Host - Pat Sweet: Hey everyone, pat sweet here. If you're like most of the folks who listen to this show, you're an engineering leader who is busy and probably not just a little busy, but extremely busy, like working overtime on a regular basis, hardly getting enough sleep, not getting the exercise you want. Work is just nuts. So if this describes you, you're in very good company and it's for that reason that I've put together a free guide, which I've what I think is very cleverly called finding the sixth day. And engineer's quick guide to making more time now. And it answers that call. It provides five practical, actionable steps that you can take very quickly to create that sixth day that you wish you actually had the run of a workweek. And here's the best part. You don't actually have to work the weekend to find that six day, that time is sitting there available for you to do important work, to do good work. And with this guide, my hope is that I can help you find that quickly. So again, that's finding the six day an engineer's quick guide to making more time. Now it's absolutely free and you can download it today@engineeringandleadership.com slash sixth day that's engineering and leadership.com/six T H day. This is the engineering and leadership podcast with pat sweet episode 40.

Host - Pat Sweet: Welcome to the engineering and leadership podcast. The show dedicated to helping engineers thrive today. I share my very best tips, tricks and advice on how to make your meetings shorter, more productive and less painful.

Host - Pat Sweet: Hi everyone. And welcome to the show. I of course, and pat sweet and as always, I'm always very excited about the show today. Always lots of really cool stuff to share. And here we are 40 episodes in just a few away from half century, which should be a major milestone for me and the show very, very exciting stuff. And today, today we have a topic that I think is incredibly important and there's probably nothing that elicits such deep visceral dread and drive such fear into even the most hardened of engineers. And that topic is meetings. The only thing that can even come close to meetings in terms of its its sheer fear factor would probably be email. There's another four letter word for engineers everywhere. And today I'm going to make the case that not only are meetings important, they can be fun too.

Host - Pat Sweet: They can be better run. There is such a thing as a good productive meeting. And today I hope to share some of my best advice on how to make that happen. But first, before we get into the good stuff, there are two public service announcements that I wanted to share with you. The first is about an upcoming webinar that I'll be hosting on October 26th called inbox detox. And the, the whole idea is to present the process that I use to stay on top of my inbox. As we all know, email is a major drain on our our time, our energy, our productivity but with a few simple tweaks to your workflow, if you even have a particular workflow, you can really dramatically cut down on the amount of time you spend in your inbox and get much, much more effective and efficient with your communications.

Host - Pat Sweet: So again, inbox detox that will be on October 26th and you can sign up for that for free@engineeringandleadership.com slash inbox, detox webinar. And the second thing that I wanted to mention is a contest that I've set up with, with my new friend, Peter Docker who, if you listened to our last episode, episode 39 on leading from the jump seat you would have heard from Peter and all about his new book. We've got a contest to give away a signed copy of the book. Peter has been very gracious in helping me out with that. So if you liked the episode and you'd like to read the book and hear more of Peter's ideas which I, I highly, highly encouraged. It's an excellent read. You can sign up for this contest just go to engineering and leadership.com/jump seat contest again, totally free. The draw's going to happen in a couple of days. So do go check that out. So that's the webinar@engineeringandleadership.com slash inbox, detox webinar, and the contest@engineeringleadership.com slash jump seat contest. All right now onto the main content for today.

Host - Pat Sweet: As many of you already know last summer I studied for and earned my project management professional designation. And one of the things that really stood out to me while studying was align in the project management body of knowledge, the PIM Bach that said that top project managers spend around 90% of their time on a project communicating. And one of the major tools of the trade. So to speak that that was highlighted throughout this book was meetings. In fact, 28 of the 49 processes that were listed in the PIM Bach highlighted meetings as a key tool of the trade. It shows up everywhere. And that got me thinking about meetings and, and, and how poorly run they are in general and how many meetings we have with the run of week. So I went and I did a little bit of research and I came up with some really interesting facts and figures that I just wanted to share to set the scene a little bit for today's episode and a 2014 article from Ted.

