Welcome to the New Manager Podcast. I'm
your host, Kim Nicol. Hello and welcome. I'm
glad you're here and I hope you're doing well.
You've tuned in to the New
Manager Podcast with me, your host, Kim Nicol, and
today we're talking about meetings. So
if you look at your calendar and just had to
eyeball it, how much of your calendar this week is
taken up with meetings? It's
so easy for them to proliferate and to start to
expand and take up a lot of time. This
is something I hear from a lot of people is, I don't
know when to do my work because I have a lot of
meetings. And when you rise into higher
levels of leadership and management, you will be
invited to even more meetings. So
part of your job will be to decide what meetings do
I attend, which do I delegate, or which ones do
I simply choose to get the, you know, maybe the
notes from after and not necessarily being there in
person yourself. And also because you will be
running your meetings, you want to be mindful and
thoughtful about how you do that. So
for today, I want to give you a simple way to
approach your meeting schedule and how to make
them better. The basic idea is you want to
reevaluate how you do your meetings. And
we're going to do this using a structure you've
probably encountered someplace else, but maybe
not applied to this particular context. And
as an aside, I kind of love that approach, because
if you can simply find a new use case for something
that is already familiar to you, then you are more
likely to actually use that tool to make things better.
And that's why we're here. So
here's the breakdown of this framework that we're
going to use. The basic idea is you want to
reevaluate your meetings. When
you look at the week, look at all of the meetings on
your calendar, and then you're going to run them
through this series of questions. The
basic framework is who, what, when, where, why, and
how. Let's look at each one of these
on its own. So look at a first meeting
and ask yourself, okay, who, who needs to be
there? Are the right people in this
meeting? Are there too many people in
this meeting? You can even ask this of
yourself. If you have agreed to attend
a meeting, ask yourself, do I really need to be here?
Does it make sense that who is
in the room includes me? Because
some days the answer might be no, when you weigh your
other priorities. So that first one is who.
Number two, ask yourself, what,
what are we talking about? What
are we doing? What is the point? You
know, this starts to point us towards what is the
desired outcome of this meeting. It
can be easy for meetings to just happen and develop
an inertia, where they simply continue out of
momentum and habit. It's good to pause and ask,
wait, what are we talking about? What
are we intending to accomplish here? When
you ask the question, what, it may prompt you to
either revisit what is the overall goal or the desired
outcome for that meeting. It
might prompt you to think about agendas. Do
we know why we're going to meet and what the purpose
of this meeting is? It also allows you to pause
and say, well, when we started to have this
regular meeting, it was for these reasons, are those
reasons still valid? Or is it time to adjust or
retire or change something? So
taking that moment to ask, what are we talking about
here? What are we doing? What
is the point? Can reveal potential
opportunities to make changes. Next,
ask yourself, when, when is this meeting happening? What
is the time? What is the duration? When
you ask yourself the when question, consider it
against who is going to be there. And
if you have folks who are joining from different time
zones, this is also a really great time to
reevaluate. Does the time of this meeting
land in an equitable way across all the participants,
schedules, and calendars? We simply want to be mindful
of the decisions that we're making and think about the
effect that they will have on other people. When
you ask the question of when is this meeting and
you're thinking about the timing of it, you also
want to consider the duration. I'm
a huge fan of creating meetings that don't land
exactly on the half or on the hour. Because
if you build in a little bit of buffer time, that
has a positive cumulative effect for you and for
everyone else. Because as a human, we are also
context switching from one conversation to another,
from one task to another. And
that takes energy. It can be difficult to just
flip a switch from one meeting or one context to
another meeting or another context. And
by building in a little bit of buffer, even if
it's only 10 minutes, even if it's only five, if you
really honor that five minute buffer, by building
in a breathing room, what that means is everyone has
to show up a little bit more prepared, a little bit
more focused. We're going to meet for 45
minutes instead of 60, or we're going to meet for 25
minutes instead of 30. If we honor that, then that
means we have a bit of space in between, which
means that next meetings can start on time, which
means that there's room to stretch, get a glass of
water, get a quick bite to eat, go to the bathroom.
Like you have time built in for
all of the human stuff. And
to also take a moment to perhaps jot down any notes
and get it out of your head and onto paper. So
that when you go to the next conversation or task,
you have that bit of break. So
your mind can kind of catch up with your body
and it's not like your body is in the next
meeting, but your mind is still finishing the
conversation that you just came out of. It
can be a better use of everyone's attention and
time when you build in these little micro breaks,
these bits of breathing room. All
of that, that question around what time do we
meet and what's the duration, that comes into
the when question. Next, we go to where. Where
is this meeting happening? Is
it happening online? Is it video? Is
it audio only? Are we meeting in person?
Sometimes we want to intentionally
change where we meet because it has a different
effect. You might be thinking about
this in terms of having a team off site or simply or
in some cases now it's a team on site where instead
of everybody being remote, now we decide, okay, for
today, for this quarter, we want to gather everyone
under the same roof so that we're having a
conversation without the screens and that might
create a different kind of experience. So
be mindful to ask, where is this meeting happening?
You know, you can also do
walking meetings. So you might say with your
one on one, hey, would you like to go for a walk?
