in an email. That just feels weird to me in an email or a chat. Maybe there are environments where they do that, but it doesn’t feel natural.
It doesn’t have to take up a big, giant piece of the agenda, just sharing a success, a win, or something and putting some constraint around it. One of the things that I love from Nick Peterson is he calls it the six-word update. He wants you to keep it to six words, which is also an interesting mental exercise. It’s like writing a haiku, I don’t know the exact rules of a haiku, but it’s the same sort of thing. It’s an interesting exercise, and it’s fun. You’ll watch people count the numbers and go, “Crap, that was seven.”
I’ve done that, and then sometimes you forget to count and or of.
Sometimes you count syllables as two. It’s like, “That one word? That’s just syllables.” But all of that, even those little tiny behaviors, also creates that bonding environment.
What I think I heard is that an effective meeting isn’t just an info-sharing session. There’s some information sharing, there is, at the very least, a little bit of relationship-building, maybe some collaboration. You mentioned that there are some times when meetings are necessary, such as when you need everybody to get the information at the same time, you need everybody to be able to discuss the information at the same time, or, in order to move the project forward most effectively, everybody needs to be in the room to talk back and forth about priorities, outcomes, all that good stuff.
I’m going to give you an example that isn’t all a business example but something from my past. Years ago, I was in charge of our church council, and there were several committees. There’s a staffing committee, there’s a financing committee, there’s a trustees committee, which is about all the buildings and the maintenance and whatnot. Typically, what we used to do is those committees would have each of their own meetings. The thing is, they would usually have to send one of their items to one of the other committees, and then those committees would have to meet and say yes or no, or ask questions, and it would go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
These were in-person meetings. This was quite a while ago. A lot of people weren’t really email proficient, but one of the things I said is like, we’re going to do all of this in one meeting together. Occasionally, there were things that had to be done separately because of legal reasons and all the rest of it, but instead of having a meeting, waiting three weeks until the next committee had their meeting, waiting three weeks until they had their meeting, getting back and whatnot.
To me, this is where you can make a meeting condense the timeline drastically because I’ve seen the same thing with chat channels and email strings and whatnot. I’m asking a question, but I have to wait 24 or 48 hours until you respond, and then I have to respond to that. All of a sudden, something has taken three weeks that probably could have been solved in an hour. That’s when a meeting is useful.
What I’ve also seen happen in those circumstances is I fire off something to you, and then I get impatient waiting for you to respond. I go take action, and 24 hours later, you’re responding to one instance, and I’ve already taken five steps. Sometimes those five steps I’ve taken are like your initial response, like, “We’re not going to do that thing.”
This is the place where sometimes meetings can be really useful, but at the same point, there are a lot of times that we’re trying to substitute meetings for having good communication, good rules, and good internal processes. That’s when meetings are not useful. Everyone has probably seen the t-shirt, the mug, the whatever that says, “Another meeting that could have been an email.”
Why Meetings Are Sometimes A Crutch
What I’ve seen, and maybe you have seen it, maybe you haven’t, is sometimes meetings are a crutch.
They totally are. They can totally be a crutch but say more about that, because I agree, but I know you’ve got something on your mind, so say more.
Keeping in mind, I worked in higher ed, and let’s talk about a system designed to justify its existence in some cases just because academia is such a beast. I think sometimes you ask a fair question. “Looking ahead to the next month, I see we have these five things that deadline before the end of the year. I’m curious just what the priorities are. Can you just give that to me? One, two, three.” “Let’s address that at the next team meeting.” Why do I need to wait till the next team meeting for my priorities? What I think happens is I think sometimes as bosses, one, we’re not ready to answer that question, but we don’t want to admit we’re not, so we’re just trying to delay to buy ourselves some time.
What I’ve seen, this was especially true in my work in the nonprofit world, is some incredible advocates are not incredible leaders, and they don’t want to own the decision. What I always talk about is abdicating their leadership authority. They want to take it to the meeting so that the group can make the decision so that they don’t have to.