Host - Pat Sweet: There was an estimated 3 billion meetings happening each and every year. And today that that number is likely gone up quite a bit, especially with the advancement of remote working that same article suggested that over a third of our time spent in meetings is time wasted that nine out of 10 people report a daydreaming in meetings. And that 73% of people do other work during meetings and another study university of North Carolina, professor Stephen Rogel Berg explained at a 2019 Harvard business review article that while 79% of managers they surveyed believed their meetings were either extremely or very productive. Only 56% of managers said the same thing about meetings that other people organized. And yet another study revealed that 75% of the people surveyed had never had any formal training at all on how to run effective meetings. So let's recap all that. Let's, let's pull this all together.

Host - Pat Sweet: What we know is that meetings are ubiquitous. There's a lot of time wasted in meetings. There's a very low chance that you've been taught how to run or even participate in meetings. And there's a very high chance that you're not doing as good a job as you think you are. So on the one hand, this is, this is incredibly depressing to, to know that there's a problem. But to, to realize the extent to which bad meetings are crippling us as a profession, but it also represents an enormous opportunity for managers and organizations to improve how their teams run by improving meetings. You can improve productivity, you can improve morale. It's, it's this remarkable opportunity that the vast majority of people, the vast majority of organizations around the world have today. So with all that in mind, what I wanted to do is I wanted to run through a list of my lessons, learned some of my tips and tricks and advice, things that have worked for me in my own professional practice to run better, more productive, shorter, and even fun meetings.

Host - Pat Sweet: So here we go. The first piece of advice is to decide what kind of meeting you're having. And this sounds a little bit silly, but often when someone calls a meeting, they have this general sense that they have something that they need to talk about. They need to discuss, they need to sort something out with others, but that's not focused enough to really have a productive meeting. In general. There are four kinds of meetings, there's information sharing idea-generating decision-making or working sessions in information, sharing your thinking. Think more like a lecture, like one person has information. They want a large group of people to hear it all at the same time, in the same way. And if there are questions, they want the whole group to hear both the question and the answer for idea-generating think about, think about brainstorming, you're trying to generate ideas or options.

Host - Pat Sweet: The idea is to, to keep things broad, as opposed to narrow down into a particular focus. And that's what decision making is about that third type of meeting in decision-making, it's critical to know what decision you are trying to make, who has the authority to make that decision and who are the stakeholders involved who can help inform that authority to make a smart decision. You need all things in place for a decision to be made and for it to hold water, I don't know how many times I've been at quote-unquote decision making meetings, where it was unclear, who, who really had the right to make a decision. And if you don't know who can make a decision, you can't have a decision be made and, and hope for it to stick. The fourth of the four kinds of meetings is what I call a working session.

Host - Pat Sweet: This is where you want to get together with with other people and, and work in quick succession. Amongst the, the, the three previously mentioned kinds of meetings. You want to share information, generate ideas, and make decisions and iterate quickly among those things. And this is quite common in engineering work. You want to get together with maybe a couple other subject matter experts and do some high level design work, and you rely on the sharing of information, generating ideas and making decisions. So that that's really, really good, especially in early phase, early phase work. My point here is if you don't know what kind of meeting you're having, you don't really know what tool it is. You're trying to employ. It's like if I were to ask my six-year-old to go down to my work bench and grab a screwdriver, she could do it, but she wouldn't know what size, what kind, what the job was for.

Host - Pat Sweet: She would, she would successfully complete the task and it may still not be even remotely useful to me. So until I decide specifically, what tool is it that I need for this job calling a meeting, doesn't really make a lot of sense. So that's my first bit of advice decide on what kind of meeting you're having. The second bit of advice that I would give is once you've decided what kind of meeting you're trying to have, you need to decide whether you even really need a meeting at all. For example, if you're having a, an information sharing meeting that's, that's great in, in some circumstances, but not in others. So for example, if you're trying to share the same information to a group of people and you can't rely on everyone, you need to be there. Let's say you've got a large team or distributed team working over different time zones.

