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Running Productive Meetings
Your weekly leadership meeting has eight items on it. At the 90-minute mark you are still on item three, and the two decisions you most needed get pushed to next week again. Everyone agrees the meeting ran long, and nobody can say where the time went.
Figure 1. Running Productive Meetings
What it is
Running Productive Meetings is a checklist of ten practices you can hold up against a meeting you already run. Together they cover what the meeting is for, who comes to it, how the time gets spent and what happens once it ends.
If you only adopt three, start with the agenda, the question "What are we solving for?" and the close. Settling each item's purpose before the meeting tells the group whether it is there to decide something, fix a problem or understand where things stand. Ending with a list of what was decided and who will do what by when is how the work carries on after people leave the room.
How it works
Before the meeting
What does this meeting need to settle?
Write the agenda in advance and ask "What are we solving for?" about every item. Phrase each one as the question the group has to answer, and say whether you need a decision, a fix or a shared understanding. If nobody can say what an item is for, drop it. Ask for status updates in writing the day before, so the meeting starts on the questions.
Who is in the room
Who does this meeting actually need?
Invite the people who will make the decision, bring information it depends on or carry out the work. Send the outcome to anyone who only needs to know what was agreed. If some people join remotely, bring them in first, because in a hybrid room the remote voice is the first one lost. Ask them by name at the start and keep checking in with them as you go.
Running the time
Where is the time going?
Shorten the length. Not every meeting needs to be an hour just because that's the Outlook default, and a lot of hour-long meetings could be 30 minutes. Give each item a time, keep five minutes for the close and set the meeting length from that total. Leave out anything a message or a quick conversation could settle. Agree as a group that anyone can raise three fingers when the discussion drifts from the question on the table. When someone does, stop and decide together whether to go back to the question or change the agenda.
Closing the meeting
Who does what by when?
In the last five minutes, read out each decision and each action with its owner and its date, and agree who will tell the people who were not there. Send the list to everyone who attended before the day is out. Open the next meeting by checking which actions were done.
Setting the rhythm
Is this the right meeting for this conversation?
Daily, weekly, quarterly and annual conversations do different jobs, so give each recurring meeting one job. If the weekly operations meeting keeps getting pulled into next year's strategy, move that conversation to a meeting built for it. The Meeting Rhythm model covers how to set up the cadence.
When to reach for it
A recurring meeting where the same topics come back each week without being settled
A calendar so full of meetings that your own decisions have started to slow down
A team that agrees its meetings are not working but has not said why
“In the first meeting I sat in on, we got to department number two, and they talked for 50 minutes.”
A worked example
Brindlewick Dental Lab is a fictional maker of crowns and dentures that works from two sites. Its general manager ran a 90-minute operations meeting every Monday for nine people. Most of it went on a round of status updates, and a question about weekend capacity had come back three weeks running without being settled.
The general manager rewrote the next agenda as three questions, starting with "Do we add a Saturday shift in March?" The team leads sent their status in writing on Friday afternoon. Once each question had its time and five minutes were set aside for the close, the agenda came to 60 minutes, so that is what the invitation said. Three people who only needed the outcome came off the invite and were sent the notes.
The production lead at the second site joined by video, and the general manager asked them to speak first on the Saturday shift. They had overtime figures nobody else in the room had seen, and those figures showed the second site could staff a Saturday from its existing team.
The team agreed the Saturday shift in that meeting, because the overtime figures answered the question that had stalled it for three weeks. In the last five minutes the general manager read out each action with its owner and date and posted the list to the team channel. Four weeks later the team reviewed the change and kept the 60-minute slot.
Try it this week
Pick one recurring meeting you run this week. By the end you'll have an agenda written as questions, a length set from that agenda and a list of actions with owners and dates.
Write each agenda item as the question the group needs to answer, and ask for status updates in writing the day before.
Give each item a time, add five minutes for the close and change the invitation to match the total.
Check the invite list against the agenda and move anyone who only needs the outcome onto the list for the notes.
When an item reaches its time, ask "Do we need more time on this, and which later item will move if we take it?"
In the last five minutes, read out each decision and action with its owner and date, and name who will tell anyone who was absent.
At the start of the next meeting, check which actions were done and whether the new length worked.
Try it with AI
Copy this prompt into ChatGPT, Claude or any AI assistant and fill in the part in square brackets. It will walk you through the model one step at a time, using your own situation.
Prompt
I run a recurring meeting that isn't working as well as it should: [describe the meeting, how often it runs, how long it is, who attends, and what goes wrong].
If you can open links, read https://www.colincox.com/library/productive-meetings first. It covers ten practices for running productive meetings, from the agenda and the question "What are we solving for?" to who attends, how long the meeting runs, and closing with actions and owners.
Ask me one question at a time and wait for my answers. Find out what each agenda item is for, who actually needs to be there, and where the time really goes. Challenge the length, and if the meeting is an hour only because that's the calendar default, ask me whether 30 minutes would do.
Then rewrite my next agenda as questions, with a time for each item and five minutes to close, and suggest who could get the notes instead of attending. Finish by asking me what I'll change for the next meeting and how I'll check in a month whether it worked.
Leave out names and anything confidential before you paste in your situation.
From Colin's work
An executive team once asked me to sit in on their weekly meetings, observe them and give them recommendations. The meeting ran for two hours every week. There were six departments, each of them gave an update, and the agenda had other topics as well.
By my math, each department had 10 to 15 minutes for its update. In the first meeting I sat in on, we got to department number two, and they talked for 50 minutes. That one update took more than a third of the two-hour meeting, and the CEO didn't stop them. It was partly because they were thinking out loud.