I think that’s a fabulous example. That can be the thing of like, “I don’t want to seem like I’m being,” and I’m going to use the term bossy because that’s one of the things I think a lot of women struggle with. “I don’t want to be bossy.” If you don’t want to be bossy, you shouldn’t be the boss. Because bossy has got a very negative connotation, but part of being the boss sometimes is making the decisions, and the rest of the team may not be happy about it. That’s okay. If they’re always not happy, then we’ve got a different issue.
Occasionally, it’s like, “They don’t want to do that. I understand they don’t want to do that, but that’s what we need to do.” By saying, “We’re going to bring it to the,” then, like you said, you can abdicate and maybe say, “We decided as a group that this is what we need to do,” even if you really were the one deciding. It’s like, sometimes you just need to say, it’s the version of, “I’m the mom, that’s why.”
Because I said so.
I don’t advocate that as an ongoing leadership style. I don’t think that’s really the best. We also know that sometimes that need is what is needed. To me, this is that balance between the two. I do think meetings get a bad rap because people have way too many meetings. I think a lot of people then do swing to the other extreme, which to me is also a bad process.
When Is A Meeting Necessary For Extroverts
Let’s have that conversation. I’m going to put myself in both chairs, but first, I’m the extrovert. I want to have a meeting about everything. I have come to you, Gwen, and my whole team is working with you. I have hired you to work with me. I’ve hired you to work with my whole team, and my team is coming to you, going, “I would get a lot more done if Tonya didn’t pull me into six hours of meetings a day.” How would you help me decide, going from having a meeting about everything, when a meeting is necessary? When it could have been an email or something else? What criteria could I use?
The couple of criteria I always use are how much other people’s input is going to make a difference in the outcome because sometimes it’s like, I’ve got this general idea, but I don’t have any idea what all of the next steps are or how it’s going to affect, I’m going to say departments. We’re generally not talking to people who have departments, but even if you’ve got three people, one’s doing marketing, and one’s doing this and that, we’ll call those departments in this case. That, to me, is a meeting kind of situation because we’re looking at lots of input, but not necessarily a meeting for all of the input.
This is where we can blend the two and say, “Think about these things and come prepared for this so we don’t have to take 30 or 45 minutes to prep people to be in the discussion. We can jump into the discussion.” That will shorten the meeting time. Back to if there is a timing issue where everyone needs to know at exactly the same time, that, to me, is a meeting. I am a fan of having some regular, “We’re touching base and making sure everyone sees everybody’s faces,” even if it’s virtually, on a regular basis.
That’s when I will question, how often is this really necessary? With a big organization, like when you were in higher ed, when I was in a corporation, that may be every week, and I can see that, but for the organization sizes that we’re dealing with, probably most of the time, once a month is okay. If it’s a small enough organization, it might be once a quarter.
That’s usually taking away a whole lot of those extraneous meetings because you don’t need a meeting for a status update. That can be done in a document. It’s really when the interaction, either because you know there are questions that you can’t anticipate, and you want them to have the ability to ask those questions, and/or you’re needing input because you can’t move forward without input. You feel like the discussion of the input will provide value as opposed to just asking for your input, asking for separate pieces. Those are the places where meetings can be super useful.
Meetings are really useful when you need interaction because you can't move forward without input. Share on XWhen Is A Meeting Necessary For Introverts
That helps me decide when the meeting is really necessary. Now, I’m an introvert. I don’t ever want to have a meeting because nothing you said sells me on this deal. I’m thinking, relationships, if they’re really desperate for friendship, they can call me. They can send, if you’re me, I’m going to Loom everybody. They can just watch my video. It’s like, I was right there. I don’t even have to go. We can just do this whole thing asynchronously. What would you tell me in terms of determining when meetings are necessary? How would you help me make that decision since I never want to have them anyway?
I would have the exact same criteria. If they all need the information at the exact same time, which, there are rarely a lot of these, but there are occasional situations where that’s going to happen. I’m not expecting that to be once a month. I’m expecting that to be twice a year at most that you’re going to have that kind of situation. Do not do that as a Loom. These are not appropriate for those kinds of things. Those need to be discussions because usually, it’s important. It’s catching people off guard. They’re going to have questions. They need to be able to ask them. That would be one.
