¶ Why meetings feel broken (and why they're not)
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because that's increasingly rare. If you're coming with a highly efficient 30-minute meeting that takes 25 minutes, you go through the well-thought-out, structured agenda items, everyone gets a chance to... to speak, you leave with concrete action items, that's a better, more efficient and effective way to stand out in a way that sets you up for that next promotion.
All right, let's kick off today's show. Today, we're joined by Rebecca Hins, author of Your Best Meeting Ever, to unpack how meetings, visibility, and AI are quietly shaping our careers. Meetings aren't broken by default. they're broken by design and fixing them is actually a career advantage. She shares why meetings quietly stall high performers, how you can gain visibility without more airtime.
the real reason collaboration hurts promotions, and how better meetings create leverage, not burnout. Welcome to the show, Rebecca. It's great to have you. Thanks so much, AJ. I'm looking forward to the conversation. we are too i know work has changed for so much of us over the last decade especially with the rise of ai remote work so many changes in the workplace love to hear from your perspective you know what are these real key changes and what's
Sure. So I think the biggest change we're seeing, and we've seen it for the past two decades plus. is an increasing focus on collaboration at work. We know that as knowledge workers, we spend 85 to 90% of our time collaborating with other people. And for so long, that collaboration has been invisible, right? It happens through so many different people, places, processes, technologies.
It's very difficult to understand how much we're collaborating, how effectively we're collaborating and be able to optimize it, be able to improve it within our organizations. And what we're seeing with AI is. an increasing dimension around that complexity associated with collaboration. Now we're not just collaborating with other humans, we're collaborating with AI.
and agents. You know, it's no longer human to human, it's human to AI, it's human to agent to human, and it's very complex. And so meetings for so long have been the tip of the iceberg in terms of this collaboration. that meetings are the collaborative practice we spend most of our time in. They're the collaborative practice that's often the most dysfunctional. And they're also the collaborative practice that's the most visible, right?
We can often see other people's calendars in our organizations. We can see people physically in the conference room. We can often see a Zoom screen open. And because of this, we have this default reaction to schedule more meetings, pack more people in the meetings, drag the meetings longer in a way that's really inefficient because we know that. Humans have this bias to associate presence with productivity. So regardless of whether anything useful and important is achieved in the meeting.
We use the meeting to signal busyness and signal progress and signal productivity in a way that's highly, highly dysfunctional. I think there's also this huge tension between. collaboration, which so many of us are feeling the pressure for, but also to achieve. And collaboration doesn't mean everyone on the team gets promoted, right? So if we're trying to earn more and to gain traction in our own career.
¶ Collaboration overload and the visibility trap
we're in this tension of like, I'm being dragged into meetings where I'm not helpful or useful, collaboration that doesn't seem meaningful to the work that we're doing and certainly doesn't put the points on the board to get us promoted. You're absolutely right, AJ. And it's fascinating because when we think about the word collaboration, and we've done some research on this.
there's a halo effect associated with it. We often associate it with teamwork. It feels good. It feels like more is better. We're encouraged to collaborate more when really more collaboration is. just as detrimental as too little collaboration. And so being able to find that sweet spot is also important and not just defaulting to collaboration to move work forward. yeah and so many of our x-factor accelerator members join partially because they feel like they've over indexed on collaboration
to the detriment of their career, meaning they're doing the work of others. They're always the first in the meeting. They're happy to participate in everything. But then when it comes time to actually get the review or be promoted, they're not really being rewarded for that teamwork. It's a multifaceted problem in the sense of I'm a big believer organizations need to do more to incentivize healthy collaboration and reward it. I think there should be some measure of effective.
collaboration baked into performance reviews, for example, informally, if not formally. And great organizations do this at surprisingly frequent rates. They recognize, and now with AI more than ever before, we need to be measuring and incentivizing healthy collaboration within our organizations. But often there's not that incentive. And then you have people and often they're the highest performers within the organization who feel.
a fear of missing out. They feel like they're not contributing to the team if they're not over-indexing on collaboration. And often you get into these situations where your highest performers in theory aren't getting promoted in a way that is going to advance the overall organization forward. Now, the title of the book is Best Meeting Ever, and I feel like...
It's almost an oxymoron in today's climate. Like, I don't want to be in meetings. People dread meetings and the thought of the best meeting ever. Can we just avoid it so we can actually do the work that we need to do to move ahead? There's nothing better than a great meeting. And I think we've all felt those where they're rare. But you leave the meeting knowing that you could have not accomplished what you just accomplished in the meeting in any other form of collaboration or coordination.
You're energized, you're inspired, especially when we think about one-on-one meetings. You know, when you have an energizing, inspiring meeting with your manager or direct report, there's nothing better in the organization. The problem is... Those are too few and far between such that we have so many dysfunctional meetings where.
