Our Favorite Management Tips on Leading Effective Meetings

Each weekday, in our Management Tip of the Day newsletter, HBR offers tips to help you better manage your team—and yourself. Here is a curated selection of our favorite Management Tips on leading effective meetings. Get Ready to Lead an Emotionally Charged Meeting Leading through tension is part of being a manager, but you don’t have to go into emotionally charged meetings unprepared. Here’s how to stay grounded and guide high-stakes conversations with clarity and composure. Visualize the meeting in advance. Picture the setting, the people involved, and how you want to feel walking out. Mentally rehearse how you’ll open the discussion, handle tension, and steer toward resolution. Anticipate challenges and plan calm, confident responses. Reframe your mindset. Focus on the positives. Before the meeting, reflect on what you appreciate about the individuals involved or what good outcomes could come from the conversation. This small shift builds emotional resilience and helps you approach the interaction with empathy and clarity. Adjust the setup. Use the “Five W’s”—who, what, where, when, and why—to fine-tune the logistics. Who needs to be there? Should you bring in resources to support the conversation? What needs to be shared and what doesn’t? Where should the meeting take place, and what is the optimal time? Finally, why is this discussion important? Build in buffer time. Give yourself 10 minutes before the meeting to get focused and 10 minutes after to reset. A short walk or quiet moment can help you stay composed and avoid carrying stress into your next interaction. This tip is adapted from “How to Prepare for a Meeting Where Emotions Will Run High,” by Dina Denham Smith. . . . Prevent Meeting Hangovers on Your Team A bad meeting doesn’t end when the call drops—it lingers, draining your team’s productivity and morale. To prevent these “meeting hangovers,” focus on five key strategies. Don’t dominate, facilitate. Encourage participation by letting team members lead relevant agenda items. Use interactive tools like polls, and structure discussions to ensure everyone has a voice. Cut the guest list. Only invite those essential to the discussion. If someone doesn’t need to be there, offer them alternatives, like asking them for pre-meeting input or sending them a follow-up summary. Fewer attendees mean more-focused conversations—and ultimately better outcomes. Turn agendas into action plans. Frame agenda items as specific questions that drive decisions. Instead of “Product Launch Update,” ask, “What are the critical risks to our product launch timeline, and how can we mitigate them?” Clear, action-oriented topics keep meetings efficient. Make every minute count—and don’t run over. Set meetings for the shortest time necessary, not by default increments like 60 minutes. Sticking to the agenda and ending on time helps people sustain focus and reduces frustration. Demand accountability. Assign owners to every action item and clarify next steps before the meeting ends. Use project management tools or shared documents to track follow-ups and ensure nothing falls through the cracks. This tip is adapted from “The Hidden Toll of Meeting Hangovers,” by Brent N. Reed et al. . . . Boost Team Participation in Meetings Low participation in meetings can harm your team’s productivity by reducing collaboration, hampering decision-making, and eroding unity. How can you encourage more fruitful engagement? Start by clarifying expectations. Outline the supportive behaviors you want to see in your meetings. For example, you could say, “As a team, we support each other, we tackle challenges together, and we communicate constructively.” Model these behaviors yourself, and be sure to celebrate when your team members do the same. For example, you might say, “I would like to recognize something. Alex, the way you just acknowledged Jordan’s contribution embodies the supportive culture we want to have on our team—one where every team member’s input is recognized and appreciated. Alex, thank you for demonstrating this and setting a positive example for us all.” It’s also helpful to offer team members different ways to contribute—for example, allow for written input before, during, or after meetings. And consider rotating the meeting facilitation among all team members to give everyone a chance to lead. Giving those who are typically less vocal a structured role can help empower them to speak. This tip is adapted from “Your Team Members Aren’t Participating in Meetings. Here’s What to Do.” by Luis Velasquez. . . . Fix Your Team’s Broken Hybrid Meetings Hybrid work has changed meetings. Despite many companies’ recent return-to-office efforts, teams are relying on virtual meetings more than ever, and participation is down. As a manager, how can you improve your team’s meetings in this hybrid world? Treat meeting culture as an important part of company culture. What