Managers: Meeting Debugging

Better meetings usually start in 1:1s.

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As managers, we want our team to collaborate, solve problems, and execute on ideas. They can’t do that if they’re not talking to each other, and they can’t do that if they’re talking to each other so much that they don’t have time to execute. It’s the evergreen manager problem of striking the right balance for your team. I really recommend at least annually checking in with your team through a survey or a group discussion on what’s working well for them and what’s not. 

Normally when there are issues in meetings, the initial fix might seem quick: build a better agenda, move the meeting time, cancel it, whatever. But I find the long-term fix happens in your 1:1s and training your team how to best engage in specific meetings to get the most out of them.

So if you’re concerned that your team might not be making the most of their time together, here’s the playbook for where to start on debugging your meetings.

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

When No One is Attending Check Expectations

During an SRE partnership that was struggling, our partner team barely showed up to our shared sync meetings. We’d normally get the team lead, and maybe one or two other people, but we never got the whole team. This made it really difficult to keep tight feedback loops, keep our shared goals on track, and learn from each other. The SRE team was feeling hurt that dev team members weren’t participating, and it was causing growing tension on the team.

During my 1:1 with the dev team lead, I asked directly: hey, why don’t other team members attend? Do they know SRE feels hurt when they aren’t participating?