Facilitating Great Meetings

Everyone knows what a bad meeting looks like. It’s boring and a waste of time, with the same people droning on and on, and there aren’t any clear action items to build momentum. Maybe even someone is behaving poorly or strong emotions prevent good work from happening.

If you count each person’s hourly salary and then think about each meeting as a bottom-line expense to your startup, it can start to make you think differently about your meetings. Meetings can drain you of critical resources (people and time) if they aren’t efficient, effective, and don’t engage the right people. They can also kill your culture if people behave in ways that are not aligned with your values - and you allow it.

The good news is that meetings can be full of energy, surface new ideas, solve problems, and align your team. The key to running a great meeting is to do proactive strategic planning and have a bunch of facilitation tools and tactics to ensure it runs smoothly.

First off, let’s identify the elements of an effective meeting:

  • Clear goals: Everyone is aligned and goals are feasible

  • Right structure: Thoughtful pre-read and agenda

  • High and diverse engagement: Lots of different voices participate productively

  • Psychological safety: Language is inclusive and respectful

  • Effective use of data + evidence: Decisions are driven by legitimate facts

  • Achieve your goals: You stick to your goals and get them done

  • Accountability and next steps: There are clear next steps and people do what needs to be done

Let’s double-tap on how to get there.

#1: PROACTIVELY PLAN YOUR MEETINGS

What is the goal of this meeting?

Is it to brainstorm? Troubleshoot? Align? Maybe you have two goals - one for the first half of the meeting and then you want to shift gears for the second half? It’s important to name the purpose for each section so that your team isn’t confused. Are we merely surfacing ideas or are we deciding on which path forward? Which goal you choose, will dictate how you structure the meeting for success.

How much time do you really need?

If you keep about 10-15 minutes aside for the ramp-up and ramp-down, how much time do you really need for discussion? Think about using pre-reading time and only having 2-3 meaty topics for discussion. Do you need less time but more frequency? Or do you need more time and less frequency? You may need to try running your meeting a few different ways to figure out the optimal structure and length.

Who truly needs to be there?

Most startups struggle with the fact that everyone attends all of the meetings when the company is only 5 people, but then it doesn’t make sense for everyone to attend everything as the company grows.

The fewer people at a meeting, the more actively engaging it can be -  unless the purpose is all-company alignment, like at an all-hands or a town hall meeting.

Instead of inviting people to keep them informed, can you figure out how to flex your management and communication structures to share information effectively? You want to keep the meeting tight - and also make sure people don’t feel out of the loop.  The fewer people who attend, the more you’ll have to communicate to balance this out.

Consider having some norms about sharing notes from meetings and having a common file-naming system so it’s easy for everyone to find everything.

Make sure there is effective use of data and evidence.

If you need to make a decision of some sort, make sure that you all have the right information at your fingertips for the meeting. Ensure that this information has been validated and that the accuracy of the data will not be a topic that derails your ability to achieve your goals.

What structure do you need? Make an agenda.

Typically, here’s what happens in meetings:

  • The arrival [2 min]

  • The warm-up [5 min]

  • The discussion

  • The wrap-up + departure [5 min]

The arrival

Getting people to arrive on time is really important. It’s respectful to be on time and you can easily eat away at productivity if people are 5-10 minutes late regularly.

Consider leaving 5 minutes of buffer time in between meetings at a company-wide level so that people have travel time or “bio-break” time built into their days. Maybe you create a norm that 1-hour meetings are really 55-minute meetings instead.

How do you get people to arrive on time? If someone is repeatedly late, ask their manager to have a coaching conversation about how to improve this following the critical feedback formula.

If you want to signal that it’s really important to arrive on time, we’d encourage you to share this message explicitly with your team.  One way to do this is to begin meetings that start right on time by saying “Thank you all for your punctuality, let’s dig in” as a positive reminder.

If you want to go one step further, consider a carrot instead of a stick. Maybe you want to give the first person to arrive a present or prize. You can have fun with this and do it in a way that aligns with your company values. You can keep this up by periodically offering fun gifts to continually reinforce how much your company values promptness.

The warm-up

While you can certainly let people randomly chit-chat while you’re waiting for the actual meeting to begin, you may want to consider adding a little structure into this time to optimize team building and create psychological safety.  For people with social anxiety, those first few minutes can be stressful.

If you want to add a little structure, consider putting a question on your screen and asking people to spend a minute thinking about their answers so they’re ready to share once everyone arrives. This gives people something to do and it grounds people to shift gears for the meeting. For people who are slow processors or introverts, giving them a minute to prepare levels the playing field so that they are ready to share when you want to begin.

Example warm-up questions:

  • On a scale from 1-10, how is your day going so far?

  • What’s a rose (something good), thorn (something challenging or hard), or bud (something that’s coming up), from your week so far?

  • What’s your favorite ice cream flavor?

  • Are you a plant, dog, or cat person?

