Meetings

As a manager, the common tool you have at your disposal is meetings. You will a lot of them. They do not stop you from doing the work, they are the work. Make yourself effective in the meetings., figuring making them effective within the constraints of your company, is the job.

• Think about your role in each meeting., before the meeting
  • Decision Maker
  • Keeping the frame (right discussion, opening/closing discussion)
  • Listener (1:1)
  • Debugger (multi team/department projects)
• Learn to lead through the meetings
  • be prepared for the meetings; always have the purpose and the context (how is everyone feeling, how is the mood on the topic, latest developments)
  • 45min meeting unprepared < 30min + preparation + context
  • putting energy into teams
  • which questions do you want your team to leave with today (?)
• Do not stack up your meetings 09:10- 10:11 - 11:12 etc.
  • back-to-back-to-back meetings drain your energy real fast
  • save your energy, tired managers suck.
  • randomize the meeting times,(ie quarter by quarter) grumpy tech-lead is only grumpy because you are always doing the 1:1 after they are bored to death in a status-update meeting.
• Shut up and ask questions
  • learn how to ask questions, learn how to ask better questions.
    • learn how to NOT ask certain questions
  • figure out your closed question asking patterns,….
    • If I were you
    • Why don’t you
    • We should consider
    • In my old company…
  • .. turn them into questions
    • why.. ?
    • what if…. ?
    • how….?
• Oh, yes shut up.
  • Take a beverage to your meetings, take a sip after you decide to talk. pause, remember to shut-up.
• Take notes (more on that later)
  • When possible, let participants see the notes you are taking. it can have several format:
    • shared document during the meeting
    • personal notes shared after the meeting
    • open the email
  • Take personal notes on behaviour, reactions, feelings, including your own. This is VERY easy to overlook, bad ones stick but the good ones are easy to forget.
• send a briefs before populated meetings where you mention the basics you expect everyone to know in the meeting .
• Find your own way of rewarding good behaviour, there is a vast, fertile land behind ’good question, Karl’ .
• Reduce the number of status update meetings with one Team/Person
  • help the team making the status visible at ANY TIME.
    • the scrum/kanban board
    • project/product documentation
    • notes from the latest meeting
  • if a teams / people need to collaborate, bring the statuses together, aggregate it and provoke the conversation
  • ’This could have been an email/slack message’ has a bad reputation but use it, teach how you would have preferred to receive that information and when. Do not work with out-of-the-box configurations.
• Do not be afraid to cancel meetings