Even the sentiment around meetings at large is negative. It's why you can't really ask people to rate their meetings or you can't really ask people how effective your meetings are. because they have this in the book, I call it a meeting suck reflex, where we're socially conditioned to believe that meetings are bad. And so I really wanted, you know, we debated a host of different titles for the book.
But the promise of your best meeting ever, I think, is one that we all should aspire to. In an ideal world, many of us would love to have the time to do the deep work and then those energizing meetings. But it feels more and more like we have to slog through the workday of meetings and then wait until the evening to do the deep, meaningful work that moves projects forward that actually helps us in our career. And we're hearing it.
from guests on the show too, that now we're feeling burned out. The stress of work is 24 seven. We can't even take vacations because this deep work keeps getting pushed to be in the meetings, to be visible. You're exactly right. And, you know, the premise of your best meeting ever is we need to treat meetings like a product. Meetings are the most important product in our entire organization.
Decisions get made, priorities get set, alignment gets set as well, culture gets built or destroyed, and yet they're the least optimized. And so one of those chapters within the book is all around rhythm. We can think of a Fitbit product, for example. It nudges us at just the right time to encourage certain actions.
Meeting should serve the same purpose in terms of aligning with the rhythm of how we operate. And so, you know, no meeting days are really important for many organizations. There's overwhelming research that.
¶ Presence ≠ productivity: the illusion of busyness
no meeting days can be effective. And some research to suggest they're not only effective for the deep work time, the productivity time. But they also improve cooperation because people need to find more efficient ways to collaborate and also evidence that they reduce micromanagement. Because meetings or managers can no longer use meetings as a surveillance tool. They're no longer using meetings to just.
get information from their reports or disseminate information from their reports. And so you start to see a whole host of different benefits as well. No meeting blocks. I call them strategic pauses in the book. It should be the case that Meetings are scheduled based on our priorities, not based on where there is an available calendar slot open. The thing that makes it difficult and AI is redefining.
every organization and everybody's job. And so when the things that you used to do, that you took pride, joy, that elevated your workday, that Made you feel like I'm the only one that does this to the degree that I do it. So I'm excited and I have purpose in this organization. That rug has been ripped out from under people. So now it's like, well, now I just.
tell my ai what to do and it spits it out it's the same work and the the satisfaction that i the small amount of satisfaction that i used to find in my job is now gone so What's the point of a meeting? No one's getting spiked off of my amazing personality. And the things that gave me that spring of my step going into meetings has been taken from me.
It's such an important point, John, and I worry about this a lot. We're seeing overwhelming evidence that organizations are not thinking carefully enough about. automating those parts of work that workers find meaningful. And in particular, there's been research done, I think it was among white accommodator startups, where a good proportion of them, I think on the order of 40 to 50 percent.
They're creating businesses to automate functions that workers don't want to automate. Right. They don't want automated. They want to keep that uniquely human. And we've seen this time and time again where. We know that it's dangerous to automate those portions of work that people find meaningful, even if AI can, in theory, automate.
If it disrupts or destroys that sense of purpose and meaningfulness at work, you're going to have these long term consequences that very much overshadow any potential efficiency gains. And so what we are seeing. And what gives me a lot of hope is some organizations, and these tend to be the ones that have been most effective at using AI to drive business outcomes. They're thinking about...
How can I get the efficiency gains, but translate those time savings into parts of work that are uniquely human and shouldn't be efficient? What we often say about meetings is the purpose of making meetings more efficient is to give time and create space for the parts of work that shouldn't necessarily be efficient. You know, developing relationships, creativity, innovation, all of these things that we know.
part of the creative process, part of the relationship building process should be inefficient. And so that's the... key calculus organizations are needing to make right now, not over indexing on efficiency, using those efficiency gains to create space for the uniquely human aspects that. will make their organization stronger, not just bottom line, but also those top line metrics. Have you ever wished people would light up when you walk in the room?
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¶ How AI is reshaping collaboration and meaning at work
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and it's like well why am i in this meeting if i'm just with a bunch of robots but also with that rise of ai in this particular area well we're also seeing now measurement of Talk time. So how much did you babble during the meeting can now be measured in a percentage with AI in ways that we were never doing previously in these meetings. And for our clients who are introverted.
You know, they're really struggling because they're seeing the metrics of, man, I'm not participating in the meeting based on a percentage. And they don't feel comfortable sharing in because a lot of it is just babble and people taking up airtime. It's such an important point and it's a complex problem, right? We're seeing more bots join meetings than humans, you know, increasingly so. And it's distracting, but more than that.
