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𝐑𝐮𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐄𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐌𝐞𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 👥👥
If you go into an academic or research career, chances are you’ll spend a lot of your time in meetings.
I am by no means an expert (and don’t always do a great job of following my own advice), but over the years I have refined my general approach to trying to run effective meetings, which is the topic of today’s #HackingAcademia video. Today’s focus is particularly on running project style meetings (this advice isn’t so much for PhD supervisor type meetings, for example).
Whilst much of this isn’t rocket science, it’s surprising how often you encounter ineptly run meetings in the research or academic environment. It’s not usually anyone’s fault: they just haven’t ever had any formal training or development, or haven’t felt like they could invest the time and energy to really work on it.
Nevertheless it’s incredibly important given the amount of time people spend in meetings, and also given the need for modern-day academics and researchers to, in general, be more effective at everything that they do.
It’s also not trivial to pull off in practice – in part because the theory of an effective meeting requires a lot of work on culture and expectation management behind the scenes. And getting into the groove with a new project team can take a substantial investment of deliberate time and effort early on.
Some of the key concept I cover include:
💬 preparedness ahead of the meeting
💬 meetings are not there for anyone to justify their existence or show how hard they worked
💬 explicit overviews and intended agendas from everyone are great
💬 trusted zone for free ranging constructive criticism and suggestions and freed of the need for anyone to be defensive or have the last word
💬 time-capped tangents and spontaneous discussions – don’t kill them, but be prepared to take offline
💬 regular recaps and contextualization – people are doing lots of different things and the reminder is helpful
💬 invest in communication development early on – especially the ability to switch between a five second summary all the way to a 20-minute detailed deep dive – this is not easy and takes some work
👉 A moderate and deliberate investment of time and energy in improving your art of running meetings will likely pay big dividends!
#meetings #research #academia #University #careers
Full Video Notes
If you go into a career in academia or some sort of academic research environment, you are almost certainly going to spend quite a bit of your time in meetings. One of the cruel ironies of academic and research careers is that you receive very little formal training in many of the things you end up doing every day. Instead, you tend to learn on the fly, and people rarely have the time, or take the time, to reflect on how they do these activities and how they could improve them.
One of the most obvious examples is running meetings, especially project management style meetings. These are the regular weekly meetings where you’re discussing a particular research project, often with industry or government partners. Most people never receive any formal training in how to run these meetings effectively.
If you move into the corporate world, there are companies, including one very well-known trillion-dollar technology company, that have highly structured and mandated approaches to meetings and meeting preparation. I don’t want to go that far and prescribe one rigid approach. Instead, I want to cover some of the principles that I think are most important for making meetings productive, making people actually want to attend them, and ensuring they genuinely help move projects forward.
The first principle is preparedness.
Within your team, you need to establish the expectation that everyone comes to the meeting at least reasonably prepared. If someone hasn’t had the opportunity to prepare, they should let everyone know beforehand so the group can decide whether to continue anyway or simply reschedule. It’s basic professional courtesy. It also avoids wasting half the meeting catching someone up on information they could have reviewed before the meeting even started.
Time management is absolutely critical if you want people to continue prioritising your meetings rather than dreading them.
There is almost never a good excuse for consistently running overtime. In practice this means cutting discussions short when necessary, condensing updates later in the meeting if you’re running behind, and recognising early enough that you’re going to exceed the allocated time so you can adjust accordingly. Otherwise, it’s always the people speaking last who end up rushing through their updates, which isn’t fair on them.
One thing I like to do at the beginning of a meeting is quickly go around the room and ask everyone for a very brief overview of the topics they intend to cover. This encourages people to think about the meeting beforehand, gives everyone a sense of the agenda, and often reveals opportunities to combine related discussions.
It’s important, however, that these agenda previews remain exactly that. They should consist of short, snappy summaries, not lengthy discussions that derail the meeting before it has even properly begun.
Another important principle is recognising what project meetings are actually for.
The purpose of the meeting is not for everyone to justify their existence or demonstrate how busy they’ve been over the previous week. It’s there to communicate the critical pieces of information, discuss important uncertainties, and share updates that are relevant to the broader team. It is not intended to be a detailed account of every activity every individual completed during the week.
Creating that environment requires culture. People need to feel that their leader fundamentally trusts them, believes they’re working hard, and isn’t expecting them to constantly prove their productivity. Instead, the meeting should focus on the interesting decisions, unexpected results, uncertainties, and forks in the road where discussion with the broader team genuinely adds value.
While it’s important to stay on schedule, you also don’t want to remove all the enjoyment from meetings.
A few minutes of collegial conversation about the weekend, sport, or other everyday topics can be valuable for team cohesion. Likewise, interesting tangents that emerge naturally during discussion shouldn’t necessarily be shut down immediately. The trick is recognising when they’re becoming too long. If a tangent can’t be resolved quickly, acknowledge that it’s worthwhile, park it for later, and continue with the meeting.
Another hallmark of a healthy meeting culture is psychological safety.
Everyone, regardless of seniority, should feel comfortable pointing out mistakes, offering constructive criticism, or questioning an assumption without worrying that they’ll be criticised for doing so. Equally important is ensuring that the recipient of that feedback doesn’t immediately become defensive.
The goal is an environment where everyone respects one another and where direct, constructive discussions can occur without descending into arguments or people feeling the need to defend every tiny detail of what they’ve done.
For projects where the leader has a much broader view than everyone else, it can sometimes be useful to begin with a brief overview of the larger issues affecting the project. That’s not necessary for every meeting, but it can help keep everyone aligned and also forces the project leader to remain engaged with the day-to-day progress of the project.
When individuals provide their updates, they shouldn’t attempt to list everything they accomplished during the previous week. Instead, they should briefly remind everyone of the broader activity they’re working on, recap what was discussed last week, explain what they tried during the week, what worked, what didn’t work, and what they plan to do next.
Importantly, people shouldn’t feel they need to justify why something didn’t work. Research rarely proceeds exactly as planned, and unsuccessful experiments are often just as valuable to discuss as successful ones.
Effective communication is one of the biggest enablers of good meetings.
Like many other professional skills, very few people receive formal training in how to communicate effectively in meetings. One of the most valuable communication skills is being able to explain the same piece of work at different levels of detail. Sometimes you need a five-second summary. Other times you need a twenty-minute deep dive. Being able to adjust your explanation spontaneously, depending on the audience and the available time, is an enormously valuable skill.
Like any skill, this takes practice. Early in a project it’s often worth deliberately investing some time in helping newer team members develop these communication skills, both through feedback and by modelling concise, effective communication yourself. That investment pays dividends over the life of the project.
Some organisations prefer formal minutes and carefully documented action items. That approach makes sense for committees and governance meetings. For regular project meetings, however, I generally prefer a lighter approach. Everyone should know what they’re responsible for, record their own actions where necessary, and report back the following week. Detailed formal minutes are often unnecessary, particularly for smaller project teams.
People often joke that the ideal number of meetings is zero, and it’s certainly possible to suffer from meeting overload. Nevertheless, meetings are an unavoidable part of many careers, particularly in academia and research.
The goal is to ensure that everyone attending genuinely believes they need to be there, that the meeting leader respects everyone’s time, that participants arrive prepared, and that the meeting consistently helps move the project forward. If you can achieve those things, people will continue to prioritise your meetings, and they’ll become a genuine enabler of productive, enjoyable, and successful research projects, rather than the chaotic, time-consuming disasters that so many meetings unfortunately become.