Steven G. Rogelberg Surprising Science of Meetings for How to Lead Team to Peak Performance

Rogelberg’s “The Surprising Science of Meetings” unveils groundbreaking insights to revolutionize your team’s performance. This game-changing book challenges conventional wisdom, offering practical strategies to turn dreaded meetings into powerful tools for success.

Dive into this review to discover how you can lead more impactful meetings and boost your team’s productivity today.

Genres

Business, Management, Leadership, Productivity, Organizational Psychology, Self-Help, Professional Development, Communication, Team Building, Workplace Efficiency, Running Meetings and Presentations, Organizational Behavior

Steven G. Rogelberg’s book presents a data-driven approach to improving meetings. He argues that meetings are crucial for organizational success but often poorly executed. The author provides evidence-based strategies to enhance meeting effectiveness, including:

1. Optimal meeting size and duration
2. Alternatives to traditional meetings
3. Techniques for fostering engagement
4. Methods to combat meeting fatigue
5. Strategies for inclusive decision-making

Rogelberg emphasizes the leader’s role in shaping meeting culture and offers practical tips for before, during, and after meetings. He addresses common pitfalls like overlong agendas and suggests novel approaches such as stand-up meetings and walking meetings.

The book also explores the psychological aspects of meetings, discussing how they impact employee satisfaction and team dynamics. Rogelberg provides tools for measuring meeting effectiveness and advocates for continuous improvement in meeting practices.

Review

Rogelberg’s work stands out for its scientific rigor and practical applicability. The author’s expertise in organizational psychology shines through, offering readers a fresh perspective on a often-overlooked aspect of business life.

The book’s strengths lie in its actionable advice and clear explanations of complex concepts. Rogelberg’s writing style is engaging, making potentially dry subject matter accessible and interesting. The inclusion of real-world examples and case studies helps readers connect theory to practice.

One particularly valuable aspect is the focus on meeting leadership. Rogelberg empowers leaders to drive change, providing them with concrete tools to improve their meeting facilitation skills.

While the book offers numerous innovative ideas, some readers might find certain suggestions challenging to implement in more traditional organizational cultures. Additionally, while the author addresses virtual meetings, this section could be expanded given the increasing prevalence of remote work.

Despite these minor limitations, “The Surprising Science of Meetings” is a must-read for anyone looking to enhance team performance and organizational efficiency. It offers a compelling argument for the importance of well-run meetings and provides a roadmap for achieving this goal.

What’s inside?

Save time and energy by facilitating better meetings. (Hint: the best ones are 48 minutes long.)

Recommendation

Are you frustrated with meetings? The view that meetings, even when they yield few results, are an unavoidable part of business is surprisingly widespread – especially among meeting organizers.

In this book summary of The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance, organizational psychologist Steven G. Rogelberg challenges this assumption with ideas on how to stop wasting time and energy by facilitating better meetings. Rather than cancelling meetings, he says, improve them by being mindful and skillful about their design and delivery.

Many managers regard inefficient, unproductive or boring meetings as an unavoidable business flaw. Professor Steven G. Rogelberg challenges this assumption with ideas on how to stop wasting time and energy by facilitating better meetings. He bases his advice on research, best practices and surveys. Rather than cancelling meetings, he says, improve them by being mindful and skillful about their design and delivery. He suggests short “standing meetings,” which offer health benefits, satisfaction and efficiency. To improve your meeting culture, try his smart strategies.

Take-Aways

• Acknowledge that meetings can cause a lot of frustration, and assess your meetings to seek improvements.
• Rather than getting rid of meetings, solve your problems with them by applying science.
• Critically evaluate your meeting facilitation skills: Are they as good as you think they are?
• Holding a meeting for 48 minutes will catch your colleagues’ attention.
• Carefully craft meeting agendas. Make participants “directly responsible” owners of their agenda items.
• Invite fewer participants to reduce “social loafing”; encourage input before and after from “secondary stakeholders.”
• Walking and standing meetings add variety to your meeting culture and ensure that people “don’t get too comfortable in that chair.”
• “Deflate negative energy from the start” and create technology-free meeting zones.
• Encourage silence to bring out every team member’s input.
• Pay special attention to audio-only telephone conferences.