You end up with note taker bots that leave with slightly different versions of reality and there's no source of truth and it's creating more overwhelm and distraction for the humans in the room. And so when we think about meeting. design, you know, if you have more than one note taker bought in a meeting, that's a sign you haven't designed the meeting, right? Because just as human attendees, there should be.
you know, each with a specific purpose. Same with AI, right? And just because it's efficient for you as an individual to go ahead and send your bot. you know if the bots are serving similar purposes that's a sign you haven't designed the meetings uh intentionally at all and you know when we think about analytics
I think there's enormous potential in AI type analytics, but we need to use them effectively and they need to be multifaceted. They need to be put in the hands of employees. We know that equal airtime is one of the strongest predictors. of team performance. And so if we are seeing people who aren't contributing in the meeting, then probably that's an opportunity to record the meeting, let them watch asynchronously, still have them.
you know, be in the loop, be in the know as to what's happened in the meeting. But the reality is if people aren't contributing. Then social loafing starts to kick in. You're not contributing to the outcome. People start to get annoyed that people aren't contributing. That said, it should never be equal in a meeting. And we need to recognize that people also have. different personality styles and comfort levels in the meeting as well. But I do think having a holistic sense of.
airtime in meetings, whether meetings are double booked, whether people are multitasking in meetings, all of these things allow us to more concretely assess whether a meeting actually deserves to be on the calendar. Even for myself, I mean, I'm human when my robot note taker is participating, I feel a little bit more comfortable.
multitasking and checking my Slack and popping into my inbox because I know the bot is catching everything. Unfortunately, what also happens in these scenarios is the nuance is lost because the bot is for the most part.
¶ Designing your best meeting ever: rhythm, purpose, and focus
just looking at the words it's not looking at the emotion behind it it's not picking up sarcasm it's not picking up those brief pauses where hey maybe this is an opportunity to bring a different idea completely we're open to a new idea here
But AI is not picking that up because it's just looking at the words in the transcript and then trying to judge through whatever algorithm that company has put together the purpose of those words. And that's, again, why we need to be crystal clear in terms of. What is the role AI is playing? Is it strictly to capture the words and ensure there's a source of truth that can be referred back to?
Are they responsible for also picking up the nuance and the tone and those uniquely human, traditionally aspects of meetings? And often the AI is not yet capable of picking up those.
nuances and the responsibility in those cases needs to rest with the attendees and the attendees need to be responsible for you know the bots they bring to meetings because the reality is what happens is Unlike humans, and this is great research my colleague Polly and already did, you know, in general, we blame the bot for mistakes and oversights, whereas with humans.
we often blame the other human. So if we have an assistant who has failed to capture the emotional nuance of the conversation in a correct way, we tend to blame the assistant, the human, whereas bot, it is on you. as the human to make sure that, you know, whatever you're using this bot for, you're using it in a way that's accurate and correct and true to the sentiment of the meeting.
It goes to something that AJ and I saw earlier in our career. So we used to run our live programs in Los Angeles and we started noticing that a lot of the attendees would diligently take notes. If we allowed them to use their computer, they would diligently take notes. But they weren't absorbing any of the content. It was going from the board from my mouth to their fingers into their computer. And because of that, we had a rule that...
You're allowed to take notes if it's a pen and paper, notebook, whatever, because now you're writing, now you're choosing words. There's more thought going into it rather than dictation and just clicking and clacking into your... computer. Well, now we're seeing the evolution of that, right? Well, my bot was at the meeting. I looked over the summary. I didn't see that.
Okay. So how many times can you use that excuse before we realize this is somebody who relies on their bot way too much in this job? to have any sort of relationship or real conversation with anybody else in this company that isn't AI assistant. That's enough for me not to want to work with somebody. In fact, if I have to hear that excuse multiple times, like, I don't want to work with somebody like that. We're starting to see research come out to that effect. You know, often it's called.
cognitive offloading when we use the thought to offload all of the important human thinking. human work that we do. I often say, you know, meetings are a lazy substitute for real work. In so many cases, we just schedule the meeting because. doing the more important work of thinking through the problem and, you know, deciding whether there really needs to be a meeting. We're seeing that on another level with AI where it's so easy to generate content now.
generate work in a way that people are cognitively offloading their human work, their human thinking to the AI. And again, the early research is showing that people start to resent that, right? Because if you show up at a meeting, especially if you're the organizer, but if you're showing up and you're cognitively offloading to the bot, people resent that because it signals that your time is more important than theirs. has a host of other consequences. And so again, as you think about
increasingly sending a digital twin to a meeting especially, it's not just whether the digital twin can represent you. What is the political cost of that in terms of your relationship with other people that we need to account for?