  • If you could travel anywhere in the world right now, where would you go?

  • What’s your favorite app on your phone?

  • Who would you consider a professional “hero” for you?

  • What is your favorite book or podcast these days?

You can google “meeting icebreaker questions” and there are a billion ideas out there. You can also get a fun conversation starter deck to keep it fresh and fun.

You have people write their answers into a Google slide and watch the answer emerge as people arrive to speed up the sharing part. Or, if you want, you can do a “word whip,” where you go rapidly around the room having people share their responses without pausing in between to comment.

Send an agenda 24 hours in advance

If you’re leading a meeting, it’s helpful to send out a pre-read at least 24 hours in advance. You can collect updates and agenda items from the rest of the team at this time as well. Consider creating your agenda in a collaborative document like Notion or Google Docs so your team can add in content real-time.

It’s important to communicate meeting goals and to share pre-reading materials 24 hours in advance for a range of reasons. First: no one likes surprises. But, even more so:  giving your team time to think before a meeting provides access points for visual learners, slow processors, and introverts. 48 hours is better than 24 hours because you don’t know what someone has planned in their day already for tomorrow and, if you have multiple time zones on your team, it allows for solid working time for everyone.

Consider sending a quick Loom video along with your agenda. It’s a great way to add a bit of content by recording yourself explaining something. It’s super easy to do and brings your pre-meeting content to life.

If you want to bring out the best in your team, you’ll need to give them some time to wrap their heads around key issues and to prepare their ideas. Not everyone is great at responding on the spot. Without that pre-communication, you’re already designing a meeting that is not equally accessible for everyone.

#2: FACILITATE YOUR MEETING EFFECTIVELY

Once you have a strategic plan for your meeting and you’ve communicated this plan to your team, it’s important to think about running the meeting well.

What makes a great meeting?

  • You start on time

  • Lots of different voices and perspectives are shared

  • There is access and opportunity for everyone to participate

  • People are able to debate productively and positively

  • No one feels discriminated against or disrespected

  • You achieve your meeting goals

  • You know who is doing what to move things forward and when deliverables are due

  • Your team feels energized and enabled to get important stuff done

  • You end on time

Let’s talk for a minute about different types of learners.

Everyone is wired a little bit differently; each of us is unique. You can’t assume that other people will think and process information the way you do. You have to create multiple entry points for everyone at your meeting. In addition to managing the social and power dynamics in any room at any given time, you also want to be thinking about common learning types and personality preferences that are likely in the group such as:

FACILITATION TIPS:

As a facilitator, your job is to optimize meaningful engagement. Here are a few of our favorite strategies for you to try:

Stay calm and neutral

It’s important to be calm and collected when facilitating a meeting. We often block off a few minutes before a meeting to make sure we are the first ones there, are organized, and are able to focus on the task at hand. As coaches, we also do our best to check our own opinions at the door when we arrive. As a facilitator, we need to focus on surfacing others’ opinions rather than pushing our own agenda. Sure, we will keep the group in check if they come up with an idea that is truly impossible. When this happens, it’s best to explain the reasoning behind why a proposed solution is not feasible so that the team understands the constraints and can improve on their brainstorming in the future.

Establish norms for tech use + active listening

It’s really hard to have a productive meeting when folks are in the room but clearly focused on something else. It’s worth having a group agreement around cell phones and laptops for live meetings that minimizes distractions. You may want to also have some expectations communicated about showing your face on Zoom meetings as well. You may need to reinforce these expectations regularly until folks get used to focusing on the speaker with active listening - eye contact and affirming body language. Psychological safety can be really hard to create if speakers feel like folks aren’t listening or valuing their perspective.

Consider “assigned seats” for in-person meetings

Sometimes physically moving people to new spots in the room to sit near different people can facilitate new connections and change the dynamic in the room. You can ask people, upon their arrival, to sit with someone they haven’t interacted with directly over the last 24 hours - or to find someone whose birthday is closest to them and sit near them. Sometimes you may even want to put out post-it notes and tell people where to sit, especially if you have breakout groups planned in the meeting. People often get stuck in the same seats and that can establish dynamics and patterns that are sometimes hard to change. Physically changing where people sit can often keep a team flexible and connected. If you can, try to set up room seating in a circle so that power is distributed evenly and everyone can see and hear each other.

Have everyone sign in for hybrid meetings

To make everyone feel equal and valued in a hybrid meeting, it’s helpful to ask everyone to bring their laptop and sign in. That way, regardless of someone’s physical location, everyone takes up equal real estate on the screen and everyone knows where to look. It’s helpful to have an audio device in in-person rooms so that everyone can mute themselves on Zoom (to avoid that awful screeching noise) and still provide high-quality audio.

Set up a parking lot

The idea behind the parking lot is to give people a place to log unrelated ideas while the meeting is happening. You can create a large group post-it note for in-person meetings and give people smaller post-it notes to write their ideas down.  Or you can make a Google doc (virtual meetings) and introduce the link at the start of the meeting.