Summary

Acknowledge that meetings can cause a lot of frustration, and assess your meetings to seek improvements.

Everyone needs to meet for team discussions, interdepartment alignment and group decision making. But everyone needs to meet effectively. Meetings can cause frustration, especially when they waste time and energy due to a bad meeting culture.

“Bad meetings should never be accepted as an organizational norm.”

Think of the opportunity costs: While you’re stuck with your colleagues in a meeting, you all could be spending time doing real work. When your company manages meetings effectively, meetings add to productivity and organizational cohesion. And when it doesn’t, they add to cost. In 2014, meetings cost the United States’ economy about $1.4 trillion – roughly 8% of the nation’s GDP that year.

Rather than getting rid of meetings, solve your problems with them by applying science.

Employees have no lack of cynicism when it comes to meetings. Yet getting rid of all meetings is not feasible. Without meetings, you would lose contact with your colleagues, disconnect from other departments and become single-minded about difficult problems. Rather than eliminating meetings, improve them. “Meetings science,” the study of meetings and their dynamics through surveys or experimental studies, can help.

Critically evaluate your meeting facilitation skills: Are they as good as you think they are?

Start by reflecting on your skills at running meetings: How would you rate your meeting facilitation abilities? Judging from the “Lake Wobegon Effect” – named for radio commentator Garrison Keillor’s imaginary town “where all of the children are above average” – most people believe they are better than the average facilitator, which is statistically impossible.

“A leader’s experience of the meeting appears to be fundamentally different from the experiences of other meeting attendees.”

Rather than overestimating your skills, accept that you might have room for improvement, and strategically seek out opportunities to improve. You can, for example, gain input by asking meeting participants for feedback. If you feel that approaching them in person would bias the results, consider sending around a short, anonymous survey. Collecting data and being open to that information will increase your awareness of issues, which is the first step to improvement. Look for the following signals when assessing your meeting effectiveness:

• Are participants on their phones or other devices, attempting to multitask?
• Are a few participants talking all the time, while others aren’t speaking at all?
• Are you, as the leader, dominating the meeting?

“What differentiates successful meeting leaders from the unsuccessful ones is the willingness to pick the right tool for the job at hand.”

Collect meeting feedback through different instruments, including your annual employee engagement survey. You could also make meetings part of any 360-degree feedback instrument that applies to leaders in your company.

Adopt a “servant leadership” mind-set and buy into an idea by Adam Grant, a professor at Wharton, that you should be a “giver” who actively assists others and disseminates knowledge without expecting anything in return. Companies with strong servant leadership and giving cultures perform better across all business indicators.

Holding a meeting for 48 minutes will catch your colleagues’ attention.

How long should a meeting last? “Parkinson’s Law” reminds you that a meeting will fill in the time you allot it. When you schedule a meeting for 60 minutes, it will most likely take 60 minutes. Your tasks as a meeting leader include making a conscious choice about the meeting length. Consider your objectives, agenda items and number of participants to determine the best length for a meeting. Once you have an accurate estimate, reduce that estimate by 5% to 10% to add the extra time pressure that makes meetings more effective. Going forward, hold meetings that last 25 minutes instead of 30 minutes, or 50 minutes instead of 60. Or set an arbitrary length of 48 minutes to inspire participants’ attention.

“Like playing dominos, how the meeting starts shapes the rest of the meeting.”

In sports, coaches and team captains commonly use the term “huddle” to describe a brief team gathering before or after a practice or game action. Many companies, including Ritz Carlton, Zappos, Dell and even the Obama White House adopted this practice as a meeting format. Huddles last no longer than 15 minutes and take place at the same time every day. Teams often hold their huddles in the morning.