¶ Declining pointless meetings without fallout
We touched on this earlier, and I'd love to go a level deeper because many in our audience are looking to get promoted. Our new leaders are in leadership roles for the first time, and they're recognizing that. meetings are that opportunity for visibility, that opportunity for them to stand out in meaningful ways that can obviously get them that next promotion. And they may have even heard.
in reasons that they haven't been promoted, that they're not visible enough that they they don't they're doing the work, but it's not having the impact that they had hoped. So what we find from our clients is then they feel like they have to really audition in meetings. They have to come more prepared with what they're going to say, almost scripting and then.
fighting and competing for that airtime in the back of their mind, feeling like they're being judged on visibility now instead of their actual work. And it creates a lot of competing dynamics in these meetings that also create dread for those of us who aren't in. that situation and feel like, man, this meeting could have been 15 minutes, but we had everyone had to get their airtime so that they could stand out. Sometimes it's called productivity theater, right?
putting on a show and nowhere is this truer than in meetings because they do become these theatrical performances. We have the pre-meetings where we align and make sure that, you know, what we're going to say in the actual meeting is okay. Or, you know, we're. coercing sometimes with other people. Then we have the post meetings and it becomes this stage for theatrics in a way that's highly, highly detrimental to the organization. And there are lots of different drivers.
of this and you know partial solutions i consistently see the best way to overcome this is well there are a couple ways one way for sure is to ensure that you have a way of measuring and tracking actual business outcomes and everything, you know, every employee is very clear on how they're advancing specific business outcomes because then you get away from this. conflating of output versus outcomes. You're less likely to schedule a whole bunch of meetings and try to performatively.
talk in meetings and hog the airtime if it's very clear what specific business objectives you're evaluating. And so the highest performing companies do this very well with OKRs or V2Mom at Salesforce. clearly delineating those objectives. Having a degree of ownership articulated to every person so that there's not this squabbling back and forth in the collaborative environment to, again, try to show off and that babbling leads to us.
droning on in meetings needlessly. A better power move and a more effective power move is to design a great meeting. because that's increasingly rare. People hogging the airtime, you know who those people are in most cases. You can pick them out. It's becoming a democratized activity in so many organizations. But designing...
highly effective meeting. There are few people right now that do that well. And if you're coming with a highly efficient 30 minute meeting that takes 25 minutes, you go through the wealth. thought out, structured agenda items. Everyone gets a chance to speak. You leave with concrete action items that are built into your broader communication system.
Like that's a better, more efficient, more efficient and effective way to stand out in a way that, you know, sets you up for that next promotion because we don't train for meeting effectiveness. And yet it's one of the most. important skills and high value skills, given the sheer volume of meetings we participate in, that you can invest in, you know, in yourself as a leader and an aspiring leader.
This stat really struck me that 53% of employees show up to meetings they know are pointless, they feel obligated, but yet you're trying to build influence and no one wants to be the person that declines the meeting i know some organizations have swung completely the other side and just cut all meetings entirely but for many of us we don't really have that ability from the seat that we're in
And yet we're appearing in meetings that are sucking up our time, killing our productivity because we feel obligated. What do you say to that? team member or that leader who knows this meeting is pointless? How do they handle that? And how do they actually say no? This is highly, highly dependent on the level of psychological safety within the organization. You know, in the best cases, you have an environment and I've had the privilege of working in multiple of them.
where it's okay to decline a meeting if it's not worth your time or you're not contributing value. And so often it's called the law of two feet and organizations, you know, will champion this rule where if...
¶ Using AI to build better meetings, not replace them 35:00 - The four D test: when a meeting actually deserves to exist
You're not adding value. You're not getting value. Use your two feet or however you're able and walk out of the room. And that type of mindset, you know, where it's OK. Most managers never have this conversation with their direct reports that. You know, what do you do if a meeting is on your calendar? Often because there's this weird psychological power of meetings where.
You send an invitation. You establish what's called a social contract. Even when we think about the words, you know, it's a meeting invitation. You accept it. You reject it. Those are loaded words in a way where you feel like rejecting the meeting isn't just. rejecting the meeting it's rejecting the person behind the meeting and so having that level of psychological safety is important that said even in environments where you don't feel as safe to decline the meeting there are other strategies
And in Your Best Meeting Ever, I walked through several of them. One is to approach it with curiosity. So say, you know, I noticed that this meeting doesn't have an agenda or I've noticed, you know, I've looked through the agenda. And I don't see any way I can contribute to this meeting. Is my attendance really necessary? So framing it as curiosity can help to sort of dispel and destowage some of the fear, some of the threat.
That's often associated with declining the meeting invite. Increasingly, I'm seeing a role for AI to play in this. there's not an agenda associated with a calendar invite, that meeting is automatically deleted if there's no agenda within 24 hours of the meeting. If you're seeing... Certain people not talk in the meeting, they're automatically removed from the invite list. And what I love about this sort of use of AI is it deflects the blame from the person or the perceived blame from the person.
to the technology in a way that feels more objective and less threatening. So when there isn't psychological safety at all in the organization, that can be a lever organizations can pull. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast? Smart move. Being financially savvy? Smart move. Another smart move? Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto.
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Drink responsibly. Caribbean rum with real dairy cream, natural and artificial flavors. Alcohol 13.75% by volume, 27.5 proof. Copyright 2025 Agave Loco Brands, Pewaukee, Wisconsin. All rights reserved. I know for a lot of new leaders, when they get into that role, it's such a difference from when they were just an IC, when they were heads down doing the work.
