What startups should know about conducting a meeting

A really simple, easy thing to do. Invite a bunch of people and talk about things to do. Thats the whole purpose and value of a meeting…

A really simple, easy thing to do. Invite a bunch of people and talk about things to do. Thats the whole purpose and value of a meeting. Which people, what to discuss and who does what at the end of the meeting are all important. During my 8 years at Intel, I held three different roles, worked with nearly 300 people and participated and conducted meetings sometimes with 40–50 stakeholders in 3 different countries and three different timezones. Together, we clarified, set and accomplished goals and began and ended every meeting on time taking away what we called “ARs” or Actions Required. When I talk to much younger companies and startups, I realize that they could benefit hugely from this valuable lesson I learnt from the Andy Grove Leadership school. When you are a lean mean startup of around 10–20 people, things are okay. You are scrappy, everyone does everyone’s job. And its okay to pull someone aside and have a quick chat, and get things done. But as most startups scale, the business of conducting a meeting is serious, and as I explain further, tremendously beneficial.

Why are meetings necessary?

I have only one answer. Communication. As startups scale, communication becomes the single defining thread of how well the whole company can move together cohesively. Is one team talking to the next? Are managers, assuming there are managers, talking to their teams, not just about day to day stuff, but about where the company is headed. Some companies use a top-down approach, others are more egalitarian where almost everyone is an equal stakeholder and very few others are bottom up. Structure and hierarchy are paramount as they enable communication and “pass-downs”. At Intel, we followed a top-down approach and we managed by objectives — MBOs. I am not saying, it was perfect, but it gave us a clear goal on how we conducted ourselves. Every meeting became one step closer to achieving our objective and every small objective helped achieve a big one, and big ones helped achieve bigger ones.

The four Ws of conducting a good meeting

I want to preface this entire discussion that first ask if this meeting is necessary. Only have meetings that are not superfluous and a waste of people’s times. You have very limited cachet. You waste their time once, you start losing credibility immediately. Tread carefully here. Assuming the answer to the question is yes, the four Ws — who, what, where, why and when will help conductive productive meetings.

Who

Who gets invited to a meeting? This is determined by the topic of the meeting. The one question to ask is, is every invited stakeholder important for this discussion. Are some people only being present to assert their importance, do they have something to contribute in terms of knowledge or actions to be done after the meeting is finished. If not, do not invite that person. Another case is when you have invited a person, and they have two direct reports that only need to contribute a 5 min update, let them route it through that one person. There is no reason all 3 people need to be present. Remember, an 18 person meeting is not very productive, some people are not contributing and by increasing the number of people in a room, others who need to speak up may become intimidated or overwhelmed. If you start exceeding 6–7 people in a meeting, ask yourself if you could benefit from introducing some hierarchy into your organization.

What

I cannot emphasize this enough. What is very important. Have a pre-set agenda and be clear about the scope of the discussion. If its an open-ended discussion be respectful of people’s times. Unless it is an open-ended brainstorming session any meeting over 60 min long will have diminishing marginal returns. This is different if you have flown out different stakeholders to a day long session about something. I strongly encourage folks, publishing an agenda with clear time limits established for certain topics. That way if someone has to get in and out of the meeting and can only stay for 15 min, make their presence and time well-spent. You want hardworking, productive employees who can use their time wisely.

Where

Have a clear location. Reserve a room, set up a conference call. Ensure your logistics work. This can be particularly important if you have a high level executive or leader of your company or an external customer or partner in the meeting. Their time is precious. Value it. Make sure that things work. There is nothing more frustrating when calls get dropped, lines arent clear and people are scrambling last minute to find a conference room. The best way to ensure is for the leader of the meeting to be 5 min ahead of the call and not running late. This helps with identifying any technical issues and logistical issues.

When

When scheduling a meeting, its not always possible to all the stakeholders in a room together. In this case, optimize for the most important stakeholders. If thats not possible, communicate with them to see if they can adjust their schedule for this important meeting. Other suggestions are, confer with them ahead of time to get their opinions or ask them to provide alternatives to represent them in a meeting, send someone from their team or have other people speak for them.

Lastly

Make sure that minutes get taken, and ARs [Actions Required], get taken and published with owners and preferably deadlines. Your next meeting should start with a check on the previous meetings actions. This particular is all about accountability. If you cannot hold folks accountable, the entire purpose of the meeting is completely lost.


Meetings conducted with goals and accountability will help avoid redundancy and instill values of credibility in smaller companies. Engineering needs to talk to Product. Marketing needs to talk to Sales. Product needs to talk to everybody. As we set out to build small ideas into big companies, and big companies into even bigger companies, the art and simplicity of running a meeting is a valuable one.