The Manager's Handbook

11Seven Steps to Running a Great Meeting

Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.

—Albert Einstein

The meeting started late and went over the scheduled time. Attendees were updated on events that had already occurred. Speakers talked too long and repeated themselves in unstructured presentations. Those on video tried to surreptitiously knock off some email while trying to appear fully present. No forward‐facing decisions were made. “Meetings are broken,” Amy Bonsall writes in the Harvard Business Review, and they are only getting worse since COVID‐19:¹

Something happened when work moved online in 2020 and opening up the office hasn't fixed it. Every interaction with colleagues became a video call, and our days became a game of transactional Tetris: Where can I slot in this or that meeting? [and] the Tetris has gotten more complex.

In a survey conducted by the consulting firm Bain & Company,² executives spent 23 hours a week in meetings, and more than 50% of those meetings were viewed as “ineffective” or “very ineffective.”³ Even before the pandemic, things were worsening, as meeting time had increased by more than 10 hours per week.⁴ This is because shared calendars and scheduling tools make it easier to create a meeting and include a larger list of attendees. Today's ubiquitous use of video conferencing and cell phones means we now have few logistical constraints to convening a meeting.

It does not ...