It's a really nice day. Maybe
we can do this meeting on our feet while we're going
for a walk instead of sitting in a conference
room. Or even if you're doing it
remotely, it might be a walking meeting that's audio
only and you and your person can be in your own
places with a headset on going for a walk and
having that conversation. I found for myself, my brain
works better when I remember to take care of
my body. So if I go for a walk, my
brain works better. If I have a glass of water,
my brain works better. It's just, you know, it's
sometimes easy to forget when we're doing a lot of
thinking work, but actually our brain works better and
we can discharge some of the accumulated stress or
anxiety or just, you know, activity that kind of
builds up in the body when we go for a walk, take
care of our body along the way. That
comes up when we ask, where is this meeting going
to happen? And then we get to why. Why
are we having this meeting again? It
gets us to ask, what is the desired outcome or what
does success look like? When
you are having your one -on -ones, the why question
might change over time because one, one -on -one
might be about having a career conversation. Why
are we having this one -on -one this month? It's
because we need to talk about career plans, career
progression, or maybe we're here to talk about changes
that are happening and we need to make sure we're on
the same page. Maybe the why for this coming
meeting is to talk about performance reviews or a
performance issue, but even though you're having this
regular meeting, the undercurrent of why, what
is the focus of this particular meeting, it might
change over time. What I find is that sometimes
when we have recurring meetings, we forget to
pause and reevaluate what is it that we want to
accomplish here. We can get into a ret where
it feels like we're just doing the same status
updates and it doesn't feel that connected or engaged.
Taking that moment to pause and
reflect, why are we doing this? What
is the desired outcome of this meeting? Checking
in every month, every quarter to see what, if
anything, has changed. What does success look like? You
can also think about this when you are thinking of
your meetings with your manager for your one -on
-ones. If your manager is not setting
the tone and there's lots of reasons why that might
be, you can kind of help out by influencing or
taking the lead and letting your manager know, hey, for
our upcoming one -on -one, here are the things that I
would like for us to go over or to talk about.
Sometimes when we simply reevaluate
how we are structuring and doing a meeting, when we
realize, oh, what we're trying to accomplish is
this. Therefore, let us change the way that
we structure this meeting. It
can have a really positive outcome. So
that's the why. And that kind of brings us
into that final question, which is the how. How
are we doing this meeting? This
is about structure. How is the meeting structured?
Do we start with a check -in?
Do we save the check -in for
the end and do the strategic conversation up
front? How will it work? Who's
running the meeting? When you're the manager and
you're planning team meetings or group meetings
for your team, there are times when you might
delegate some of the facilitation to somebody
else. It might be part of their
career and professional development, the public
speaking, the facilitation, or it simply might be a
necessary delegation if you are really heads down
working on something else. And
you can think of this as tapping into the brilliance
and the ability of your team and helping people all
come together. So thinking about how will it
work, how will this meeting go? With
more and more AI tools, I've seen a lot of folks
who are also now using AI for summaries of meetings.
And you can have an AI tool
capture the summary of the meeting, capture any next
steps. It's always a good idea to
review those notes because they're not 100 % accurate.
But you might think about, is
there a way that will make it easier for everyone to
be on the same page and to have a point of
reference to go back to? And
so maybe now you start experimenting with different
AI enabled meeting tools to help you have a more
effective meeting. The main thing is to simply be
mindful that you're not going through the motions,
running from meeting to meeting without realizing
you actually have a lot of influence about which
meetings you attend, which meetings you don't, and how
the meetings that you do attend are organized and
how they work. It's important to pause to do a
bit of an inventory. I would recommend you do this
every quarter because especially depending on the
organization that you're in, it's very common for
organizations to have different seasonal
activities. So end of year might be the
busy season for your organization or maybe end
of year is the quiet season. But
really understanding that every season of the work
of the organization, there's a little bit of an ebb
and a flow. There's a cadence. It
also might be around the holiday season. So
it might be that as you're coming into the summer and
you know that folks on your team will be taking
vacation or you will be planning to take vacation,
thinking about how will this affect our meetings
and maybe we make some changes to accommodate or
to simply reflect how we can best use our time.
When you do this, you will feel
like you're having a little bit more control over your
calendar. Be mindful of when you feel
uncomfortable, specifically in the sense of, I don't
know if I can decline this meeting. I
feel like I should go to every meeting I'm invited
to. You shouldn't actually. You
should expect to be invited to more meetings than you
will be able to attend. And
part of your work will be deciding what do you say
yes to and what do you kindly decline. I
read something on LinkedIn recently and I'll see if I
can find the original source. But
it was this person who was posting this concept of
most people organize their week based on the meetings
that they have rather than the work that they have
and the priorities. And the meetings should never
drive the work. It should be the reverse. So
when you look at your calendar, if you say I've
got all these meetings, you want to ask, well, do
these line up with my priorities this week? And
if not, then change it. Don't
run your week based on the meeting invites in your
calendar. And again, I'll see if I can
find where I read that because I thought it was a
really, a really great point. So
today it's all about meetings, how to make them
better, maybe question what's on your calendar and
why. And again, run this simple
framework, who, what, when, where, why, and how. And
use it to begin to look with new eyes at what you
have on your calendar, how the meetings work, and then
make some small adjustments to make them better. That's
what I had to share with you today. Take
it, use it. I hope you have a great day
at work. Thank you for listening. And
I will talk to you again next time.