One also is if your entire team is introverts, they may not need to bond in any other way than through asynchronous types of communication. However, if you have more than one or two people on your team, and you only have introverts, you’re missing a whole lot of value in your team. I see this happen with a lot of entrepreneurs as they start growing. They realize that they keep hiring themselves, which is not creating the diversity that creates a strong team. If you start hiring 1 or 2 people who aren’t, they are completely disconnected from the rest of your team.
They do need a meeting every once in a while, which could be this monthly meeting, this quarterly meeting, this whatever. The other is, if you’re wanting discussion, you can do discussion via chat and whatnot, but it’s not the same as communicating out loud verbally. That’s another time that if you really feel like, “I don’t have all the answers. I’m needing multiple sources of input.” Usually, it also shortens your timeline greatly. People are like, “But I can just do it when I want.” It’s like, but that’s a cycle-interrupt process. It’s like, “I took five minutes to answer this, five minutes to answer this, five minutes to answer this, five minutes to answer this. So I only spent 20 minutes on it.”
That may feel like that’s true, but that start and stop for each one of those things probably was closer to a 15- or 20-minute mental process that was going on. What felt like it was fifteen minutes was about an hour and a half of your productivity time, where a 30-minute meeting would have been shorter because we would have stayed focused on it.
Got it. I don’t think I’ve ever had that experience in my entire professional career, but it is definitely something to work toward, this idea that it would have been 90 minutes asynchronously, but it can be 30 minutes.
The thing is, you can’t track it as 90 minutes. You can’t track it as 90 minutes asynchronously because you’re just saying, “It was five minutes.” It’s really hard to do the context switching and be able to track that, but that’s going on whether you think you’re tracking it or not. There is lost productivity. But like I said, if I said, “Track all of that,” there’s no way you can track it. There’s absolutely no way you can track it.
Agendas: Why They’re Essential For Productivity And Inclusion
Agendas, yes or no? Believe it or not, this is a controversial topic.
Agenda is always yes for two reasons, and they need to go out ahead of time. Ahead of time doesn’t mean weeks ahead of time because then no one’s looked at it. Ahead of time usually is 24 to 48 hours. Here’s why. Agendas first help you think about what we’re doing so you can stay on track, and not every meeting has to have an agenda, but most meetings, if you really want them to be productive, should have an agenda. It also helps you think about, “I’m really expecting to talk about this for fifteen minutes.” If you’re at 20, it’s like, we’re going to make a choice, either we want to put more time into this, which means we’re not going to do something else, or we’ve got enough. Let’s stop, keep moving on.
Agendas first help you think about what you're doing so you can stay on track. Share on XThat’s part of the agenda, but the other half is for the difference between the introvert and extrovert. Extroverts don’t necessarily need an agenda because they’re okay discussing, thinking, and commenting off the cuff. It’s their nature, and I’m a big extrovert. You’ve heard me more than once say, “I didn’t even know I knew that until it came out of my mouth,” because that’s the way our brains work. Introverts want to think about what they want to say, the question they want to bring, the thing ahead of time. The agenda gives them enough information to do that so that they can contribute more effectively at the meeting than if they don’t know what the topic is.
This is a training I’ve done for a lot of organizations, and the extroverts are like, “It never even occurred to me.” When they start doing it, I inevitably get notes back like, “My meetings are so much better,” because half of their team were introverts that weren’t ever contributing, and all of a sudden, they’re contributing now just by them having an agenda 24 to 48 hours ahead of time.
It doesn’t have to be detailed. It doesn’t have to have every little minutia to it. You don’t even necessarily have to send it out with, “We’re going to spend fifteen minutes on this and this and this.” Do that for yourself because it does help you manage your meeting better. Knowing what we’re talking about makes a huge difference for the introverts. A lot of times, when introverts have said, “We hate meetings,” it’s because they’ve never had meetings where the agenda was sent out ahead of time.
I think there are people, introverted or not, who have some measure of social anxiety. Nobody wants to go into a room, see an hour block on their calendar, and go into a room truly not knowing what to expect.
It’s absolutely true.
Finding The Perfect Timeline For Productive Meetings
Agendas, yes. Always. What about timeline? Do you think there’s a perfect amount of time to have a meeting? Is there something that makes it too short, too long?