Carefully craft meeting agendas. Make participants “directly responsible” owners of their agenda items.

The trainer at any “Meeting 101” business course will say you must have an agenda. However, research shows that merely having an agenda doesn’t yield more effective meetings. Instead, be intentional in the process of creating a meeting agenda, including customizing it to meet team needs and approaching team members to ask them to add their agenda items in advance. The rule of thumb is to prepare for an internal meeting as carefully as you would prepare for an external client meeting.

“Short meetings with a focused agenda, facilitated effectively, can have tremendously positive effects.”

Place important discussion items near the top of your agenda. The same holds true for items that participants have generated. Even if you convene the meeting, you don’t have to own every item. Increase accountability by assigning agenda items to participant-owners up front. In line with the advice from Death by Meetings author Patrick Lencioni, present the most salient and demanding items early. These topics usually will require more intensive exchange and alignment time. It’s most functional if you kick them off no later than 10% to 15% into the meeting time.

“Adopting a strategy where agenda items are simply listed in the order received…or without critical thought, is highly counterproductive.”

Make sure your agendas do not become obsolete or dull. Refresh them every time you meet. Encourage people who don’t participate to own a future agenda item, so some of them can become, according to Apple’s practice, a “directly responsible individual,” or “DRI.” Agendas are “a hollow crutch” unless you fill them with life.

Invite fewer participants to reduce “social loafing”; encourage input before and after from “secondary stakeholders.”

Is bigger always better? Or do bigger meetings become less effective and make things worse? You could argue that having more participants increases the wealth of ideas, diversity and resources. However, research from Bain & Company shows that seven participants per meeting hits the sweet spot. With more participants, decision-making effectiveness decreases by roughly 10% per additional participant above seven. Reasons for this decrease include logistics, coordination and social issues.

“Never forget the one thing people dislike more than meetings: not being invited to a meeting.”

How do you keep the number of participants low, while not offending colleagues by not inviting them? To strike this balance, revisit your meeting goals and determine who among your potential participants is absolutely indispensable to achieving those goals. In conjunction with this exercise, think about a “timed-agenda approach,” in which you invite certain participants to specific sections of your meeting. Alternatively, consider consulting with additional participants beforehand to collect their input. Take the best meeting notes you can, and share them afterward with secondary stakeholders. This is a best practice straight out of the Google playbook.

Walking and standing meetings add variety to your meeting culture and ensure that people “don’t get too comfortable in that chair.”

Most people are creatures of habit. That means that after you set up a routine meeting with a group, everyone will sit in exactly the same seat during every subsequent meeting. This can foment a stale meeting culture. Counteract this by introducing fresh ideas and subtle changes in the set-up:

• Change the seating arrangement – Actively ask participants to sit in a different seat, change the table set-up or switch to another venue.
• Conduct a “walking meeting” – Take the meeting agenda and your participants outdoors or on a circular walk through your building.
• Hold your meeting standing – Participants in “standing meetings” gain health benefits and appreciate the efficiency of this shorter meeting format (15 to 20 minutes maximum).

“Deflate negative energy from the start” and create technology-free meeting zones.

Meetings enlivened with humor and laughter lead to more supportive team members, more constructive group dynamics and higher team performance. Negative comments lead to “mood contagion” that lowers performance. Paying attention to the emotions in your meetings is part of successful meeting leadership.

“The research is clear on the concept of emotional contagion: Moods travel quickly.”

How do you create positive moods in your meetings? Greet participants, offer refreshments or snacks, and play an upbeat song as they enter the room. Discourage multitasking. Some companies also create “technology-free zones,” banning personal laptops, phones and smart devices from meetings. Facilitate vivid team interaction, for example, by asking a participant to play the “devil’s advocate role.” This helps advance your project through critical thinking. Pay attention to and create space for positive energy and “mindfulness.”

Encourage silence to bring out every team member’s input.

