Professor Stephen Rogelberg is one of the world's leading experts on workplace meetings, and he knows that one of the biggest deciding factors on whether a meeting is successful or not is the ability of the person leading the meeting. Whether it's making the meeting all about themselves or failing to plan in advance, there are plenty of pitfalls that can undo a meeting for a leader. Additionally, there are also some key traits that all successful meeting leaders have
in common, and Stephen is an expert on them. All. Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your day. I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imber. In today's quick Win episode, I speak with Stephen Rogelberg about what the best meeting leaders have in common, that some people make when running a meeting and the different kinds of strategies a good meeting leader can use to get the best results.
Well, let me frame it this way and our research the best meeting leaders appear to have something in common, and what they have in common is a similar mindset, and that mindset is a mindset of stewardship. They're a steward of others' time. The thought of people leaving their meetings saying it was a waste is so uncomfortable to them that they act with intentionality. And this intentionality is instead of just you know, dialing the meeting in using
default calendar settings, right, you're making choices. You're saying, Okay, I'm having this meeting, this is how long I think it should be, this is who must be there. So you're just being intentional. And furthermore, one of the things I talk about in my book is this idea of a pre mortem, and a pre mortem is where you start to think about what are the potential challenges and problems that could arise in the meeting? And given that,
how should I design the meeting? And so it's just stepping back and giving it a little bit of thought. And interestingly, we act with intentionality all the time when we're meeting with important stakeholders because we don't want those people to leave the meeting saying that was a waste of time. But we typically don't act with intentionality when it comes to meeting with our peers or directs. So this intentionality is just saying, all right, people are giving
me the biggest gift. They have their time, so how can I honor that time? And so the decisions are you know, tightness of invites ordering of the agenda, right, hit the most important things first, you know, not the superficial stuff.
Right.
Keep the meeting as short and tight as possible. You can always find more time to meet. But we know from Parkinson's law that work expands to fill whatever time is a lot to do it, So keep it tight, you'll get it done. And those are some really important intentional design factors to keep in mind.
What else have you found that the best meeting leaders have in common?
So that's the main one, but then there's other ones that fall from that. For example, facilitation when one of the best predictors of people's perceptions of an ineffective meeting is the leader doing more talking than the attendees. The more the leader talks, the more the ratings go down. And that makes a heck of a lot of sense, right, because the leader is supposed to be facilitating. That's their job, right. They've called this party together and their job is to
get these voices out. It doesn't mean that they can't talk during it, but mean it does mean that they shouldn't be dominating because they invited people. If they dominate, the meeting could have just been an email. So that propensity to facilitate is really critical. And what underlies that is this desire to listen right, to truly engage. And and then the other characteristic of really good meeting leaders
is they understand that meetings need an end. Ding. So we know meetings end, right, everything ends, but an ending is something different, right. An ending is where you stop three to five minutes before the end and you say, okay, well did we actually decide and for each of these things, who is the dri the directly responsible individual and what did we not decide? You know, so we know that these are things that we have to discuss at another time.
At the same time, during this ending, you're recording this key information so your non attendees can stay in the loop. So that is another key thing that really differentiates excellent meeting leaders from not so excellent meeting leaders.
What else can we do during a meeting to get the best outcome, whether that be facilitation techniques that work, or other strategy that you found.
I mean, facilitation is absolutely the most key, but you know there's lots of different ways to have a meeting, and so, for example, silence in meetings is phenomenal. The research shows that when people brainstorm in silence typing directly into their computers, they generate nearly twice as many ideas, and the ideas tend to be more creative, right because everyone can talk at once and you're not influenced by
that very first thing you hear. So a meeting leader can say, okay, depending on what we're trying to solve, maybe silent brainstorming could be really meaningful. Again, depending on what you want to solve, Sometimes a standing meeting is really a helpful. Standing meetings generally take half as much time and yield the same quality decisions. You might choose
to get people into pairs before the conversation. What we've found is that when you tell people, hey, again, to pairs and start to talk about this problem or issue for just three minutes and then we'll all come together. When you do that and then you return to the big group, people are participating, right, you've kind of greased the rails. So that's another technique that could be super helpful.
So there's lots of choices, and that's I think a really key takeaway for your listeners is that we need meeting leaders to think about things and make choices. You know, we have around a billion meetings a day around the globe and they generally all look the same. That's not good, right, Let's mix it up. Let's change it up and position yourself as a leader as part of the solution, as opposed to being part of the problem.
I hope you enjoyed this little quick win with Steven. If you'd like to listen to the full interview, you can find a link to that in the show notes. If you like today's show, make sure you get follow on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop. How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of the Warrangery People, part of the Cooler Nation
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