I think it depends on the purpose. It does depend on the purpose of the meeting. If it’s a lot about, I’m going to say, ideation, questions, discussion, and whatnot, usually, you can’t do that in 30 minutes or less unless it’s super focused. But at the same point, giving it three hours usually is also not valuable. It’s probably better to have three one-hour meetings than one three-hour meeting because, at some point, our brains get tired. From that standpoint, 90 might be okay, but usually, longer meetings, unless it is a training or something like that, where people are giving and providing information, generally, my insight is 1 to 2 hours is definitely in the max category.
I have also seen, though, fifteen-minute meetings be really effective with small teams on updates or “I need help on” just very focused kinds of things. I think the trick always is to start with what you think is right and, as the leader of the meeting, really know how much time you think is going to be taken. Because to me, this is a bit like a lot of the stuff that we talk about. Most people are really bad at it. They try it once or twice, it sucks, they’re like, “I’m bad at this. I’m not ever going to do this again.”
It’s like, this is a skill. Part of a skill is, we’re going to put something out, we’re going to try and do our best, we’re going to evaluate how we did, we’re going to do something a little bit different next time, and we’ll see if that’s better or worse. If it’s worse, we’ll do something different. If it’s better, then we’ll do more of that. Over time, you can get pretty good at doing this. You will learn how much you can put in a meeting, and you can see it’s about not just running the meeting but observing the meeting.
Say more about that.
We often get caught in just doing the meeting that we forget to look back and reflect on, how did the meeting go? How were my time blocks? Where did I see people lose interest? When did they all get on their phone? What were all of those things? It’s that reflection piece that we talk about a lot that provides part of the value of getting good at running a meeting. That reflection piece becomes super important over time. It’s easy to just finish the meeting, done. It either, in our mind, is yes or no. Good meeting, bad meeting. It’s a good meeting, these are the pieces that went well. Let’s make sure we do it better next time. This one little thing wasn’t quite right, let’s see if we can tweak it. Or bad, these things really didn’t go well. This thing was really useful, so we need to figure out more of that. How do we tweak these other things to get it better? It’s not just yay or nay.
We often get caught up in just doing the meeting that we forget to look back and reflect on how the meeting went. Reflection provides part of the value of getting good at running a meeting. Share on XChoosing The Right Communication Tools
We’ve talked a lot about meetings and their importance, but also, we don’t want to have meetings about meetings. We don’t want meetings that could have been emails. We’ve talked about all these different types of communication methods that are used, sometimes along with meetings, sometimes to replace meetings. I’d like to just talk a little bit about what’s good or which tools are good for what goals. Let’s take direct messaging, so you’ve got Slack, Teams, Google. I’m sure there’s others out there that I’m blanking on. I guess some people are still using Messenger, that might be a thing. When is that communication? When does that make sense?
One of the things that we did soon after you arrived in the organization, that I hadn’t really done before but we saw a huge impact on, is being clear on which tools are used for what kind of communication. In this case, it’s less about this is the right thing for chat and this is the right thing for email. It’s about knowing that, within our organization, what those definitions are. I’m just going to share what ours are, not that they are the right answer. It’s just an answer, and it’s what works for us.
We use a chat-life tool for pretty much all internal communications, any kind of updates that I need to get. This is the status updates, what I call the quick question, keeping in mind that we also know people are, we do not expect, as part of our culture, that people are watching that constantly. If you’ve sent me a Slack and I’m in a meeting, I am not going over and answering your question in Slack and because of the way my calendar works, that may mean it may wait for three hours. We know it’s not for urgent, but we also don’t have the kind of business that has fire, flood, or blood. Things can wait for most of a day if they need to wait for most of a day.
That’s how we use that. Part of the reason the tool works well for us is we don’t have a thousand different channels. We have a very limited number of channels. We know how we’re using each one, and that works really well. Email, for us, is really only for outside communication or if we’re forwarding something internally that came from the outside. Every once in a while, I’ll get a request from somebody that’s like, “This is a marketing question. I don’t really know if we want to do this or not,” and then I forward that to you. I don’t send you a Slack that I sent you an email, because I’ve seen that happen. It’s like, that’s not helpful, because that’s part of the rule, we don’t do multiple communications.
