📖 The Surprising Science of Meetings

How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance

2019. Steven Rogelberg

This is a quick read from a University of North Carolina Professor. Rogelberg offers practical tips for improving meetings, and while the book doesn’t really offer anything new, it does go to greater lengths to try and support it’s claims with academic research.

The core of the book is eight chapters, each dedicated to one key area for improvement.

The image in the mirror is likely wrong

We are poor judges of our own ability to lead good meetings. Get training, and get feedback.

Meat for 48 minutes

For how long has 60 minutes been the default meeting duration in offices? Rogelberg cites research to prove that meetings will just expand to fill up whatever time was allocated to them, whether they need it or not. Fight the urge to just schedule your next meeting for 60 minutes.

Agendas are a hollow crutch

Most research concludes that there is no positive relationship between good meetings and agendas. This is one area where I found Rogelberg’s suggestions to be a little more traditional and uninspiring. While he makes some suggestions for keeping agenda’s active, it still all seemed pretty traditional to me. Request agenda items days before the meeting, circulate the agenda in advance, etc. I am more interested in techniques such as on-the-fly agenda building, as advocated by Brian Robertson and Patrick Lencioni among others.

The bigger, the badder

Try get the number of participants down. No spectators, “meetings should be called to address issues that require genuine interaction among, and engagement with, attendees.” Rogelberg offers some good tips on how to keep meetings small without making people feel left out.

Don’t get too comfortable in that chair

Seating position tends to be important. So mix it up, or better yet scrap the chairs altogether and do standups, or walking meetings, or anything that keeps it fresh and stops people getting into a routine.

Deflate negative energy from the start

The meeting leader’s energy is crucial, so set the stage for constructive meeting by getting everyone off to a lively start.

No more talking!

Incorporate meeting techniques that allow for individual work and thinking, rather than always have one line of group conversation. Or maybe push it even further and have a silent meeting.

The folly of the remote call-in meeting

People who just dial in without video will inevitably end up multi-tasking. Just don’t do it. And if you have to, there are a bunch of simple tips to try and get the most out of them such as banning the mute button, or frequently directing questions at various people on the call.

There is also a quick pass on general good practices for facilitation such as active listening, conflict management, ensuring active participation, pushing for consensus, and time management.

As I said at the start, there is nothing ground breaking here. However considering you can fly through this book in a single sitting one evening, it is worth a read if you can get your hands on it easily.