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9 Keys for Running Effective Meetings as a Project Manager

I was in a meeting a couple of years ago with the CEO of the company I was working with. The CEO of the company along with about 8 other people were invited to a meeting on a key issue. At the exact meeting start time, only 3 of the 8 people were in the conference room. The CEO came into the meeting about 5 minutes after the start time and wanted to know why the meeting hadn’t started yet and why key personnel weren’t there yet. I explained that those people were running behind and we were waiting for them. He was understandably frustrated by having to wait for the meeting to start. In the end, the meeting ended up starting about 10 minutes late. This was not a one-off occurrence. Meetings would hardly ever start time, end on time, have all of the necessary participants, or would have too many participants who weren’t required.

About six months later, the CEO and senior management received a bunch of complaints from employees about meetings essentially being a waste of their time. The common complaints were exactly what I mentioned above: that meetings didn’t start and end time, frequently got off topic, didn’t include the appropriate people or included too many people, and that there were too many meetings period. I can say that these complaints in my estimation were largely fair and accurate. When the idea of implementing new meeting management policies for running effective meetings was suggested I said, “Are the CEO and management team prepared to enforce and embrace these new policies?”

The reason that I asked that question is because how meetings are approached is largely a function of company culture. Company culture changes start at the top of the organization. If I am a project manager at ABC manufacturing, I can decide that I am going to start running more effective meetings, but I don’t have the authority to make that happen across the company. I make that point early in this post so as not to make this another in the long line of pie in the sky meeting management articles on the internet. Company meeting culture and company project culture are often intertwined. It all starts at the top and you need buy-in for running effective meetings just as you do for running projects. If the company culture is lax when it comes to missing dates on a project plan or is one where people routinely showing up 5-10 minutes late to meetings is commonplace, that is something that needs to be changed at the top if you don’t have the authority to do it yourself. In my experience, these challenges are more difficult to overcome in large matrixed organization, which is often a function of how big the company is. Regardless of circumstances, as project managers and leaders, we need to endeavor to do our part to be leaders in effective meeting management. To that end, I have highlighted 9 key characteristics of effective meetings. As I alluded to, I have attempted to make this realistic things you can do as a project manager as opposed to things that are great to talk about as buzzwords, but can’t be easily implemented.

Send out an agenda with a meeting goal prior to the meeting

People may read this item and think, “Yeah, even if I send the agenda out, how many people are actually going to read it?” My counterargument is that you could very well be right (Though it’s not just meeting agenda emails that people don’t read), but without an agenda and meeting goal you are setting yourself up already for an ineffective meeting. First, the agenda should contain the goal which addresses a very simple question, “Why are we having this meeting?” Please note that a goal of “project status” is not good enough. There needs to be a reason for the meeting around project status such as, “We are having this meeting to ensure that the tasks required to ensure successful deployment next week are on track.” If risks or issues are a reason for the meeting, that is an even better reason. Getting back to people not reading the agenda, even if this happens you can still have it up on a Powerpoint (I will get into the approach in more detail below) to keep the group focused. Another item that needs to be included in the agenda that I will go into more detail on later is who is going to be expected to address particular agenda items. This is one way to also get people to read the email as nobody wants to show up to a meeting and be put on the spot to speak on an item that they don’t have an update on. Here is an example of the agendas I send out prior to meetings:

Stay on track

In virtually every meeting management post on the internet, you will find this item. As a project manager, it is important to keep the meeting on track and adhere to the agenda. I have found that even though it requires extra work on my part that having a Powerpoint with the meeting agenda (and corresponding slides with each of those items) helps keep the group focused and people have a less of a tendency to take things off track when you have the agenda items shown on the projector. That is not to say that a meeting still can’t be taken off track. For example, are you really going to interrupt the CEO and tell him that the meeting is getting off track? With the vast majority of big company CEOs I have worked with, this is not an approach that would be well received. Again, while meeting management is about following a process, you still need to read the situation and apply those process appropriately.

