Welcome to the New Manager Podcast. I'm your host, Kim Nicol. Hello and welcome. I'm glad you're here and I hope you're doing well. You've tuned in to the New Manager Podcast with me, your host, Kim Nicol, and today we're talking about meetings. So if you look at your calendar and just had to eyeball it, how much of your calendar this week is taken up with meetings? It's so easy for them to proliferate and to start to
expand and take up a lot of time. This is something I hear from a lot of people is, I don't know when to do my work because I have a lot of meetings. And when you rise into higher levels of leadership and management, you will be
invited to even more meetings. So part of your job will be to decide what meetings do I attend, which do I delegate, or which ones do I simply choose to get the, you know, maybe the notes from after and not necessarily being there in person yourself. And also because you will be running your meetings, you want to be mindful and
thoughtful about how you do that. So for today, I want to give you a simple way to approach your meeting schedule and how to make them better. The basic idea is you want to reevaluate how you do your meetings. And we're going to do this using a structure you've probably encountered someplace else, but maybe
not applied to this particular context. And as an aside, I kind of love that approach, because if you can simply find a new use case for something that is already familiar to you, then you are more likely to actually use that tool to make things better. And that's why we're here. So here's the breakdown of this framework that we're going to use. The basic idea is you want to
reevaluate your meetings. When you look at the week, look at all of the meetings on your calendar, and then you're going to run them through this series of questions. The basic framework is who, what, when, where, why, and how. Let's look at each one of these on its own. So look at a first meeting and ask yourself, okay, who, who needs to be there? Are the right people in this meeting? Are there too many people in
this meeting? You can even ask this of yourself. If you have agreed to attend a meeting, ask yourself, do I really need to be here? Does it make sense that who is in the room includes me? Because some days the answer might be no, when you weigh your other priorities. So that first one is who. Number two, ask yourself, what, what are we talking about? What
are we doing? What is the point? You know, this starts to point us towards what is the desired outcome of this meeting. It can be easy for meetings to just happen and develop an inertia, where they simply continue out of momentum and habit. It's good to pause and ask, wait, what are we talking about? What
are we intending to accomplish here? When you ask the question, what, it may prompt you to either revisit what is the overall goal or the desired outcome for that meeting. It might prompt you to think about agendas. Do we know why we're going to meet and what the purpose of this meeting is? It also allows you to pause and say, well, when we started to have this regular meeting, it was for these reasons, are those
reasons still valid? Or is it time to adjust or retire or change something? So taking that moment to ask, what are we talking about here? What are we doing? What is the point? Can reveal potential opportunities to make changes. Next, ask yourself, when, when is this meeting happening? What is the time? What is the duration? When you ask yourself the when question, consider it
against who is going to be there. And if you have folks who are joining from different time zones, this is also a really great time to reevaluate. Does the time of this meeting land in an equitable way across all the participants, schedules, and calendars? We simply want to be mindful of the decisions that we're making and think about the
effect that they will have on other people. When you ask the question of when is this meeting and you're thinking about the timing of it, you also want to consider the duration. I'm a huge fan of creating meetings that don't land exactly on the half or on the hour. Because if you build in a little bit of buffer time, that has a positive cumulative effect for you and for
everyone else. Because as a human, we are also context switching from one conversation to another, from one task to another. And that takes energy. It can be difficult to just flip a switch from one meeting or one context to
another meeting or another context. And by building in a little bit of buffer, even if it's only 10 minutes, even if it's only five, if you really honor that five minute buffer, by building in a breathing room, what that means is everyone has to show up a little bit more prepared, a little bit more focused. We're going to meet for 45 minutes instead of 60, or we're going to meet for 25
minutes instead of 30. If we honor that, then that means we have a bit of space in between, which means that next meetings can start on time, which means that there's room to stretch, get a glass of water, get a quick bite to eat, go to the bathroom. Like you have time built in for all of the human stuff. And to also take a moment to perhaps jot down any notes
and get it out of your head and onto paper. So that when you go to the next conversation or task, you have that bit of break. So your mind can kind of catch up with your body and it's not like your body is in the next meeting, but your mind is still finishing the conversation that you just came out of. It can be a better use of everyone's attention and time when you build in these little micro breaks,
these bits of breathing room. All of that, that question around what time do we meet and what's the duration, that comes into the when question. Next, we go to where. Where is this meeting happening? Is it happening online? Is it video? Is it audio only? Are we meeting in person? Sometimes we want to intentionally change where we meet because it has a different
effect. You might be thinking about this in terms of having a team off site or simply or in some cases now it's a team on site where instead of everybody being remote, now we decide, okay, for today, for this quarter, we want to gather everyone under the same roof so that we're having a conversation without the screens and that might
create a different kind of experience. So be mindful to ask, where is this meeting happening? You know, you can also do walking meetings. So you might say with your one on one, hey, would you like to go for a walk? It's a really nice day. Maybe we can do this meeting on our feet while we're going for a walk instead of sitting in a conference