Host - Pat Sweet: Maybe an email or a video or a podcast or something. Something asynchronous is a better choice because that will allow you to get that same message across a broader cross section of the people you're trying to target. Maybe a meeting is not the right tools for the job. Maybe if you're trying to make a decision, you could do that. Asynchronously. Maybe you could send out the request for feedback from a group. If you are the authority and you get to make a decision, you have that, right. Maybe all you need is input or feedback from others. And maybe that doesn't require a spot in everyone's calendar. That might actually be the, the quickest, the most efficient way to approach things. So all this to say is we're very comfortable in, in some engineering cultures, calling meetings to solve all information related and organization related problems, where there are other tools at our disposal.

Host - Pat Sweet: And one of the best ways to, to have a great meeting is to not have that meeting at all. Then that avoids the, the, the pain and suffering associated with a meeting that didn't have to be a meeting. And I think if you looked at your calendar right now, you would find a number of candidates for meetings that maybe you're being asked to attend, or you're organizing yourself that just plain don't have to be there, that there are other more effective, more efficient ways of doing things. The third bit of advice that I'd like to give today is to have a plan to, to really understand how things are going to progress through the meeting and what a good outcome looks like. And again, if you refer back to point, number one, if you understand the kind of meeting you're trying to have, you probably have a good idea for what a good outcome is.

Host - Pat Sweet: So you've got to know your goal. So what the outcome would be, and what would indicate success is some sort of definition of done. For example, if you're trying to make a decision, a good outcome would be the decision was made to do X, to be able to write that down, put it in front of everyone and everyone nod and say, yes, that's right. That is what we agreed to. Once you have a plan, you need to write it down. You need to be able to go into a meeting, knowing in, in very concrete terms, what you're trying to accomplish. Finally, once you know, your goal, it's documented, you need to prepare your tools and space. And this is everything from setting up the zoom meeting, or, you know, someday in the future, we'll be getting together again, physically in conference rooms, making sure that if you need a whiteboard that it's there and there are markers there, and there's an eraser there, just having all that prepared ahead of time and understanding the flow of the meeting can help improve things dramatically.

Host - Pat Sweet: And often it doesn't take that long, but if you catch a little issues upfront, rather than only discovering it, once everyone's in the room, you can, you can save a lot of people a lot of time and get things started off on the right fund. The fourth thing that I want to suggest is to get exactly the right people in the room, or they're empowered delegates. What I mean by that is often there's this, this tendency to over invite people so that you can quote unquote, make sure that all voices are heard, but, but there's a problem with this in, in some situations, when you invite a larger cross section of people than what you really need. And again, I'd go back to 0.1, where you've got to decide what it is you're actually trying to do. What kind of meeting are you having? If you just invite everyone in their dog, you introduce the risk that people who aren't really truly stakeholders in a particular situation, hog the floor, or they're, they're throwing things in that are a little bit off topic.

Host - Pat Sweet: And it gets to be very difficult to manage a room filled with people who ought not be there in the first place. Once you've invited them, that they have the right to be there. So I think it's very, very important to understand who your stakeholders are, who has a legitimate interest or legitimate feedback to provide, make sure that those people are there. But, but leave it at that really keep yourself tight, keep yourself focused. And I mentioned just a moment ago that there's, there's one exception is that if the people you need, aren't available, you need they're empowered delegates. And this is a turn of phrase that a board from a mentor of mine and empower delegate is someone who can act in the stead of the person who can't be there. And what that means is their job is not to take information back to the person you originally invited.

Host - Pat Sweet: Their job is to make the decision as though they were the person there's no going back. There's no. Oh, well, I'll get back to you after I discuss it. If you rely on people being shuttles to go back and forth between the meeting and the person who should have been at the meeting, but couldn't attend because they're invited to eight other meetings, it's going to bog down productivity. It really creates a lot of really highly paid gophers, who frankly, that's, that's not a fun job to have. It's probably not a good use of their skills. Take the opportunity to empower delegates, to really act with the authority of the person who sent them. If you can do that. Yeah. Sometimes decisions will get made. Sometimes feedback. Won't be exactly what the other other person would have provided. And guess what? That's okay. That's not the end of the world.

