Your Startup is Probably Wasting Time with Ineffective Meetings - How to Meet with Intention

This is a guest post from Jacob Drucker, a LongJump LP and cofounder of Supply Clinic, an online marketplace and procurement software for dental offices. Together with his brother/cofounder and their team, they scaled the company, and now partner with hundreds of suppliers to serve tens of thousands of dentists across the nation.

Startup founders have a million and one things to focus on. And good founders focus relentlessly on the most important ones, such as building product and securing customers.  As teams grow, though, they need to learn to work together and communicate effectively. And that inevitably means more meetings.

Meeting pains are something I experienced growing Supply Clinic from an idea to a company. Our leadership meetings initially consisted of team leads assembling, and… that’s about it. A time block and a conference room. Meetings would trail down rabbit holes, with the loudest team leads trying to troubleshoot whatever issue was top of mind. Needless to say, we needed to make a change.

A few years ago, we adopted a modified Level 10 framework, designed to take any meeting to a 10 out of 10. (The framework works better than the name is clever.) There’s no shortage of meeting methods- we could have opted for Harvard Business Review’s outline, the 7-Step Meeting Process,  a McKinsey method, or one of a thousand others. The big ‘unlock,’ though, was structuring our meetings in the first place. And we found the following steps to be the most impactful:

Define the goal of the meeting

No kidding, right? Many meetings have a dead simple goal. Demos are designed to solicit feedback, reviews offer actionable evaluations. Other meetings, however, are more complicated. When our team leads met, were we looking to set goals and targets? Troubleshoot problems? Get everybody on the same page? Or accomplish something else entirely?

Leadership meetings, 1:1s, and all-hands all need structure to avoid winding up somewhere between a waste of time and a verbal food fight. What’s the goal of a weekly leadership meeting? A monthly town hall? Specifying the goal (or goals) is the first step toward ensuring a meeting’s efficacy.

Get everyone on the same page early

One of the most undervalued purposes of meetings is to get team members on the same page. Particularly in the era of remote work, teammates may not know what’s going on inside a company.

To do this most effectively, ensure that every meeting attendee knows both the purpose of the meeting and the general performance of the company (relative to the meeting). Taking 5 minutes early in each meeting to review relevant performance metrics helps sync up team members and guide the discussion. After all, goal structures like Objectives and Key Results are only useful when they’re repeatedly communicated to team members. It’s hard to set a strategic direction if folks don’t even agree on whether the company is performing well. We take pains to ensure that everyone in leadership meetings, 1:1s, and even all-hands meetings have at least a high-level sense of company performance.

Consistently review to-dos

Most meetings are meant to turn ideas, problems, or plans into action. To that end, meetings should have to-do lists as part of the shared materials that are revie in each meeting.

Keeping a running to-do list is important for two reasons. First and foremost, it serves the function of the meeting by forcing something (plans, problems) into tangible action items. The format of a to-do list makes the next steps abundantly clear to all involved. Secondly, a shared to-do list creates accountability. Everyone involved knows exactly when the list will be revie (at the next meeting), and what tasks are assigned to them. The public review of a running to-do list generally provides enough incentive to keep team members focused on the outlined tasks, and to the aim that those tasks accomplish.

Maintain shared materials

Shared materials- agendas, meeting minutes, and to-dos- help keep everyone on the same page. But I found shared materials to be most helpful with minimizing wasted time outside of meetings.

I can’t even begin to calculate how much time I’ve spent asking, or being asked about, status updates on random deliverables, non-urgent questions, and thoughts about potential projects or features, just because they were top-of-mind.

At some point, I stopped asking and answering those questions altogether. I just ensured they were added to the shared materials for the appropriate upcoming meeting. We essentially removed the mini-meetings and between-meetings that can drain the life out of employees. The amount of time spent on distractions plummeted, and our meetings proved no less effective.

Know your culture

Every team is different, and it’s critical to understand how yours operates best. At Supply Clinic, we implemented a few guidelines that worked well for us, but might not work for a larger team, or one with different personalities.

• We have a very high tolerance for distracted participants. Just because everyone is in a room (real or virtual) together doesn’t mean that everyone is needed for the full meeting. When we talk about more technical problems, for instance, our customer team may not have much to contribute, and may be better off multitasking. Of course, nobody minds calling on them for input, even if it means repeating ourselves. Other companies move in the exact opposite direction, and require laptop-free meetings. For certain meetings and certain teams, that might be a better strategy.
• We have minimal defined roles in our leadership meetings. A meeting leader keeps the meeting on track, a notetaker acts as scribe, and… that’s it. Meetings, even leadership ones, aren’t necessarily led by the most senior person. This definitely won’t work for every team, but it works great for us.  
• We have a Friday afternoon standup for everyone in the company. It’s only 15 minutes, but it gives everyone the opportunity to speak up and get involved. Over time, it’s evolved - in its most recent iteration, every team lead speaks, providing a 30-second blurb on what they are working on, what’s going well, blockers, etc. Sometimes those leads gave people on their individual teams time to spotlight something they were working on or launched. It’s a great way to wrap up the week and give people space to talk about the work they are proud of.
• We end meetings early (if we fully covered our agenda). All the time. Nobody complains about an extra half hour.
• We strive to keep meetings positive. The meat of our leadership meetings is focused on identifying and solving problems. This can naturally be a bit of a downer, so we work hard to bookend meetings with good news and team successes.

Seek feedback and act on it

We pointedly ask for feedback on our meetings (at the end of leadership meetings, in 1:1s, and other times), and tweak them accordingly. Simply asking, “Rate this meeting on a 1-10 scale” and getting an explanation for any score below 8 can help steer the direction for future improvement.

Our meeting structures have evolved over time. Yours should too.

And that’s about it! Nobody likes spending excessive time in meetings, but with the right structure that fits your team, you can make them a bit more bearable, and a lot more effective.