The Beauty of Meeting Governance with Hiba Amin

Do you hate meetings? Are you frustrated by how much time they seem to waste? If so, then this is one of the most important episodes you'll listen to this year. We're about to fix your meetings for you.Or rather, Hiba Amin is. She's the Sr. Marketing Manager at Soapbox. Soapbox is an "app built for managers," designed to "streamline objectives, meetings, and morale into one workflow that gets you results." Meetings are hard to get right but so essential to making the most of your day-to-day, because they’re necessary. Hiba shares concrete steps you can take to transform the nature of your meetings moving forward. Take the steps she suggests, and you'll master your meetings, ending frustration, saving time, and getting critical time back every week. The highlights: [1:38] Hiba's philosophy on meetings. [2:48] Crafting meetings that are worth having. [6:16] The efficient way to plan and prep for meetings. [8:25] The power of ten reclaimed minutes. [10:38] The place where most internal meetings go wrong. [13:37] The most effective way to organize an agency-client meeting. [16:08] Etiquette for meeting follow-up. [17:50] Iterating on your company's meeting structure. [19:55] Creating meeting management templates. [22:27] Hiba's cause.The insights:A meeting philosophy to live byHiba's meeting philosophy is pretty straightforward."If there's no point or goal to the meeting, don't have it!" Hiba doesn't have more than 4 internal meetings per week, because she doesn't need more. That number can vary by company or team size, of course, but the point here is to be lean with your meeting planning. "If it's a status update, add it in Slack. Add it in email. Or just add an item to your agenda and tackle it asynchronously. But don't have a meeting for the sake of having a meeting."Crafting meetings that are worth havingHiba notes there are four types of internal meetings to address here.1:1 meetings.Team meetings.Company meetings.One-off meetings.Crafting a meeting worth having means matching the activity of the meeting to the meeting type."For one-on-ones, the whole point is for managers and employees to continuously exchange feedback, to talk about their growth, to find different levers to engage their team, to talk about blockers, to use it as a coaching session."She says you can really accomplish a great deal in a one-on-one."The baseline is just to build trust, to exchange feedback, and continue to build so much rapport that the feedback exchange becomes easy and natural, which I think is really important between managers and employees." Next, Hiba addresses team meetings."Team meetings are to keep your team in sync. Let's talk about the blockers, but I also want to make sure you're not just waiting until a team meeting to talk about a blocker, either."A blocker is anything that keeps someone from achieving a goal or completing a project. "Don't wait two weeks, if that's the [meeting] cadence, to say: I'm actually stuck on this one project. You could have solved that two weeks ago. The team meetings just really keep the team in sync.Talk about goals. Make sure you're aligned. Make sure that you know you have all the steps in place to be able to hit your goals and not wait until the end of the quarter to say: oh crap. Didn't hit that goal. Don't do a retrospective of the past three months. Do the retro for two weeks. Fix your problems."What about company-wide meetings?"At least at Soapbox, they're really short. We have a 15-minute company-wide meeting every Monday. That's ultimately walking through our goals, giving everyone visibility into things like our MRR, weekly sign-ups, all those things that are the core metrics we measure and track. We do this every week because it gives us 52 chances to correct the ship. If we release a payment modal and our sign-up numbers from free-to-paid go down, we know so we can revert that change and not wait 3 weeks to say: holy crap, we lost 20 potential customers as a result of this change. We can do that immediately in the following week." Finally, one-off meetings."Things are going to happen. You're going to have to meet about making specific decisions. Maybe you want to launch a campaign and you need to have all the stakeholders in there. I think the important thing there is, again, what's your goal? What do you want to accomplish? Go in with an agenda, give everyone access to that agenda. Then they can just come in prepared to talk about all the items that matter. And that will help you not stray off."She even suggests appointing someone to keep each meeting on track, a role she calls the Accountability Officer."Someone to say: hey ya’ll. Let's get back to the meat of the conversation. This is straying really far off.This prevents the types of meetings we all hate, the ones where everyone spends 20 minutes talking about nothing." The efficient way to plan and prep for meetingsSo how much time should you spend planning and preparing for meetings?"I think I'm ...