I spend a majority of my time in meetings as a manager (and even in the past as a senior IC). Like Jack Donaghy, I aspire to be featured in Meeting Magazine. Running effective meetings is not just a point of personal pride—I deliver most of my impact by pushing the whole group forward. Ensuring everyone is aligned around a single direction is my top priority; building support for that direction must be conducted in the open to establish procedural justice. Despite their necessity and prevalence, I attend a huge number of meetings that are duds.

Hosting meetings with 3 or more people is a little bit of a dark art. Unlike a 1-on-1, larger group settings don't benefit from spontaneity. The group gets side tracked, talks in circles, and by the end of the meeting no one is sure what was accomplished. The fix is structure. As the host, you establish structure by deciding in advance the topics of the meeting, the desired outcomes for each of those topics, and the techniques you will use to achieve those outcomes. I'm avoiding calling this an agenda because just having an ordered list of discussion topics is not enough; you need all three elements to get the most out of a large meeting.

This involves a certain amount of regimentation. Structured meetings won't feel very natural, and you'll lose a good dose of socialization. You may feel reluctant to take charge with a group of your peers, or as is often the case with larger meetings: members of your management chain. If your team has a more egalitarian culture, the whole idea of structure will seem out of place...like trying to use parliamentary procedure to pick a dinner spot with friends. I promise it's not that awkward, and your meeting participants will thank you for taking the lead. To understand why, try to get in the head of someone invited to your meeting:

• They're trying to be helpful. They know you invited them for a reason and want to live up to your expectations...how do you make it obvious what you want from them?
• They're trying to perform. With a large group present, meeting participants will feel pressure to put their best foot forward...how can you help them avoid embarrassment?

Structure is the way you can help participants perform, while hopefully getting something done yourself at the same time!

Topics

Start by figuring out what you want to address in the meeting e.g. "annual employee survey results." While it is possible to cover multiple topics in a single sitting, you will get better participation if you stick to one item. Assume your participants will need to spend some time preparing for the meeting—with fewer topics to prepare, they will come ready to make higher-quality contributions.

Consider whether or not the topic requires a significant amount of context, or requires participants to wade into a lot of technical details. If so, provide pre-work in the form of references. You may end up spending half of the meeting just getting everyone up to speed anyways.

Standing staff meetings usually have multiple topics that need immediate action, so you won't be able to uphold the single-topic recommendation in all situations. That's just fine, it simply makes the outcomes and techniques even more important.

Outcomes

With your topic(s) selected, the next step is to determine your desired outcome. In my experience most meeting topics will fit into 1 of 6 categories:

1. Sharing information e.g. presenting annual employee survey results and bringing new-joiners up to speed on results from previous years.
2. Collective brainstorming e.g. coming up with different options for addressing the problems identified in survey responses.
3. Providing input e.g. obtaining opinions and rationale on a proposed program for increasing employee engagement.
4. Making decisions e.g. finalizing the actions each member of the management team will take as part of the new engagement program.
5. Building capacity e.g. training everyone on the basics of analyzing survey results with Jupyter so they can form their own conclusions and contribute to a later collective brainstorming meeting.
6. Building community e.g. celebrate improvements from last year's results with a team social.

It is also possible to move through multiple outcomes in a single meeting i.e. sharing a new problem, brainstorming how to solve it, and deciding on a course of action. The key thing is to call out the distinct phases to the conversation; preventing attendees from getting ahead of themselves, making room for everyone to contribute, and ensuring you leave the meeting with something accomplished even if not all outcomes were reached. It's better to leave with the space of possible solutions mapped out, then to end with budding conflict because some participants were lobbying for a course of action before everyone was able to contribute their ideas.

Muddled outcomes are the reason behind the post-meeting scurry of activity where "back-room" deals are made and people start talking behind each others' backs: it all boils down to lack of confidence in the process and your ability to lead the group to the best possible outcome.

Techniques

Now that you have a list of topics, and each topic mapped to the desired outcomes, you have 80% of the recipe for a successful meeting. If you stop here then you're already going to have a significantly more effective and enjoyable meeting for everyone involved. To get the final 20%, you must map the desired outcomes to techniques suited for achieving those results.

The number of different techniques is endless, and there is ample room for creativity. The right choice will depend on environmental factors so I won't attempt to create a master-list of techniques, but instead name a few per outcome I have used successfully.

• Sharing information: presentations and reports (do you really need a meeting for this?), "ask the expert" Q&A
• Collective brainstorming, split into pairs, lean coffee, drawing flowcharts i.e. process/value stream/workflow mapping,
• Providing input: dot voting, silent meetings, fishbowl meetings
• Making decisions: gradients of agreement, straw-man proposals, setting decision-making rules
• Building capacity: ADEPT model, hands-on self-directed learning i.e. codelabs
• Building community: kudos, lightning talks

Picking a technique avoids opening a topic, just to have the only directive be "now... discuss!" Lacking any guidance, participants aren't sure how to contribute, and you're basically handing control of the meeting to the dominant personalities in the room—squelching the slow-thinkers (AKA System 2) in the room.

Putting it all together: The Structured Meeting

Share the topics, outcomes, and techniques in advance; either via a formal agenda or just jotting a note in the meeting invite. Once you're in the room, open each topic by explaining the desired outcome and the basic approach the group will take to get there. As the meeting progresses, use the structure to keep participants on topic and from getting lost in the weeds. You'll be empowered to call people out directly as the facilitator of a structured meeting because everyone knows what is expected at a given moment.

Everyone will leave the meeting recharged, rather than cringing from the awkwardness. Back-channeling will decline as the group becomes more confidant in collective decision making. For people who hate the spotlight, a structured meeting enables them to contribute without drawing extra attention to themselves.

Not every meeting should be structured (think: 1-on-1's, team-building events, etc) but when assembling large groups, structure is a sure-fire way to ensure you get what you need out of the meeting, and the participants feel you have honored their time.