Quick Win: What all the best meeting leaders have in common

Steven Rogelberg is one of the world’s leading experts on workplace meetings and he knows that one of the biggest deciding factors on whether a meeting is successful or not is the ability of the person leading the meeting.

Whether it’s making the meeting all about themselves, or failing to plan in advance, there are plenty of pitfalls that can undo a meeting for a leader.

Additionally, there are also some key traits that all successful meeting leaders have in common and Steven is an expert on them all.

Steven’s book, The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance has been on over 25 “best of” lists including being recognized by the Washington Post as the #1 leadership book to watch for. To top it off, Adam Grant has called Steven the “world’s leading expert on how to fix meetings”.

Listen to the full interview with Steven here.

Connect with Steven via his website and linkedin.

My latest book The Health Habit is out now. You can order a copy here: https://www.amantha.com/the-health-habit/

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Host: Amantha Imber

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Professor Stephen Rogelberg is one of the world's leading experts
on workplace meetings, and he knows that one of the
biggest deciding factors on whether a meeting is successful or
not is the ability of the person leading the meeting.
Whether it's making the meeting all about themselves or failing
to plan in advance, there are plenty of pitfalls that

(00:22):
can undo a meeting for a leader. Additionally, there are
also some key traits that all successful meeting leaders have
in common, and Stephen is an expert on them. All.
Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals,

(00:42):
and strategies for optimizing your day. I'm your host, doctor
Amantha Imber. In today's quick Win episode, I speak with
Stephen Rogelberg about what the best meeting leaders have in common,
that some people make when running a meeting and the

(01:03):
different kinds of strategies a good meeting leader can use
to get the best results.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Well, let me frame it this way and our research
the best meeting leaders appear to have something in common,
and what they have in common is a similar mindset,
and that mindset is a mindset of stewardship. They're a
steward of others' time. The thought of people leaving their
meetings saying it was a waste is so uncomfortable to
them that they act with intentionality. And this intentionality is

(01:35):
instead of just you know, dialing the meeting in using
default calendar settings, right, you're making choices. You're saying, Okay,
I'm having this meeting, this is how long I think
it should be, this is who must be there. So
you're just being intentional. And furthermore, one of the things
I talk about in my book is this idea of
a pre mortem, and a pre mortem is where you

(01:59):
start to think about what are the potential challenges and
problems that could arise in the meeting? And given that,
how should I design the meeting? And so it's just
stepping back and giving it a little bit of thought.
And interestingly, we act with intentionality all the time when
we're meeting with important stakeholders because we don't want those

(02:22):
people to leave the meeting saying that was a waste
of time. But we typically don't act with intentionality when
it comes to meeting with our peers or directs. So
this intentionality is just saying, all right, people are giving
me the biggest gift. They have their time, so how
can I honor that time? And so the decisions are
you know, tightness of invites ordering of the agenda, right,

(02:44):
hit the most important things first, you know, not the
superficial stuff.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
Keep the meeting as short and tight as possible. You
can always find more time to meet. But we know
from Parkinson's law that work expands to fill whatever time
is a lot to do it, So keep it tight,
you'll get it done. And those are some really important
intentional design factors to keep in mind.

Speaker 1 (03:05):
What else have you found that the best meeting leaders
have in common?

Speaker 2 (03:10):
So that's the main one, but then there's other ones
that fall from that. For example, facilitation when one of
the best predictors of people's perceptions of an ineffective meeting
is the leader doing more talking than the attendees. The
more the leader talks, the more the ratings go down.
And that makes a heck of a lot of sense, right,

(03:32):
because the leader is supposed to be facilitating. That's their job, right.
They've called this party together and their job is to
get these voices out. It doesn't mean that they can't
talk during it, but mean it does mean that they
shouldn't be dominating because they invited people. If they dominate,
the meeting could have just been an email. So that
propensity to facilitate is really critical. And what underlies that

(03:54):
is this desire to listen right, to truly engage. And
and then the other characteristic of really good meeting leaders
is they understand that meetings need an end. Ding. So
we know meetings end, right, everything ends, but an ending

(04:15):
is something different, right. An ending is where you stop
three to five minutes before the end and you say, okay,
well did we actually decide and for each of these things,
who is the dri the directly responsible individual and what
did we not decide? You know, so we know that
these are things that we have to discuss at another time.

(04:36):
At the same time, during this ending, you're recording this
key information so your non attendees can stay in the loop.
So that is another key thing that really differentiates excellent
meeting leaders from not so excellent meeting leaders.

Speaker 1 (04:52):
What else can we do during a meeting to get
the best outcome, whether that be facilitation techniques that work,
or other strategy that you found.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
I mean, facilitation is absolutely the most key, but you
know there's lots of different ways to have a meeting,
and so, for example, silence in meetings is phenomenal. The
research shows that when people brainstorm in silence typing directly
into their computers, they generate nearly twice as many ideas,
and the ideas tend to be more creative, right because

(05:21):
everyone can talk at once and you're not influenced by
that very first thing you hear. So a meeting leader
can say, okay, depending on what we're trying to solve,
maybe silent brainstorming could be really meaningful. Again, depending on
what you want to solve, Sometimes a standing meeting is
really a helpful. Standing meetings generally take half as much

(05:42):
time and yield the same quality decisions. You might choose
to get people into pairs before the conversation. What we've
found is that when you tell people, hey, again, to
pairs and start to talk about this problem or issue
for just three minutes and then we'll all come together.
When you do that and then you return to the
big group, people are participating, right, you've kind of greased

(06:05):
the rails. So that's another technique that could be super helpful.
So there's lots of choices, and that's I think a
really key takeaway for your listeners is that we need
meeting leaders to think about things and make choices. You know,
we have around a billion meetings a day around the

(06:25):
globe and they generally all look the same. That's not good, right,
Let's mix it up. Let's change it up and position
yourself as a leader as part of the solution, as
opposed to being part of the problem.

Speaker 1 (06:39):
I hope you enjoyed this little quick win with Steven.
If you'd like to listen to the full interview, you
can find a link to that in the show notes.
If you like today's show, make sure you get follow
on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop.
How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of
the Warrangery People, part of the Cooler Nation

Speaker 2 (07:00):
Two