Engage everyone

There are two different instances I encounter of people who aren’t engaged in a meeting – people who aren’t paying attention versus people who are quiet. First, I’ve had people who come into my meetings fully engrossed in epic Candy Crush sessions and they are fully glued to their phones. Many of the projects I’ve managed have been in matrixed organizations and I don’t have the authority to tell the person to get off their phone (This is why I led off this post by saying meeting culture is a function of company culture. If being on a smartphone during a meeting is accepted by senior management, you as a project manager aren’t going to be able to set a different policy). However, I will simply try to engage that person in the conversation, “Will – What are your thoughts on this approach from the Application Support perspective? Do you feel this is feasible?” That will usually get them back involved in the meeting. As a project manager, it is also important to recognize people who may be quiet or have a more introverted personality in a meeting full of people with more aggressive personalities. I’ve had people on teams who have had a lot of valuable knowledge to add, but have felt that they haven’t had the opportunity to express their thoughts because other people are speaking or they just feel uncomfortable. As a project manager, I feel it is my responsibility to ensure that all viewpoints are heard from and make it a point to get these people involved in the conversations.

Limit interrupting

Have you ever worked in a company where interrupting is the norm? I have and have found it very difficult to get much accomplished when this happens. Yes, there is always someone in a meeting who has a tendency to ramble and you have to try to find a tactful way to get them to wrap up their thought. With that being said, I really try hard to only do this when I feel it is truly necessary. This ties in with the item above regarding engaging all team members as well as the item below on ground rules. When it comes to engaging people, if someone is already introverted by nature, how are they going to feel when 20 seconds into explaining their viewpoint someone interrupts them. Most introverted people are going to become frustrated, revert to what is comfortable (being quiet), and be less inclined to participate. In addition to causing frustration, I have also found that constant interrupting very often can take a meeting off track. How can you be running an effective meeting if one or two people are doing all of the talking and interrupting other team members?

Set ground rules

This is another one that comes up in a lot of articles on meeting management and running effective meetings. However, I acknowledge that in a lot of situations especially as a consultant it is very difficult to set and implement ground rules that aren’t in full alignment with the way meetings are normally run in that company. If you go into a meeting as a project manager with a slide listing 12 meeting management ground rules for future meetings, some people may not take kindly to that. However, a more tactful way to approach this would be to explain the anticipated format. For Agile projects, I follow the pretty standard format where we go around the room and each person answers 3 questions and we take technical discussions outside of the call with the required parties:

• What have you worked on since the last meeting (normally 24 hours in Scrum)?
• What will you be working on in the next 24 hours?
• What roadblocks are you encountering that may prevent you from accomplishing your tasks?

I have also found that as a project manager a lot of this can be accomplished by setting the example. I can often be found a few minutes before the meeting setting up the conference room (as long as it is not in use) and making sure the projector is working properly. If I am not ready to begin the meeting at the scheduled time, why should anyone else be prepared to do that? If I constantly interrupt people when they are giving an update or their input, why shouldn’t other people feel free to interrupt? You wouldn’t run a project without a process and you shouldn’t run a meeting without a process. However, we have to recognize as project managers that setting ground rules can require a bit of a softer approach at first than just coming in like a bulldozer and saying, “Yes, this is how it is going to be.”

Start and End on time

I provided the caveat to this in the introduction, which is that you as a project manager aren’t going to be able to start a meeting involving the CEO or other high level leaders without them or other key participants present (without having to deal with serious blowback). However, within my own teams, I always start meetings on time regardless of whether everyone is present at the start time. When you do that, a very interesting thing happens – People start to realize that if they come in 5 minutes late they have missed 5 minutes of valuable information as opposed to missing 5 minutes of idle conversation that happened while waiting for people to show up. In order to avoid that experience, people adapt and realize that they need to show up on time. Another key reason for this is that it shows all of the team members that you respect their time and are in control of the situation. You realize as a project manager that they are a valuable member of the team and 10 minutes of wasting time waiting for people to show up to a meeting is 10 minutes that they could be getting project tasks done. In today’s corporate culture where many people are running from meeting to meeting, ending on time is absolutely critical. This may require having people take technical or problem solving conversations outside of the meeting as I mentioned above regarding ground rules. This may seem like a fairly simple item when it comes to effective meeting management, but it is one that is easier said than done, but still very important to accomplish.