Host - Pat Sweet: This is how efficient organizations work. They do not rely on single individuals who are the linchpin of particular processes or programs or products you need in order to run an efficient organization, to have delegates, to have backups, to have deputies who really can act as your representative. That's critical. The fifth thing that I wanted to suggest is to have a way of making decisions already established. One of the things that I find is, is frustrating in a number of meetings is let let's say, let's say that you know, that you have gathered people together to make a decision. You need to know what that governance process looks like before anyone shows up in the room. You need to know whether or not your goal is a 100% consensus, or is it simple majority, or is it that a single person just gets to make that call with authority, but just wanted input from other people in case they were overlooking something.

Host - Pat Sweet: These are all very different ways of making a decision. They're all legitimate, but you need to know as the chair of that meeting and the other people need to know how that's going to play out so that people prepare accordingly, you know, to, to need to come to a decision yourself and vote on something, demands a very different level of involvement than if your job is simply to provide feedback to the decision maker, based on your area of expertise. Those are two very different jobs. Two very different asks of the people who are being invited to a meeting. And then, like I said earlier, you, you need to be able to define success. So if, if success for a meeting is to make a decision on situation X, you need to be able to say with hand on heart, that, yeah, we executed this decision-making process.

Host - Pat Sweet: This is how we operate as an organization. This is how we operate as a team. And everyone is behind us. Not everyone necessarily has to agree with the decision, but it is important for everyone to align with the decision that was made. And it's much easier to do that when everyone believes in the process and that the right approach was taken, even if the ultimate conclusion differs from what a given individual would have decided. So this is very important. And this is something that most organizations really struggle with, frankly, is, is how do we know that a decision is real, number six, you need to have roles assigned for a meeting. And what I mean by this is, and this is how I run all of my meetings. There are a few different roles that need to be filled for each meeting. That doesn't necessarily mean that each role needs to be a different person, but someone needs to wear each of these hats.

Host - Pat Sweet: Someone needs to be the chair of the meeting. Someone needs to take minutes. Someone needs to keep an eye on the time, and then you need participants in the meeting. One of the things that I do is when I'm chairing a meeting. So I'm the one in charge of the agenda on the one in charge of getting the group to a point where the meeting was a success that demands a lot of time and attention. And I don't like to pause the meeting to make sure that I'm keeping up with minutes, but I also want to make sure that the record keeping is really good so that we can look back on the meeting and understand what was discussed, what decisions were made and what happened. So I will often invite other members of the team to come in and help me out with a meeting by taking minutes or watching the clock to make sure we stay on track.

Host - Pat Sweet: And we don't run out of time for things that are on the agenda. This is a really good opportunity. I find, especially for new members of the team for co-op students, for example, people to come in and get exposed to a higher level discussions or discussions involving a cross section of different teams. Yeah, th taking minutes is not a lot of fun, but if you can make it an opportunity to learn and grow and be exposed to more of the organization, it really can be win-win. And I've had a lot of success with with that in the past. The real take home message here is, is not that there's one right way to assign these roles so much as it's important that you know, who is going to do each of these jobs, because if you don't assign someone responsibility for, for really chairing the meeting and, and normally you would assign that to yourself.

Host - Pat Sweet: But if you don't take ownership for that meetings can just kind of sit there or spiral without any real movement toward a conclusion. Someone needs to take charge and lead a group of people in a meeting. And like I said, that's a lot of work. So you need to know upfront who else is going to be responsible for it, or maybe it is you, but who's going to be responsible for taking care of these other important jobs. The next bit of advice is that it's important to understand the rules of engagement. And one of the things that I highlighted earlier was this idea that it's important to know how decisions will be made. And that, that to me, is so important that it deserves its own its own treatment. But in this next bit of advice, there are a number of other things that you also need to think about how will the meeting flow?

Host - Pat Sweet: What rules, what tools do you have in place to, to help the group operate efficiently? One example of this. And I love this. I only learned this within the last couple of years is, is the term Elmo, which stands for enough, let's move on. And one of the things that we do as a group is we have given people permission, we have taught them this acronym and given them permission to raise their hand and say, Elmo, if they feel like we've, we've been flogging a dead horse for, for 20 minutes, if we really feel like the conversation has, has met its natural end, there's really nothing more to table or discuss it's okay for someone to raise their hand and say Elmo. And it's the chair's job to say, okay, thank you. So, and so I appreciate where you're coming from. What does a group think?