Now you feel as you're managing people, you need to know what they're doing. You feel your job depends on understanding what everyone else is doing and you grow this dinosaur tail. And many of us don't even realize as new leaders, the weight of.
our words, the weight of scheduling that meeting, what it means to our team members to put that pressure on them to put them in a position where they don't feel like they could decline or they feel like they have to just agree with our ideas and we don't create an opportunity for them to share. It's this amplification effect, this magnification effect. And there's overwhelming evidence that the minute a leader walks into the room, the eyes fixate on them.
influencing the conversation. You feel unsafe to disagree or combat. And that's why some of these strategies are absolutely really important. And ideally, they come from the leader. You know, ideally, the leader is self-aware enough. Sometimes that's not at all the case. But ideally, they're self-aware enough where.
they're taking steps to mitigate that amplification effect. And so one of the leaders I talk about in the book is Ed Catmull at Pixar, where he made the judicious decision to speak last in the meeting so that people in their famous brain trust meetings where they were critiquing early films, a high risk activity, you know, you have.
your heart and soul poured into these films, he spoke last because he recognized that that primacy effect of the leader speaking first then influences the conversation. When Jobs was CEO there, he. you know, made a deal with Steve Jobs that he would need to stay out of these meetings because he knew that Jobs' presence in the meeting would create these. you know, perverse incentives for people to align and agree with the powerful person rather than voicing their own concerns.
And so it's complex. It's hard. Ideally, you have the leader taking action. If not, you have a culture around it. And in the worst cases, you try these curiosity led, technology led interventions that. Hopefully, you know, while they won't mitigate the situation entirely, hopefully they nudge it in a healthier direction. I guess it remains to be seen, and I'm sure you've seen the earlier data. of how culture is going to be built with now AI in our lives when culture previously was built on.
human activity, habits, routines, and incentives that the company has put together. Well, even communication. So, you know, we're seeing AI, if we're all using GPT. We're defaulting to GPT's communication now. We're not influencing the culture. GPT is influencing the culture in the way the meeting gets summarized, what gets sent out, how the agenda gets organized. All of these used to be cultural norms set by human activity and human communication.
And now AI has inserted itself and we're all typically using the same few models. So it's going to default to that culture. If the AI is interpreting the values that accompany for everybody, then it's set in stone. There is no individual interpretation or expression of those values, which adds. the personality and the human touch to that culture. That relationship, the framing of AI within the organization and in particular.
What is that relationship between humans and AI that matters significantly for how people end up using the technology? And there are a couple of different dimensions to this. So first. We see one group of companies where AI is very much treated like a transactional tool, right? People are using it to generate content, get their work done. It's a very transactional tool. What can AI do for me?
There's another group of organizations where there's a higher percentage of people who are treating AI like a true teammate. So they're recognizing that. The AI is not perfect. They're not just saying, what can the technology do for me? They're asking, what can I do with the technology? They're pushing it to think deeper. And what's fascinating is for better or worse, that group that's seeing.
AI as a teammate, they're significantly more likely to be productive with the technology. They're significantly more likely to be enthusiastic with the technology. And so this sort of psychological framing in terms of how we use the technology technology differentially impacts how we use it and how it's enacted in our organization. What we're seeing overwhelmingly is AI doesn't change your organization culture.
But what it does do, change it, transform it, I should say. But what it does do is it amplifies what already exists in your culture. So if you have a culture around. you know, a hierarchical culture, if you have a culture around using meetings as a lazy default for your work, if you have a culture around experimentation, if you have a culture around, you know, risk aversion.
that typically is amplified by AI rather than any sort of radical transformation. And I think that's important to recognize and for leaders to be. self-aware enough to assess, okay, what are our values? What are our lived values? Not just the ones we put on our website. Those are the ones that are likely to be amplified by AI.
A lot of us have no problem with AI offloading work and making us more productive. I think the challenge really becomes when AI is now inserted into these human connection moments that are so important for us. team building culture setting you know and i've even seen it where
Even cold email outreach has the M dashes. And I know all of a sudden I'm talking to a robot. It feels impersonal. And AI is getting better. You know, ChatGPT said, hey, you can remove the M dash. So us as humans, we're still picking up on. when we're talking to bots and it's disingenuous and it creates a dynamic where I feel less invested in the interaction because you're less invested in the interaction. You're letting the bot speak for you.
And I know it's one of the easiest ways to start using AI is to offload your email communication on AI, have it go through your inbox, respond to things, because we're trying to get to a place where the productivity creates the deep work, but it's now actually severing.