It helps to give folks a couple of examples so they understand what kind of ideas belong there. If you’re having a meeting about business models and a new marketing idea pops into your head, the parking lot is a great place to “park” it for now to keep the meeting on track. At the end of the meeting, make sure to leave time to look at the parking lot and quickly discuss it to make sure people don’t feel like their ideas die there.

Ask open-ended questions

To keep the conversation moving in the right direction, infuse a lot of open-ended questions into the mix. Open-ended questions are ones in which there is no “yes” or “no” response but, instead, require an explanation such as:

  • Tell us more about your idea…

  • Can you explain your reasoning?

  • What are you worried about?

  • How do you anticipate the larger team will respond?

  • What do you anticipate will happen if we pursue that option?

Think-pair-share

To encourage great ideas from everyone, it’s helpful to ask a discussion question and then give everyone 1-2 minutes to quietly think and write some notes and think about their ideas on their own. Then you can ask folks to turn to the person next to them or to pair up or create a small group of 2-4 people to share ideas..  As the time wraps up, ask one person to succinctly share their group’s ideas with the larger group. This strategy helps quieter or less confident folks share their ideas in a safer context and then someone else ultimately shares their idea with the larger group.

Word whips or question whips

One way to quickly pulse check or surface lots of ideas in rapid succession is to ask folks to quietly think of a word or question related to whatever is going on and to give you a thumbs up when they have it. Once everyone is ready, you can go around the room in rapid-fire and hear all of the responses before commenting. It’s great to do this with concerns as well. What is one way we could fail? You can preface it by saying you don’t necessarily need to believe that this is true, but it will surface ideas to sort out later.

Consider using hand signals or emojis

It can waste a lot of time to simply have people agree with what’s already been said. It can also really derail a productive conversation if someone takes the conversation in an entirely different direction. When we’ve facilitated group meetings, especially with larger groups, we’ve come up with a few shared norms for:

  1. When we agree but have nothing new to add

  2. When we disagree and want to share why in a timely manner

  3. When we have a new topic we want to bring up vs. want to contribute to the current thread

  4. When we are confused or don’t understand

If you are hosting a virtual or hybrid meeting, you can use the chat and emojis for this and make sure someone is monitoring it. For entirely live meetings you can agree on a few hand signals like “two fingers raised” means “I have a new idea” whereas a full hand raise can mean “I am adding onto this thread.”

Have shared norms for interrupting bias - and interrupt bias regularly.

We love this short video that provides concrete tips on how to do this.

Create rotating jobs for people to play during the meeting

One way to constantly keep the dynamic changing and provide different opportunities for engagement is to have a few “jobs” that need to be filled during the meeting and to rotate who serves in that role in some equitable manner. Here are some jobs to consider:

  • Time-keeper: Keeps track of the time and alerts you are on track for the agenda or alerts you at some regular intervals to keep the meeting paced effectively.

  • Note-taker: Have someone take notes to share after the meeting. It’s helpful to have a model to use so that there is some consistency in the notes regardless of who takes them.

  • Facilitator: Have someone else take charge of moving the meeting along and/or keep track of the conversation flow.

  • Peacekeeper: If something heated comes up, think about having a “talking stick” that the peacekeeper manages to ensure that you all can productively work through the conflict together. The rule is that you can only talk when you have the object in your hand and the peacekeeper helps make sure it’s moving from person to person.

  • Sharer: Pre-identify a few people who are going to share their group’s ideas when you do breakout sessions. This way the same people aren’t always “nominated” by their peers to share.

  • Reflector - If you are trying to improve how your team meetings run, you may want to have someone collect some data during the meeting to share back. How many people spoke up? How did the conversation move? Perhaps the reflector shares back ideas on how to improve since they’ve been in the meeting while also thinking about ways to improve the meeting moving forward.

  • Questioner: This person is only allowed to ask questions during the meeting.

Create a virtual or live “gallery tour”

Sometimes it’s nice to have everyone write down an idea in a shared document or on large post-it notes (if fully live) and ask everyone to quickly walk around the room to take it all in, silently, before beginning the meeting or discussion.

If virtual, you can do this the same way - create a common Google slide deck and have everyone share an idea or a shared virtual post-it board. The feeling you’re trying to mimic is walking around an art museum or gallery. You take in all of the content, but it’s silent.

This is another great way to see patterns and trends or surface ideas from everyone before diving into a hearty topic. It’s particularly empowering for quieter or less confident people, giving their voice equal weight.

WRAPPING UP

Your startup’s culture is defined by HOW you do the work and meetings are often when we end up working collaboratively together. It’s worth it to put some time into planning your meetings to be highly productive and positive - and to train your team leads to have a range of strategies and tools to help meetings be culture-building opportunities that are highly engaging, equitable, and accelerate company progress.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Here are some resources for you to keep things fresh and experiment with new ways to productively engage in meetings: