Nisha Pillai 00:00:06

How do leaders build trust and inspire their people? What skills and tools do they need, How can they develop them? And how about meetings - what role do they have? 

I’ve been talking to business leaders and scientists about what leaders can - and should - do to help their people feel trusted, with a sense of belonging and purpose. So, join me, Nisha Pillai, for another fascinating series of The Agenda - brought to you by Sherpany. 

My guest today is an internationally renowned meeting scientist. Yes, they exist. And his book, The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance, has been on numerous best of lists. Let me introduce you to Professor Steven Rogelberg from the University of North Carolina, in the US, who joins us now to tell us how to get the most out of meetings, of course.

Professor Rogelberg, welcome to The Agenda.

Prof. Dr. Steven Rogelberg 00:01:02

Thank you. It's really great to be here.

Nisha Pillai 00:01:05

Now, most of us love to hate meetings. Let's be truthful here, right? We spend so much time in them, yet we detest them. It's a bit of a paradox, isn't it?

Prof. Dr. Steven Rogelberg 00:01:15 

It is. I actually don't think people hate meetings as much as they say. What they hate are bad meetings, bad meetings or the problems it's not meetings in of itself. I mean, we need meetings, right? 

Meetings are where organisational democracy comes to life. I think employees, and people in general, recognise that gathering together is an opportunity to contribute, to positively affect work and also a great opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

Nisha Pillai 00:01:47:00

So what makes a meeting bad then? Why are so many of them bad?

Prof. Dr. Steven Rogelberg 00:01:50

Now, that is a great question. They are bad for so many reasons. It starts with the fact that organisations provide almost no training on how to effectively lead meetings, which is pretty jarring when you think about how many meetings we have. They're bad because what also exists is a blind spot that leaders think they are better at leading meetings than they really are.

And as a result, they're not motivated to make changes. And the final reason I think they're bad, related to the previous point, is that organisations do almost nothing to assess how their meetings are going. You could look at organisational engagement surveys. There's no content on meetings. So, leaders just don't have a clue. They're operating on the assumption they're doing a good job.

But clearly, based on the data, they're not doing as well as they think they are.

Nisha Pillai 00:02:47

That makes me chuckle, honestly. So what does the data say? What does the research say? Would it be better to scrap meetings altogether?

Prof. Dr. Steven Rogelberg 00:02:54 

Oh, gosh, no. The data show that well-run effective meetings have tremendously positive outcomes. A well-run meeting can yield better, higher quality decisions. They can yield more creative decisions, lots of positive outcomes. And I'm not even mentioning the fact that a well-run meeting can actually be a source of positive gain for the individual. 

So, we often think about meetings is being draining, and they absolutely can be. But a meeting run well actually leaves attendees feeling better about their supervisor, better about their teams. And actually some level of gratitude that their voice mattered.

Nisha Pillai 00:03:41

So, the prize is great indeed. But it seems to be rather elusive. So what are your three top tips then to business leaders and organisations on how to get the most out of meetings? I'm only going to allow you three, Professor Rogelberg.

Prof. Dr. Steven Rogelberg 00:03:55

Oh, dear. That's hard. That's hard to give you just three given I wrote a whole book about it. But let me let me sample a couple. 

So, first of all, the best meeting leaders definitely recognise that they are inherently a steward of others' time. And that's the mindset that they have. And when you have that mindset, the thought of people leaving your meeting saying it was a waste of time is so bothersome to you that you become intentional with how you run your meetings, and you facilitate to make sure everyone has a voice. So that's one. 

Two is I'd love for meeting leaders to think differently about their agendas. Having that agenda in of itself does nothing to make meetings better. And if you really reflect, that's not a surprise, right? It's just a piece of paper. And what matters more is what's on the agenda. And is it relevant, and how they facilitate it.

So, the suggestion that I really like is meeting leaders, framing their agendas as a set of questions to be answered. And I won't unpack that now, but I'd be happy to do that later. 

And, then the third thing is, I'm going to go bigger picture, I want organisations to start taking meetings seriously. Instead of just assuming that bad meetings are the cost of doing business, I want them to start owning these meetings as a critical organisational practice where they're assessing the effectiveness of it. 

They've assigned someone on the leadership team, chief meeting officer responsibilities to make sure that this key work process is being handled effectively.

Nisha Pillai 00:05:32 

So, you've got me three great ideas to unpack there. Let's start with stewardship. I have read your book, Professor, and it's a very good read. I can recommend it to everyone joining us on the podcast. 

And you talk quite a lot in the book about developing a stewardship mindset, not just for leaders, but for participants. What does that mean? Can you elaborate a bit for us?

Prof. Dr. Steven Rogelberg 00:05:54 

Sure. Stewardship is obviously the notion that you are trying to accomplish something while elevating others, and supporting others. And a stewardship mindset is akin to being a servant leader. A servant leader leads from behind, constantly helping to elevate other people. 

We have a stewardship mindset all the time when we're meeting with key stakeholders. Right. Because we would never want in our meeting with a CEO for that person to say that was a waste of time.

It's just that we tend not to act like a steward when we're meeting with our team or peers. But we absolutely all have the capacity., what we sometimes lack is the intentionality.

Nisha Pillai 00:06:42

So, can this be trained into us? Can we learn how to run meetings better? We'll be better meeting participants. I'm trying to tie it into that third point you make about organisations should just take meetings more seriously.

Prof. Dr. Steven Rogelberg 00:06:55

Yeah, some people absolutely can develop these skills, but I think you're hitting a really key piece that, without feedback and accountability, there's often not much motivation to do so. 

So, we have to engage the meeting leader and make meetings better. But, we also need to think about the broader ecosystem that meetings exist in, and make sure that that ecosystem is inspiring new ways of thinking of meetings.

Nisha Pillai 00:07:25

So, what do meetings say if anything, about the wider organisation? Some of the people I've been talking to for this series think that a meeting is almost like a kind of mirror, a reflection of the organisation. Do you agree, or is that too far-fetched?

Prof. Dr. Steven Rogelberg 00:07:38 

No, I completely agree. I think meetings are absolute windows of insight into an organisation's culture. I think meetings are the stage for leadership. Who that leader is and their values. 

So, if you were asking me to do an assessment of an organisation I would absolutely, you know, start with looking at meetings. How are they run? You know, is voice elevated?

Is disagreement welcome? Do people really listen to one another? Does that leader truly engage and facilitate? So, absolutely. Meetings are great windows of insight into organisational culture, constructiveness, and values around employee voice.

Nisha Pillai 00:08:25

Now, I'm not entirely surprised that you said that, Professor Rogelberg because you're a meeting scientist, right? That's what you've created a great body of work looking into. But do other business academics have the same viewpoint? Is it taught and taken seriously in business schools, for instance?

Prof. Dr. Steven Rogelberg 00:08:41

No, I personally believe that COVID has elevated interest in meetings to a level that we have never seen before in meeting science, where now I think people are more dialled in to making sure their meetings are not fatiguing. So I think we're in a good inflection point where greater attention is being given to this critical topic.

Nisha Pillai 00:09:06

So how have meetings changed because of the pandemic? I mean, obviously, they're in virtual spaces. That's clear for everyone to see. But in other ways, have they changed for the better? For the worse?

Prof. Dr. Steven Rogelberg 00:9:19

Well, we know there's more meetings now than there were pre-COVID.

Nisha Pillai 00:09:24

There are more meetings.

Prof. Dr. Steven Rogelberg 00:09:25 

There are more. And they do tend to be a little shorter now than they were before COVID. But there are quite a bit more. 

We also know that there has been some really nice enhancements with regard to tools to make virtual meetings work. In fact, I think we've reached a point where virtual meetings have a great deal more potential than face to face meetings.

We know that with virtual meetings, it lends itself readily to polling so we can actually test whether we actually have consensus as opposed to just assuming it or thinking that the loudest voices indicate consensus.

So, I would say the biggest change, besides the time that we discussed, is that we've added a host of new tools and opportunities through virtual meetings that can absolutely elevate meetings. And the good news is it appears to be happening. 

Virtual meeting effectiveness is higher than I've ever seen it before.

Nisha Pillai 00:10:25 

So you seem to be saying that these tools, many of them technological, seem to be a good way of improving the democracy in a meeting.

Prof. Dr. Steven Rogelberg 00:10:32

I do indeed. I think a lot of these tools really promote voice and engagement and involvement in a multi dimensional way, whether it's written through chat or voice. 

You know, if you even think about the setup of a virtual meeting, we don't have to have head of table effects, right? Everyone can see each other equally. I love that. That absolutely helps with the dynamics and flow of information.

So, I think there's a lot of real positives associated with virtual meetings. I'm really hoping that even as people come back to work, that we still heavily rely on virtual meetings as our medium of choice.

Nisha Pillai 00:11:13

So, I'm going to bring in a dissenting note here then, professor, if you don't mind. One of the things I struggle with a bit in virtual meetings, you can't really read the temperature of the room. You can't really judge body language, especially if you've got lots of small icons of people's faces. How does one overcome that if we're going to have more and more virtual meetings?

Prof. Dr. Steven Rogelberg 00:11:33

So first of all, I would argue that being in a conference room doesn't really enhance that either, given sightlines. Right. You really can only see effectively the people directly across from you. So I think this is a problem for face to face or virtual meetings. 

But if you really want to kind of take the temperature, I actually think you can do it much better in virtual meetings. Namely, you can always send someone a private chat. Just say, hey, you good? You know, where are you at with this. So you could be back channelling a lot of different things. 

You can have a partner facilitator who's also back channelling things. The other thing is that it's so easy to do this polling where you can quickly take the temperature of the attendees in an anonymous way.

This is a wonderful tool for really seeing whether the discussion is actually going in the direction that the majority of people want to go in versus just the loudest voice dictating it.

Nisha Pillai 00:12:32

OK, so I'm going to ask you a practical question and that is we're talking about meetings as if they're a kind of generic one size fits all phenomenon, but that's clearly not the case. Meetings have different goals. Some are strategy oriented, some are performance review, some nature action, and you project to a program. And that's just mentioning three. 

Do they need to have different designs? Do they need to be constructed differently to match the goals?

Prof. Dr. Steven Rogelberg 00:12:57 

Well, that's a great question. In general, what the research shows is that rarely do meetings have a singular purpose. They typically have multiple purposes at once. So, this idea of really structuring a meeting by goals just doesn't seem to pan out, in practice. 

With that said, there are some exceptions. Right. So if you're having a brainstorming meeting, for example, I love the idea of actually using silence as a way of generating more ideas and more creative ideas.

Nisha Pillai 00:13:33

Actually, you're not the first person who said that. I just spoke to one of the other contributors who said the same thing. Silence, and I thought, What? What are you talking about?

Prof. Dr. Steven Rogelberg 00:13:42 

Yeah. I mean, research shows that groups brainstorming in silence typing directly into a document, first brainstorming in there with their mouths. They produce more and better ideas. And, you know, if you really reflect, that's not surprising, right? When people can write, everyone can do it simultaneously. We're not waiting for one person. We're less influenced by one person's ideas.

Everyone can talk at once. So there is just a much greater free flowing conversation when it's done in silence. Furthermore, it tends to privilege those people who like writing and who do tend to be introverted. And, you know, every once in a while we want to make sure that everyone is privileged, not just those people who are highly extroverted.

Nisha Pillai 00:14:28

And that's a very good point. Yeah. It's a way of rebalancing the contributions. I want to ask you a question to do with the future. Now, you sound pretty positive that COVID and virtual meetings have really changed the dynamic a bit, made people more aware of meetings. 

I want you to peer into your crystal ball and tell me how you see the future of meetings panning out. Are organisations going to wake up and finally begin to take the more seriously as you've been demanding?

Prof. Dr. Steven Rogelberg 00:14:57

I certainly hope so. I do think more organisations are indeed taking them seriously, but I wouldn't say that all organisations are. I would say some leaders are taking it seriously, but I would not say all leaders are taking it seriously. 

I believe that once we start building more feedback and accountability systems, then this topic will be much more elevated, you know, and a good example is, you know, the concept of employee engagement, right?

So we all know how critical employee engagement is. And we've reached a point that all organisations basically, not all, but most regularly survey their employees, and then they take those engagement survey results and they break them by division and department, thus, you know, shining a light on this topic and insisting that everyone take it seriously and come up with plans to do better if they're not doing well.

Once we do that with meetings, it's going to be a game changer. But without that feedback and accountability I think progress is just going to be tremendously slow.

Nisha Pillai 00:16:10 

So what's at stake here then, Professor? They take up so much of our time, presumably quite a lot of cost as well.

Prof. Dr. Steven Rogelberg 00:16:15

The most precious resource everyone has is time. And we need to honour that resource. So, by running meetings more effectively, you know, we make better use of that time and by dialling meeting times back a bit, we're able to give back time. 

And let me circle back now to something I mentioned earlier, just because I think your listeners might enjoy it, is this idea of framing agendas as questions to be answered.

So, by thinking of your agenda as a set of questions to be answered now, the leader really has to think about what they're hoping to achieve by gathering folks together, by framing your agenda items as questions you now have a better sense of who really has to come to the meeting, the relevant to the questions, by framing agenda items as questions, you now create an engaging challenge for the meeting.

By framing agenda items as questions, you know when to end the meeting after meeting has been successful, the questions have been answered. And if you just can't think of any questions, it likely means you don't need a meeting.

Nisha Pillai 00:17:25

That's a wonderful word of wisdom. If you can't think of a question, don't hold a meeting. As our chat draws to a close Professor, I'm going to ask you to go down memory lane and think back to the best meeting you've ever been in. What was it like? Describe it to us.

Prof. Dr. Steven Rogelberg 00:17:43

Good question. And absolutely, I've experienced some really good meetings in the past. Meetings where the right people were in the room working on an important problem. We were listening to one another. We were building off each other's ideas. It was energising, it was motivating. 

And at the end of it, we created something that really as individuals, we couldn't have done but as a collective, we created something meaningful and important and it was incredibly satisfying.

Nisha Pillai 00:18:15

Thank you so very much for joining us, Professor and thank you for sharing your wisdom, your insights and your enthusiasm.

Prof. Dr. Steven Rogelberg 00:18:25

Is totally my pleasure. I'm so glad to be here to talk to you about this critical topic.