meeting culture do you want for your team? Determine best practices and define roles and responsibilities. This can also include expectations on when not to meet, such as scheduled focus hours and meeting-free days. Identify and invest in meeting leaders. Running effective meetings is a skill, and like any skill, it can be cultivated and strengthened. Recent research shows that 54% of all meetings are hosted by just 10% of employees. Targeted training for this group of “power users” can help promote a healthier meeting culture on your team. Leverage data. One of the advantages of virtual meetings is that they produce data that provides meaningful insights into productivity, engagement, and even retention—so make use of it. For example, if a specific department has a particularly high no-participation rate, you could monitor how that number changes as you roll out trainings within the department. This tip is adapted from “Hybrid Work Has Changed Meetings Forever,” by Mike Tolliver and Jonathan Sass. . . . Use Curiosity to Keep Your Meetings on Track Are your meetings chronically disengaging—or worse, easily derailed? It may be time to introduce curiosity into the agenda to keep people focused and things on track. First, direct the team’s attention to identifying the problem you’re there to solve. Rather than doing this for them, ask everyone in the room to define the goal of the meeting in one sentence. Clarifying a collective mission at the outset will help align team members and reduce confusion or irrelevant sidebars. Then let your employees do the talking. Just because you’re leading the meeting doesn’t mean you have to dominate it. Show curiosity, ask others for their opinions before sharing your own, and actively listen. This is a powerful way to engage and empower people. Finally, offer feedback—but avoid judgmental language. Judgment is the opposite of curiosity and can discourage and demotivate your team, leading to stilted, unproductive meetings. If you’re unsure how you feel about an idea, probe it. Simply saying “say more” is a nonjudgmental way of expressing curiosity and maintaining meeting momentum. This tip is adapted from “How Curiosity Can Make Your Meetings—and Team—Better,” by Sabina Nawaz. . . . Making Bad Meetings Better We all have those recurring meetings that feel inefficient, unproductive, or aimless. How can you make them better when you’re not the one running them? Here’s how to get involved before, during, and after to nudge things in the right direction. The best time to intervene is often before the meeting even takes place. Reach out to the organizer to ask if there’s an agenda, relevant materials they can share in advance, or anything you can do to help prepare. During a meeting that’s veering off topic, you can take initiative and steer the conversation back on course. Refer back to the agenda if there is one. If there isn’t one, you can speak up to clarify the goal of the meeting, then point out when the conversation feels off topic. After the meeting, reach out to the organizer to compare notes and clarify next steps and who’s responsible for them. This will ensure follow-through—and that the meeting wasn’t ultimately pointless. This tip is adapted from “How to Improve a Meeting (When You’re Not in Charge),” by Tijs Besieux and Amy C. Edmondson. . . . Executives: Rethink Your One-on-Ones If you’re a senior leader, your calendar is likely packed with one-on-one meetings. But instead of fostering alignment, an overload of one-on-ones often creates fragmentation, siloed thinking, and trust issues. It’s time to shift how you use your meeting time. Use one-on-ones for development, not operations. Make these meetings quarterly and dedicate them to career growth and feedback—not tactical updates. Block 90-minute sessions that focus on leadership goals, not project status. Shift decision-making to capability meetings. Identify five to seven core capabilities in your organization—like innovation or customer experience—and hold standing meetings with the relevant cross-functional leaders. This ensures strategic clarity and faster, more aligned execution. Put the right people in the room. Avoid the work of briefing others after the fact. Capability meetings bring the decision-makers together at the right moment so that alignment happens in real time, not retroactively. Free up executive team time. When capability meetings handle cross-functional work, your full executive team can focus on enterprise strategy and long-term priorities instead of replaying decisions made elsewhere. Center executive meeting agendas around questions like “What are the few issues that require the full weight of this team?” or “Where does our system need realignment?” This tip is adapted from “Why Senior Leaders Should Stop Having So Many One-on-Ones,” by Ron Carucci.

Our Favorite Management Tips on Leading Effective Meetings

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