One plus one can equal three when you create synergies among team members. Especially in the more creative phases of teamwork – for example, when generating new ideas and thinking creatively – hearing every voice and including every person is essential. This may seem paradoxical, but creating silence to elicit all team members’ input can work wonders. Consider the following idea-generating techniques:

• “Brainwriting” – Ask meeting participants to be silent and jot down their ideas before sharing them with others. Your objective is to generate unique ideas and to avoid “groupthink.”
• “Silent reading” – Assign 10 to 30 minutes of silent reading for a new proposal and conceptual piece rather than having a person present the idea. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos promotes this technique, followed by discussion, at Amazon. This ensures participants evaluate a proposal on its merits and not on the eloquence of the presenter.

“Banning technology works best if the meetings are short and focused.”

“Silence can be golden.” You don’t need to inject silence into every meeting, but it will improve your outcomes and participant satisfaction.

Pay special attention to audio-only telephone conferences.

What you’ve read so far is good for face-to-face meetings, but what about the “technology-related meetings” that are taking over the workplace? As much as you might crave a new formula for good meeting techniques in those circumstances, the same rules still apply to purpose, participant selection, agenda generation, meeting facilitation and follow-up.

“When someone is on mute, multitasking becomes almost a foregone conclusion.”

Because audio-only meetings are tricky to lead, pay special attention to your format. The absence of social controls tempts participants to perform other tasks or embrace distractions while on the call – reducing meeting efficiency immensely. To counteract those shortcomings, ban the mute button at audio-only meetings and increase engagement by actively addressing participants by their names.

“If I die, I hope it’s during a staff meeting because the transition to death would be so subtle.”

If your audio meeting includes more than five people, consider forming smaller breakout teams who work on a certain task together and report back during the conference call. A variation of that approach is to use “intervals” in which you first hold a brief audio-only meeting of 15 minutes, and then work on the task collectively over a number of days using a “shared document.” This approach is effective for brainstorming and decision making. Mastering audio-only meetings is difficult, and you may feel great satisfaction when you lead them well.

About the author

Steven G. Rogelberg is Chancellor’s Professor at University of North Carolina, Charlotte, for distinguished national, international, and interdisciplinary contributions. He has well over 100 publications and recently won the highly prestigious Humboldt Award for his research on meeting science. His work has been profiled in the Harvard Business Review, CBS News, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, NPR, Guardian, National Geographic, and Scientific American Mind, among others. In addition to his research and teaching, he consults for small and large organizations, including IBM, TIAA, Procter & Gamble, VF Corporation, Family Dollar, Siemens, and others. Dr. Rogelberg founded and currently directs large outreach initiatives focusing on nonprofit organization health and effectiveness with over 500 nonprofits served.

Table of Contents

Preface

SECTION I: Setting the Meeting Stage
Chapter 01: So Many Meetings and So Much Frustration
Chapter 02: Get Rid of Meetings? No, Solve Meetings Through Science

SECTION II: Evidence-Based Strategies for Leaders
Chapter 03: The Image in the Mirror is Likely Wrong
Chapter 04: Meet for 48 Minutes
Chapter 05: Agendas Are a Hollow Crutch
Chapter 06: The Bigger, The Badder
Chapter 07: Don’t Get Too Comfortable in That Chair
Chapter 08: Deflate Negative Energy From the Start
Chapter 09: No More Talking!
Chapter 10: The Folly of the Remote Call-in Meeting
Chapter 11: Putting it All Together

Epilogue: Trying to Get Ahead of the Science—Using Science

Tool: Meeting Quality Self-Assessment
Tool: Sample Engagement Survey and 360 Feedback Questions on Meetings
Tool: Good Meeting Facilitation Checklist
Tool: Huddle Implementation Checklist
Tool: Agenda Template
Tool: Guide to Taking Good Meeting Minutes/Notes
Tool: Expectations Assessment

Acknowledgments
References
Index