¶ The visibility tax and remote work trade-offs
a lot of these close connections in the workplace that are so important to us performing well yeah and you're exactly right aj and it's an enormously hard problem because What's going to need to happen is every individual, every team, every organization is going to need to get clear on what is that division of labor between humans and AI. And it's going to look different for every single person. And so ideally, we get into a world where AI is able to scan your email list for what is the...
level of emotional intensity associated with this email, right? Is it a message reminder for my flight to California? Or is it a message from my boss saying, Hey, I, you know, you did a really good job on this project last week. Those have very different levels of emotional valence. And it should be able to say, okay, given the low emotional intensity email.
I'm going to offload this. You know, I'm going to take this on. I'm going to draft the response versus the emotional, intense one. You know, perhaps I do a first draft or perhaps I edit a draft you do. But being clear on when AI is injected in the process, especially for these creative human pursuits, is going to be the key unlock here because as you've articulated. we start to get into the territory of political risk associated with using AI to offload our work. So let's dig into...
structuring the best meeting ever? What do we need to do before the meeting? How do we should be thinking about the agenda? And what can we do to make our meetings more effective and have people leaving saying, hey, that was the best meeting ever? Each of the seven. chapters of the book walks through a product design principle applied to meetings because if we're going to treat our meetings like a product
we should be applying those same product design principles to how we design our meetings. And so one of those design principles is around minimalism, right? Just as we design minimalist products, often they're the best products in the world. the google homepage chat gbt you know no clutter no fluff you know exactly what you're supposed to do the same discipline should apply to our meetings. And so I often start with organizations looking at four key dimensions of the meeting. So the length.
the attendees, the agenda items, and the frequency. And for each of these dimensions, there are different strategies we can take to create more minimalist meetings. So if we take the length, for example. We know that meetings suffer from what's called Parkinson's law, and we've all felt it. Work expands to fill the time allotted. So if you schedule a 30-minute meeting, it will take those 30 minutes most of the time.
And so thinking about the length, can that 30-minute meeting be a 25-minute meeting? I studied an individual in the book that used 27-minute meetings, right? Because that starts to... convey to attendees that you've invested the time so we can contrast it with what we're seeing with AI, where people cognitively offload. Designing a 27-minute meeting.
conveys that you've taken the time to decide on those 27 minutes, not 26, not 28. And people start to snap out of inertia. They start to take the length more serious. For certain types of meetings, standing up meetings, evidence shows they can run about 25 percent shorter. And what's fascinating is when we stand up in meetings, it actually changes how we behave in the meeting as well. And in particular.
we become less territorial. And it makes sense, right? Because when we sit, it's, you know, it's our slice of the table. It's our chair. It's our desk. The room is divided into these tiny plots of land. When we stand, we become much more collaborative. The ideas become shared. The conversation becomes shared. And so a lot of these minimalist strategies.
are not just, again, aimed at efficiency, but fundamentally allowing us to collaborate in new and better ways. Attendees are another one. We talked about the law of two feet. That's one where you give explicit permission. the agenda items. So I'm a big proponent of framing every agenda item according to a verb and a noun.
So you're not just saying, you know, team discussion. You're saying discuss this or decide this very specific actions because that allows you to become much more disciplined. And once you.
¶ Building career leverage through better meeting design
done the verb in each agenda item, you're able to move on in a way that's much more efficient. And then frequency, getting rid of some of those pre-meetings, post-meetings, I'll often encourage. organizations to try to schedule meetings at half the cadence. So take that weekly meeting.
convert it to every other week. Often what organizations will find is they didn't need to meet as frequently and it becomes a much more disciplined communication culture. And so there are lots of strategies, but thinking about those four dimensions of meetings. I think is a useful first step to not just assume that you need to design meetings in any certain way, but these are the different principles that we can apply to our meetings.
One thing that jumps out at me around the 25 or the 27 minute is oftentimes we time box because that's what the calendar allows, 30 minutes. We take up the 30 minutes. But for many of us who live. full days in meetings that 30 minutes is then jumping to another 30 minute meeting which means by the last five minutes of the previous meeting you're already thinking okay well what's the next agenda and who am i talking to now and i gotta perform in a different environment
So oftentimes the last five minutes of the meeting anyways, we're all checked out because we're trying to multitask and find what's next on our calendar. And I've worked with a lot of leaders just to actually time box. not scheduling back to back meetings, like recognizing that just because the calendar says you're available.
put a tail on every single meeting so that you have time to decompress, to think through what needs to be sorted out from that meeting and prepare yourself for the next meeting. And I had a leader who was jumping from internal meetings to external meetings. at talking to shareholders and talking to prospective clients, not recognizing that there's no way that you can mentally prepare for that next meeting if you're code switching from another meeting.
Absolutely. And even when we think about I studied the CTO, the former CTO of the New York Times for the book and. He wanted to shift from 30 minute meetings to 25 minute meetings to have that five minute buffer. And even what he found, which totally makes sense is. If you schedule the meeting from 10 to 1025, hoping to leave those last five minutes because of this Parkinson's law, because you still have technically that time available, it tends to also.
be you know overcome with meeting time whereas if you start five minutes after the hour or five minutes after the half hour there's nothing to eat away at and so even thinking about the structure of the blog And what's fascinating is we also see that as soon as a meeting is on our calendar, even if it's hours and hours away, it's sometimes called the contracting time effect where.