We don’t duplicate.
We don’t use any other tools in that kind of way. We will text, but we have determined text is emergency only. Text or phone call is emergency only. It is our own version of fire, flood, or blood unless we have pre-agreed that we’re using it. There have been times that I know you’re off picking up the kids, and you’ve said, “If you’ve got a minute and you want to talk, call me,” so I call you. During the day, I would not call you. If I did, you would probably be like, “Gwen’s calling me.”
Pretty much exactly how it goes.
I do the same thing. If Tonya is calling, it’s like, “Something happened. I need to know.” We’ve made the clear pieces, and what that allows is, we don’t have to have little meetings all the time about all sorts of things. Every once in a while, I will say, “I’d like for us to meet so that we can have the live conversation.” We’re doing a big project update for our project management software. Although a lot of it’s happening asynchronously behind the scenes, and there are questions being asked and questions being answered, and we’re moving through the whole process, every once in a while, it’s like, “I’d like for us to schedule a 30-minute meeting to talk about where we are, what the status is.” Because we’ve got someone else doing it for Tonya and me to be able to ask questions live.
We’re not doing that every day or every week. We’re doing it every once in a while, as we feel like there’s a big chunk of progress that we can make on that. That allows us to do this asynchronous piece. For me, part of that asynchronous is, how urgent is it? It’s all the same qualifications. To me, it’s always about the same qualifications. Is the relationship piece important? Do we need to see each other face-to-face from time to time? Is there some real urgency to it? Do we need to have discussion? Otherwise, we do a lot asynchronously.
You left out some things that we do, and then there are some things that we don’t do organizationally.
Maybe because I don’t do them.
It’s because we don’t do them right yet, but we’re working toward it, Gwen. We are working toward it. There are some things that we do individually, but one thing that we’re working toward is communicating about tasks happening in the task management system. In our case, we use Asana, and I am somebody, I will DM with you all the time. I used to have a little plaque on my desk that said, “I’m a multi-slacker,” and it wasn’t because I was lazy. It was because I was running thirteen different Slack communities at the same time.
I’ll Slack all day long. I’ll have all the conversations about Slack, but if we’re working on a project and each of us has a set of tasks on the project, and we have to go through approvals and review, it is so much more efficient to leave those as comments on the tasks so that everybody can follow along the process. That way, you can go in and say, “I know Tonya was working on that new project. I wonder where she sits with that.” Rather than you trying to piece it together by seeing which tasks are crossed off and which aren’t, you can see the discussion or the documentation of discussions.
That’s something we do that, I’ve only worked in one other organization that I felt like used their project management tool for all the things that the project management tool could be for them. We’ve talked about Slack. We’ve talked about email. When I say we’ve talked about Slack, we’ve talked about Slack and other direct messaging systems. We’ve talked about email, project management, a lot of people like Asana, Notion, Trello, Teamwork. There’s no shortage of those out there.
It doesn’t matter.
All of them, I think when you’re looking at a project management tool, that’s definitely something to be considering. Do we need to communicate about the tasks, or is it really just about having checklists? Because that could determine which tool you use. There’s what I call async video and audio tools. We always joke, “I speak fluent Loom.”
I love to do async video back and forth, partially because I don’t have the same schedule as a lot of people, but I’m the person they need to come to to tell them how to do a thing. It’s so much easier for me to open Loom, share my screen, and say, “Here’s the steps,” and then anybody can follow along because sometimes writing out the instructions doesn’t make as much sense. Also, audio tools such as Voxer, WhatsApp, how do you feel about all of those things?
I absolutely love the video tools for exactly what you said, because if it’s not training that’s going to probably have a lot of questions, which, to me, is like big training as opposed to this is how you do the thing, how you do the thing is a perfect Loom kind of a thing. It allows it to either go to one specific person, or it can then be shared with multiple people. If it’s a more holistic, like “this is how we’re going to be using Asana,” that’s not a Loom. That starts out as a training. From there, there may be Loom pieces, but I love Loom for that and being able to say, “This is what we’ve done. These are the decisions we’ve made,” or “This is the way we do it here.” I love all of that. This is just totally a Gwen opinion, not any sort of fact. I’ve not been a big asynchronous voice user. I think it’s because it feels so foreign to me as a very strong extrovert.
