On Effective Meetings

For a long time I said I loved meetings. Then I realized I had just been lucky to be on teams that did them well. I think there are essentially 3 types of meetings and only 1 should be had more than once a week.

1. One to Many Meetings.

These are your All-Hands. Most participants are passive listeners (they are not watching the presentation sorry!). At their best they keep the team going in one highlevel direction and can provide some camaraderie when times are good and reassurance in moments of crisis. These are fine fortnightly or once a month.

2. Many to One Meetings

This is Check-in meeting. The primary reason for these is to keep the boss up to date. While there is value in knowing what teammates (especially those whose work intersects with your work) are doing, there is low benefit of being present while details of problems far removed from one's area of responsibility are discussed. So while it is tempting to attempt to bring value to them by offering questions or insights, these are best done offline. Otherewise these become the type of meetings that have people privately messaging each other "Why Am I here?". These meetings benefit from a strict timelimit for each member's checkin and are best run by someone with a naturally authoritative or dictatorial personality.

3. Co-equal Meetings / 1 on 1s

When type 2 meetings go off the rails it is because they are confused for these meetings. The key difference here is the number of people and their involvement in what is being discussed. Because these types of meetings invite every participant to weigh in and the number of relationships grows squarely with the number of participants. These meetings do not scale. They only work with very small teams of 2 to 5 people. Here each person speaks to and receives replies from every other person. If the team is truly small these might deceptively be called a checkin meeting but they are most likely an adhoc meeting setup to come to a resolution on a particular topic. Invites to these should be as exclusive as possible. 3 is better than 5. They should be the most common type of meeting but if a given group meets more than twice on the same topic that might be cause for concern.

The key

Recognize the type of meeting you are in or that you wish to create and act accordingly. Aim to maximize meeting effectiveness not only for your self but for all participants.