Our brain starts this mental countdown window where we know it's 10 a.m. We have that 4 p.m. meeting. We avoid doing very deep work. We're thinking about the meeting. We're ruminating about the meeting. And so, again, things like no meeting days or scheduling meetings earlier in the day so you're avoiding that contracting time effect can also be strategies. I've done work on meeting hangovers, too. We know that.
We've all felt it, the groggy, irritated feeling we have after the meeting. We're still thinking about the meeting and ruminating about the meeting. Even if it's good, if it's taxing, we have this residue that builds up. And often what we do to resolve it is we vent to our colleagues, which again, spreads the negativity or the overwhelm. And so thinking carefully about, you know, buffers, breaks, and how do we show up for meetings?
in a way that we're prepared mentally and cognitively to contribute is an important practice. Another thing that strikes me is the collaboration around agenda. So when I was a new leader in the company and I wanted to bring agendas to the meeting.
I found oftentimes that what was on my agenda wasn't actually as impactful for the team members who had to go out and do the tasks or work on the projects. And what ended up happening is I wasn't surfacing that meaningful stuff in the group setting. Then I had one-off meetings.
where now I have team members coming to me, hey, this wasn't clear. We didn't talk about this in the meeting. And now my calendar is getting stacked not only with the group meetings, but individual meetings for clarification. And I know you're a big proponent of really looking
thoughtfully at the agenda and making sure that it's not a top-down approach with the agenda, but we're actually choosing meaningful things for everyone who's attending the meeting in that agenda. The organizer of the meeting should always have the final call. You don't want it to be a... grab bag of topics, but absolutely crowdsourcing the agenda. In particular, if there's ambiguity, if it's a project where there's a lot of different moving pieces and stakeholders where.
You as the organizer cannot fully comprehend everything that probably should happen in the meeting. So I studied organizations that use something called the Dory method, where it's essentially you're crowdsourcing the agenda. You're asking. questions. You're asking questions of your attendees in terms of what's going to make this meeting most valuable for you.
in a way that tends to then minimize those spinoff meetings because someone doesn't feel heard in the meeting or doesn't get something resolved and they feel the need to understandably to schedule a follow-up or a follow-up after the follow-up. Now, even with the best intentions on the scheduling, the agenda, meetings can be messy.
How do we get a meeting back on track if we feel like it's spun out of control, even with the best efforts on Parkinson's law, great agenda and having the right attendees? There are a few different strategies. One, I love the parking lot. method where you have a physical space if you're all in person or a virtual space where you explicitly say for any topics that are still important but are tangential to what we need to achieve and what's on the agenda.
Let's park them in the parking lot and revisit them later. The key is you need to revisit them later or else people aren't going to buy in. And so I've seen many organizations that will create the parking lot and then the parking lot disappears. then it defeats the purpose of the parking lot. Here again, AI can help in a lot of cases. So I've used AI as a meeting moderator specifically for this purpose.
detect when the conversation is drifting off from the agenda and raise the question. Often you don't want to, you know. cut people off, although I've seen that happen with the AI, you want to nudge them back on track, ask the question, you know, hey, this doesn't seem directly related to this agenda item. Do we want to get back on track?
And in the best cases, you know, the people in the room will have that psychological safety to say, hey, this doesn't feel like it's relevant to the agenda item we're discussing. Should we park it in the parking lot or does it? you know warrant adding a new agenda item to to the meeting in those situations where it gets parked and doesn't get brought back up it feels very frustrating to then
be attending those meetings. And I think unfortunately, a lot of us, especially as new leaders, we want to be inclusive and we want to make sure that everyone has a say and everyone can participate. But I've been in meetings and I saw a very funny promotional meeting for Timothee Chalamet's latest movie where he does this.
Zoom where there's nine attendees. You can see half of the attendees are completely checked out. They don't need to be in the meeting at all. They're not decision makers. They're not actually engaged in the conversation. But we've been there where the meeting is just too large. And we're just sitting there wondering, why am I here? What is the point of this meeting? We've already covered the little sliver of things that I'm working on, but now I got another 45 minutes where I can't work.
What should we do in terms of designing the attendees and think about that strategically so that it is an impactful meeting for everyone? First is the number of attendees. There's evidence that seven or eight. is the maximum you know that's the point where you start to see social loafing kick in people don't feel accountable we start to see multitasking increase as well
And so very rarely should you have meetings with more than eight people. You know, if you're doing something often status updates are. you know, the bane of many organizations where you just sit around, each person gives the status update, right? That's an example of something that shouldn't happen.
in a synchronous meeting. And I walk through in the book, I call it the 4D CEO test to determine whether a meeting actually deserves to exist on the calendar. And the first part of that test is A meeting should only exist if the purpose is to decide, discuss, debate or develop. yourself or your team. And so status updates don't pass that test. Broadcast briefings don't pass that test. Even something like brainstorming doesn't technically pass that test.