Host - Pat Sweet: Are we ready to move on with this? And it's a, it's a non-threatening way of, of expressing something that probably other people are thinking already without cutting someone off or cutting them down or, or getting into it with anyone, everyone gets it. And that's, it's real power is it's become a cultural norm. So it really facilitates forward motion in a meeting, a few other things that you may want to consider. How do you want to, how do you want to handle interruptions? Is that okay? You know, for, for some working sessions, maybe you want it to be fast. You want it to be quick. You want ideas to come out quickly and, and the occasional interruption, isn't a big deal. In other situations, it would absolutely not be productive and would be considered quite rude. Maybe you want to set up a way to, if you have something to say, you know, raise your hand or, or do or do something, and then it could be the chair's job to bring people into the fold.

Host - Pat Sweet: Or maybe you want to set a time limit on how long someone can can talk. Maybe there's a 92nd limit when you have something to say, express it and then stop and let the chair move the conversation along and bring other people in. Maybe you want to set up some sort of norm for voting, you know, maybe you want to do secret ballot so that people don't influence one another with respect to, to what they want to say. This is one of the big ideas that came out of leadership is language with David. Marquet is there's a lot of influencing going on when someone publicly takes aside or states a position that can have a lot of influence on the group. So maybe you want to stay away from that and set up a practice where votes are cast quietly so that you can then discuss it as a group when there's divergence.

Host - Pat Sweet: One of the other things that I really like to use is the it's the use of a parking lot and what the parking lot is. It's literally just a section in either a Microsoft one note or a whiteboard or flip chart paper that is used to capture ideas or topics of discussion or something that does need to be talked about, but really doesn't fit with the meeting that we're having right now. So if someone comes up with a good idea or concern, but it's a little bit off topic, it doesn't really fit with what we were trying to do here, which by the way, you should know, because you've decided what your purpose is. You've got a plan. It should be very clear when something veers outside of the scope of what you're trying to discuss, you can add it to the parking lot. And that's a way to acknowledge what the participant is saying, what they're bringing up and, and providing that person with assurance that you're taking them seriously and not just shutting them down and say, no, tad like go away.

Host - Pat Sweet: That's that's, you know, all of a sudden you you've, you've created some resentment and a person that you've invited to a meeting that you are trying to get them to engage. So the use of a parking lot is, is a way to respect the, the ideas and capture it. And then you've got to make sure to actually address those items in the parking lot, in a future meeting a dedicated session, make sure that the right people are there. That's a, that's a very, it's a simple but very powerful tool. Finally, the eighth thing that I wanted to share in terms of advice on running really, really good meetings is the power of doing something different for different kinds of meetings, shaking things up. This keeps people incredibly engaged. It keeps them interested, keeps them thinking and active. If every single meeting looks and feels the same way, it's going to be very easy for people to slip into meeting comas.

Host - Pat Sweet: Frankly, if every meeting feels the same way, there's nothing to pull you in and engage you. And frankly, you need different tools, different plans, different approaches for different kinds of meetings. So why would you hold them the same way with the same tools in the same place? You know, if you were hoping to generate ideas with a small group, there's no reason you couldn't do that well out for a walk in a local park that doesn't have to be in a conference room. It doesn't have to be the kitchenette or yet another zoom meeting. If you can physically be together and be outside and walk that might, that might generate ideas that you wouldn't get. Otherwise, maybe there are games you can play. Maybe you can do something off-site just to separate yourself from the day to day. Anything you can do to we call it pattern interrupts to, to really disrupt the way people kind of coast through their Workday.

Host - Pat Sweet: The better, no, of course you don't, you don't change something just for the sake of it. You try to, to change things and shake things up in ways that help bring you closer to your goals. But there's, there's an awful lot of power in, in trying to do things a little bit differently. The point here is simply that if you set up and run every meeting the same way, it'll be very, very tempting to, for people to behave in the same way. And that's not what you want because each meeting ought to have its own goal, its own purpose and its own approach. So just to recap, those ideas, I threw eight of them at you today first was to decide what kind of meeting you're having second to decide whether you even need a meeting in the first place. Next was to have a plan.

