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One of the questions people frequently ask me is: What’s the best way to run a meeting? Well, that sort of depends. And again, one of the dilemmas we have in running meetings is a lot of these meetings are now virtual because we are working with people from around the world. So one thing I want to say about that is: You need to make sure – and this is a very basic issue – that if you are working with people who are not in the same time zone, that sometimes you adjust to them and sometimes they adjust to you as opposed to you always adjusting to them.
The other thing I would say about running a meeting is: Don’t hold a meeting unless you really need to have a meeting. Meetings do take time and energy and you need to make sure that you have a sense of what you’re trying to accomplish in that meeting. By that, I do not mean that you’re just sort of work, work, work, work. Because what we do see is, if you want to run reasonable meetings, what you have to do is set the context for those meetings, and that means getting to know the people you’re actually meeting with. So in those early meetings, that’s when you develop the habits that will either make you an effective or not so effective group at having meetings. It is worth taking the time to let people get to know each other. Even if it’s a virtual team, to sort of let people say who they are, what they know. Because what you often find in these meetings is you don’t hear from everyone. You don’t know what they knew, you don’t know what their concerns are. So I’d say one piece of the puzzle is – yes, there’re all kinds of rules about making sure you have an agenda, etc., – but one of the things is to know about who you really have in the room, what they know and what they think.
If you’re the leader, I would say one of your primary roles is also to make sure you enquire and not simply advocate. If it’s worth calling the meeting, it’s worth knowing what people think. So it’s your job to make sure you find out what people think and if you have to use artificial methods to get them to participate, particularly if it’s virtual, then you use artificial methods and you literally call on everybody. Do not assume that silence means, you know, no opinion or agreement.
And ideally in most, if you have a group that’s working together over time, ideally you are trying to do things in a way that you’re moving towards more sort of, if you will, qualified consensus. Or, at least when you don’t agree, particularly if people have to act on whatever you’re doing, at least make sure you know what those minority views were and why people held those views.