Invite the right people

A couple of years ago, I was asked to put together a meeting with a senior IT leader regarding a technical issue a couple of the team members were running into so that we could ask his group to assist with it. Upon entering the meeting, the senior leader lamented the fact that he felt the meeting was not necessary and way too many people were invited. He proceeded to lament that fact every 5 minutes for the entire 30 minute meeting. Attempts to refocus the meeting on the original goal were unsuccessful and the meeting was really ineffective for everyone involved. This is an extreme example of the importance of inviting the right people, but the point shouldn’t be underestimated. If people feel that the meeting is a waste of their time based on attending once or twice, they aren’t going to prioritize it and may not show up. As project managers, we need to be mindful of the fact that people’s time is valuable and need to make sure we invite the right people to the meeting. If we aren’t inviting the right people, the meeting won’t be effective and people will leave frustrated rather than focusing on the project work at hand.

Identify next steps/action items

At the end of the meeting, I always take a minute to make sure everyone is clear on what the next steps are. For instance, I will say, “Okay, just to recap so we are all on the same page, I have the following 2 action items. Tim will get us more details on the deployment status for the Finance Team by tomorrow. Gary will follow-up with us by tomorrow on that networking risk we discussed.” You will notice that I not only mentioned the task, but I also mentioned the due date. That’s key for a lot of reasons. First, you are setting expectations which is the first step towards accountability. Second, you can enter that into the project management software and track to it. Third, it should be part of the meeting notes that are sent out. I normally have a section for the meeting notes and a section for action items/next steps. It’s not likely that every attendee is going to remember their action items that were discussed 30 minutes prior so as part of your meeting management process, you should budget 1-2 minutes at the end to recap all of these items and then include them in the meeting notes.

Send out meeting notes in a timely fashion to confirm and document everything

Over the last few years, I have worked on a few large projects that have involved external vendors that had their own project managers who were in more a lead role than I was since their company was doing the lion’s share of the work. In one of these cases, I was consistently amazed at how meeting notes would come out 2-3 days after the meeting. At that point, the purpose of sending those meetings notes is really lost. First, that is 3 days that action items from the meeting are potentially (I would argue it is highly probable) not being worked on when they should be worked on unless the person assigned that task is pro-active about it. Second, it is so far past the meeting that the confirmation of understanding purpose those meeting notes serve is diminished if not completely lost. Third, people who couldn’t attend the meeting, but are key parts to the team are even further behind on what they missed during the meeting. Lastly, I can’t tell you how many times I have had someone ask about project information that they believe wasn’t discussed or accounted for. In many of those cases, I have been able to go back to meeting notes, sent emails, or the project management software tool, and point out exactly where that information was located. It doesn’t help get a task done that might have been missed, but if you are pro-active it can help to get things back on track in a more timely fashion. If you’ve read my other posts, you know that I believe everything should be housed in project management software even if you have to integrate something like Dropbox into your project management software to accomplish that.

(Bonus tip) Give people fair warning if the meeting is a videoconference meeting.

If you are running a meeting virtually and are using videoconference software, let people know that the meeting will be a videoconference meeting. At a time when a lot of people are working from home, people may feel uncomfortable joining a videoconference if they are in jeans and a t-shirt versus in regular work gear. This isn’t a point that many people thinking about when it comes to meeting management and running effective meetings, but I can tell you from experience that people will definitely be caught off guard without fair warning of a videoconference meeting.

In conclusion, running effective meetings is really important in today’s corporate culture where everyone’s time is limited and many people are already near 100% fully allocated in terms of their workload. With that being said, it is not nearly as easy as many posts make it seem. However, as project managers we need to endeavor to do our best to make the meetings we organize effective, efficient, and valuable. The 9 keys above have helped me to improve my meeting management skills in running effective meetings and hopefully you will find them valuable as well.