Host - Pat Sweet: Fourth was to get exactly the right people in the room or their empowered delegates. Next, we talked about having a specific way of making a decision and knowing what that way is sixth was having roles assigned seventh, establishing those rules of engagement and those little tools, those little tricks that are culturally accepted, and finally try doing something different for different kinds of meetings. Meetings are absolutely a fact of organizational life. And the fact that so few of us have ever been trained to run excellent meetings is frankly, a bit of a shock. We all know they're needed and we all know that they're mostly painful and wasteful. So if you can follow even a few of the ideas we talked about today, you and your team will absolutely be more engaged, more efficient and more effective in your work. So I hope that can be a help to you. If you use any of the strategies that we talked about today, I would absolutely love to hear about it. Hit me up on LinkedIn or on Twitter at NG leader. And I'll put links to both those handles in the show notes that's engineering and leadership.com/episode 40. Next up we have the engineering and leadership mailbag.

Host - Pat Sweet: Well, my friends, you know how this works, this is the part of the show where I read your messages and answer your questions. I promise to read absolutely everything you send me. And I promise to read my favorites right here in the podcast. Last week I asked some of my LinkedIn followers what their biggest misconception was about leadership before they actually started leading a team and a couple of friends of the show pitch their ideas Jeff Perry from more than engineering.com. And now the host of the engineering career coach podcast. Great guy, a fantastic collaborator. His answer was, was pretty funny. His answer was he had the misconception that he was already good at leading before he ever actually had to lead a team. And I think that's something a lot of a lot of first-time leaders and managers can relate to. They really did think they were going to be great.

Host - Pat Sweet: And then the reality of the role hit them like a ton of bricks. It, it really is quite, quite shocking to, to be to be a first-time leader. It's, it's very eyeopening and you learn a lot, not just about other people, but about yourself as well. So I, I realized that Jeff wrote that in jest, but I, I do, I do think that that's a gem of a comment there. And Neil Thompson from teach the geek wrote to say that leaders have to deal with conflict and just realizing how much conflict there is in the workplace that you, you don't see when you're not in a leadership role is quite surprising. And that and I know that was absolutely the experience for me as well. You don't realize sometimes, particularly as a high performing person, if, if you are getting into leadership management view, you've probably done well as an individual contributor and you might not realize the, the conflict and the issues that exist in other pockets of the organization.

Host - Pat Sweet: And it absolutely is your problem. It's your responsibility to help lead a team through conflict and productively through conflict. And one of the things that you've probably heard me say on the show before is conflict is not inherently bad. It's how conflict gets managed that that can make it good or bad. So I really appreciated Neil's comment there and last but not least Tigo commented on the last episode with Peter Docker episode 39, he said, I love the insights of this episode in particular. Thanks Patrick sweeten, Peter Docker. Just need to get my hands on that book now. And I thought that was a great way to remind everyone to go check out the book, check out the contest engineering and leadership.com/jumpseat contest. And if you don't win there, there can only be one winner, unfortunately for this contest do go out and pick up the book. It depending where you live in the world, it's either out right now or imminently. So do check the show notes for a link to that. Thanks again, to all those who reached out. If you'd like to chat or leave a comment, please do find me on LinkedIn or Twitter or leave a comment at the bottom of the show notes

Host - Pat Sweet: That my friends is all the time we have for the show today. I will be back very soon with our next episode. If you enjoyed the show and you haven't already subscribed, please do so. And while you're there, please leave an honest review that helps me to figure out how I can make the show even better and helps others find the show as well. And don't forget one last reminder, upcoming webinar on October 26th, inbox detox, and that's at engineering and leadership.com/inbox, detox webinar, and check out that contest to pick up a signed copy of Peter Docker's new book leading from the jump seat. Again, engineering and leadership.com/jump seat contest for more information and links to the resources mentioned here today. Just go to the show notes@engineeringandleadership.com slash episode 40 until next time, this is pat sweet reminding you that if you're going to be anything, be excellent.

Host - Pat Sweet: You've been listening to the engineering and leadership podcast with pat sweet. If you'd like to learn more, go to engineering and leadership.com where you'll find more free articles, podcasts, and downloads to help engineers thrive. That's engineering and leadership.com.