room. Or even if you're doing it remotely, it might be a walking meeting that's audio only and you and your person can be in your own places with a headset on going for a walk and having that conversation. I found for myself, my brain works better when I remember to take care of my body. So if I go for a walk, my brain works better. If I have a glass of water,
my brain works better. It's just, you know, it's sometimes easy to forget when we're doing a lot of thinking work, but actually our brain works better and we can discharge some of the accumulated stress or anxiety or just, you know, activity that kind of builds up in the body when we go for a walk, take care of our body along the way. That comes up when we ask, where is this meeting going
to happen? And then we get to why. Why are we having this meeting again? It gets us to ask, what is the desired outcome or what does success look like? When you are having your one -on -ones, the why question might change over time because one, one -on -one might be about having a career conversation. Why
are we having this one -on -one this month? It's because we need to talk about career plans, career progression, or maybe we're here to talk about changes that are happening and we need to make sure we're on
the same page. Maybe the why for this coming meeting is to talk about performance reviews or a performance issue, but even though you're having this regular meeting, the undercurrent of why, what is the focus of this particular meeting, it might change over time. What I find is that sometimes when we have recurring meetings, we forget to pause and reevaluate what is it that we want to
accomplish here. We can get into a ret where it feels like we're just doing the same status updates and it doesn't feel that connected or engaged. Taking that moment to pause and reflect, why are we doing this? What is the desired outcome of this meeting? Checking in every month, every quarter to see what, if
anything, has changed. What does success look like? You can also think about this when you are thinking of your meetings with your manager for your one -on
-ones. If your manager is not setting the tone and there's lots of reasons why that might be, you can kind of help out by influencing or taking the lead and letting your manager know, hey, for our upcoming one -on -one, here are the things that I would like for us to go over or to talk about.
Sometimes when we simply reevaluate how we are structuring and doing a meeting, when we realize, oh, what we're trying to accomplish is this. Therefore, let us change the way that we structure this meeting. It can have a really positive outcome. So that's the why. And that kind of brings us into that final question, which is the how. How are we doing this meeting? This is about structure. How is the meeting structured?
Do we start with a check -in? Do we save the check -in for the end and do the strategic conversation up front? How will it work? Who's running the meeting? When you're the manager and you're planning team meetings or group meetings for your team, there are times when you might delegate some of the facilitation to somebody
else. It might be part of their career and professional development, the public speaking, the facilitation, or it simply might be a necessary delegation if you are really heads down working on something else. And you can think of this as tapping into the brilliance and the ability of your team and helping people all come together. So thinking about how will it
work, how will this meeting go? With more and more AI tools, I've seen a lot of folks who are also now using AI for summaries of meetings. And you can have an AI tool capture the summary of the meeting, capture any next steps. It's always a good idea to review those notes because they're not 100 % accurate.
But you might think about, is there a way that will make it easier for everyone to be on the same page and to have a point of reference to go back to? And so maybe now you start experimenting with different AI enabled meeting tools to help you have a more
effective meeting. The main thing is to simply be mindful that you're not going through the motions, running from meeting to meeting without realizing you actually have a lot of influence about which meetings you attend, which meetings you don't, and how the meetings that you do attend are organized and how they work. It's important to pause to do a
bit of an inventory. I would recommend you do this every quarter because especially depending on the organization that you're in, it's very common for organizations to have different seasonal activities. So end of year might be the busy season for your organization or maybe end of year is the quiet season. But really understanding that every season of the work of the organization, there's a little bit of an ebb
and a flow. There's a cadence. It also might be around the holiday season. So it might be that as you're coming into the summer and you know that folks on your team will be taking vacation or you will be planning to take vacation, thinking about how will this affect our meetings and maybe we make some changes to accommodate or to simply reflect how we can best use our time.
When you do this, you will feel like you're having a little bit more control over your calendar. Be mindful of when you feel uncomfortable, specifically in the sense of, I don't know if I can decline this meeting. I feel like I should go to every meeting I'm invited to. You shouldn't actually. You should expect to be invited to more meetings than you
will be able to attend. And part of your work will be deciding what do you say yes to and what do you kindly decline. I read something on LinkedIn recently and I'll see if I can find the original source. But it was this person who was posting this concept of most people organize their week based on the meetings that they have rather than the work that they have and the priorities. And the meetings should never
drive the work. It should be the reverse. So when you look at your calendar, if you say I've got all these meetings, you want to ask, well, do these line up with my priorities this week? And if not, then change it. Don't run your week based on the meeting invites in your calendar. And again, I'll see if I can find where I read that because I thought it was a
really, a really great point. So today it's all about meetings, how to make them better, maybe question what's on your calendar and why. And again, run this simple framework, who, what, when, where, why, and how. And use it to begin to look with new eyes at what you have on your calendar, how the meetings work, and then make some small adjustments to make them better. That's what I had to share with you today. Take
it, use it. I hope you have a great day at work. Thank you for listening. And I will talk to you again next time.