There's a lot of evidence to show that brainstorming synchronously in the meeting is not the best approach. It's much more effective to brainstorm individually. come together to decide and debate because then you've crossed over into one of the four d's and so thinking about you know the agenda every item every attendee rather needs to have a clear role
in the meeting. So I use, you know, a three word test to define the role of each attendee in three simple words. If you can't do that, or if people, two people have the exact same. role, that's a sign you don't need both people in the room. Often I'll see, you know, a manager invites their direct report, who invites their direct report, and you have this multi-threaded meeting, which
ends up creating more cognitive load, more coordination tax on the individual and their manager and their manager of managers. We need to be very judicious about who needs to be in the meeting. And, you know, what is the purpose of each person? And it should pass the 4D test.
question that went viral. And I think there was a quite a bit of a generational divide around this. But as we wrap, I'd love to unpack the visibility tax because This question was, should you take a job that is $240,000 a year but requires you to be in the office five days a week, be highly visible?
Or should you take the $120,000 a year job that is completely remote where you could work from anywhere, you can physically arbitrage your location to get cheaper rent and enjoy being a nomad. And generationally speaking, it's felt like... More millennials were like, take the high paying, highly visible job. And more Gen Z were like, hey, take the fully remote job and the flexibility. And what wasn't really discussed is this visibility tax. So when you go fully remote.
And now you're not involved in the random in-person water cooler type meetings or being pulled into conference rooms because you're not visible. And we talked about this. OK, now I'm not even being pulled into these meetings as they go through the 4D method. You lose visibility completely. And now you're just a cog in the machine. And you might be that first cog where they go, hey, can AI replace this remote worker?
So this is something I've done a ton of research on. And the unfortunate reality is there is a massive visibility tax in so many organizations. definitely more legacy enterprise organizations, it's exacerbated. on a different level than others. But absolutely, you know, remote workers for decades have paid this visibility tax when they're not physically in the office. Now, during the pandemic, I studied.
a large number of remote workers who were previously remote before the pandemic and were working in predominantly in-office environments. So that's exactly the second scenario you're talking about. And I watched how their experiences, and I spoke to them and interviewed them, how their experiences changed through the pandemic. And what my co-authors and I found was...
they became much more visible in the organization. We called it a leveling effect where all of a sudden they felt for the first time on a level playing field within their organization. And what's fascinating is... The key enabler to that was how the organization used technology in new ways to create that visibility. became much more written documentation cultures.
much more transparent in those cultures. You know, meetings became the last resort rather than the first knee-jerk reaction. People weren't huddling, you know, over the water cooler. And so it very much is dependent on whether the organization is willing to invest in a communication and technology infrastructure that gives remote workers more visibility.
If you don't have that in many organizations, unfortunately, we don't have that. You do pay this massive visibility tax. But that study gave me a lot of hope that. If the organization is intentional about it and we see this in remote first companies where everyone's remote, then we can recreate an environment where there is more of a even playing field. But it's a hard problem. And, you know, meetings are a key piece of it because.
Meetings need to be intentionally designed. You can't forget to call the remote worker in, which is often the case. And it needs to be part of a very strategic, intentional, disciplined communication system. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing all these great frameworks. and hopefully pushing back on some of our disdain for meetings as they do have a purpose and a value when run the right way. Where can our audience find out more about how to have the best meeting ever?
So your best meeting ever is available on Amazon as well as all your favorite bookstores. My website is RebeccaHines.com and I'm on LinkedIn as well. Thank you for joining us, Rebecca. Thanks so much. That was fun. And now I'd like to showcase one of our X-Bactor Accelerator members. Take it away, Michael. Hi, my name is Michael and I'm an accountant for an insurance company.
before the x-factor accelerator i struggled to build and maintain close connections in my social circle because i wasn't the best at sharing thoughts and feelings with others The reason I joined the X Factor Accelerator is to improve my overall social confidence with my family, friends, colleagues, new acquaintances, and in my social and romantic life.
My favorite thing about the X Factor Accelerator is that it helped me overcome my fear and anxiety when interacting at large social events so that I can now confidently approach others and make new connections with ease. What I'm looking forward to now is using the skills, techniques, and experience I've learned to create long-lasting and more meaningful relationships with the people I care about most in life.
Thank you, Michael. It was an honor and a pleasure working with you too. And good luck to you and all of your future endeavors. If you've gotten value out of this or any of our podcasts, head on over to your favorite podcast player and rate and review the show. It will mean the world to us and it helps others find the show. Until next week, go out there, have an amazing week, have an amazing weekend, and we'll see you soon. And you...