That’s so funny because it’s the extroverts that seem to love voice notes.
It’s because I want to have the dialogue in real time.
I’m so glad you said that because I said it’s the extroverts that love it, but it’s not. It’s the external processors who I think shine using voice notes because they can talk through the idea. Some of them take some time to find all their words. They really enjoy that, and the apps will let you listen at 1.5, 2 times speed.
I don’t think they’re bad. It just means that I haven’t used them much and felt like they were my tools. I wasn’t like, “I’m drawn to this.” I thought I would be drawn to Voxer. I tried it a little bit, and it was like, “It gave me the heebie-jeebies.”
Top Meeting Tips: Advice For Meeting Lovers And Haters
It’s funny because I do think some people fall into rhythms where they’re not using them as asynchronously as they’re designed to be used. It’s like, “I’ll Vox you at 10:00,” and then they proceed to have a 30-minute back-and-forth conversation using voice notes. I have seen that happen. Thank you for pointing that out, because it’s really not specific to extroverts. It’s really the people who are external processors versus people who process in different ways. We’re wrapping up here. We have our listener who’s like, “You’ve made me think differently about meetings.” If there were two takeaways from this, one takeaway for the person who loves meetings and one takeaway for the person who doesn’t, what would be your top advice?
It’s the same advice for both, which is use the criteria to decide whether or not it needs to be a meeting or it could be an asynchronous form of communication. Don’t go just with your favorite.
When we’re talking about the criteria, what we’re really talking about is figuring out, on this specific issue or set of issues that we want to talk about, how much does other people’s input make a difference in the outcome or in next steps? You talked about also timing, how timely is this? Do we need to make sure everybody gets the same information at the same time, or everybody has an opportunity to respond at the same time? Is there value to the FaceTime aspect of it, being able to hear each other, see each other? You did say a meeting is for more than just a status update. Standing by that?
Yeah, totally standing by that.
Agendas always, because they help you bring in the introvert. Gives them some thinking time so that they are ready to contribute when they get there. You don’t advocate for agendas that go, weeks ahead of the event, 24 to 48 hours is sufficient. It also helps you, as the meeting organizer, think through how you want the event to run.
Something that’s happened to me is I worked with an organization that had a standard of 30-minute meetings, but as their team grew, they had failed to account for the fact that three people could get stuff done in 30 minutes, but there was no way six people could get done in 30 minutes because that wasn’t enough time for everybody to have a voice. Talked a little bit about ideation. I will say that meetings, in general, should be, based on my interpretation of what you said, they should be as short as possible but long enough to get the job done.
There is no perfect length, but there is a perfect length for this meeting.
Like you said, It all depends on the subject matter and the goals. What I love that you mentioned, this is what I want our listener to take away from this, is always build in time for reflection. This is hard for those of you who are in roles where it’s not uncommon to have back-to-back meetings because, after the fourth meeting, they all run together. Build in time for reflection, even if it’s just five minutes to jot down how you feel it went. You can do, like, a happy face or a sad face, it’s that easy, as well as maybe what could be more effective moving forward. I think that’s a really good tip, Gwen, whether your meetings are online or in person.
This episode highlights how important it is to really step back and rethink our assumptions about business. In this specific case, it’s really about meetings and team communication. If you’d like support in examining other aspects of your business with the same level of insight, we, Gwen and I, we’ve got a little something special for you. We have Insight to Impact, which is our premium weekly email subscription that helps you gain clarity on your business one reflection at a time. Each Friday, you receive a thought-provoking question designed to help you examine a specific aspect of your business.
It could be meetings in this case, but here’s the thing, it’s a little bit different. Because when you respond, you’ll get personal feedback to help you implement positive changes right here, right now. Head over to EverydayEffectiveness.com/Impact to learn more. Until next time, keep thinking about what’s working well and what you would like to see change.
Mentioned In This Episode
- Everyday Effectiveness – From Insight to Impact
- Loom
- Slack
- Asana
- Notion
- Trello
- Teamwork
- Voxer
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.