You Can Run Engaging Meeting With This TIP

Learn a powerful framework that you can use in your next meeting

The abrupt transition to remote work in February 2020 was hard for me.

For years, I had said: “I am a slave to my calendar.”

I would go where my calendar said.

I would do what my calendar said.

My days were full of back to back meetings, and I was miserable. At the time, I thought that that’s just part of the job of management. I eventually learned that there is a better way, a more fulfilling way.

But meetings are are large part of management.

So it’s worth getting great at meetings.

In today’s issue of the δeltas newsletter, we will cover:

• Why the Common Advice is Wrong

• The Six Types of Meetings

• 🔒 The TIP Framework for Engaging Meetings

• 🔒 The TIP Framework in Practice: Team Meetings

• 🔒 The Team Meeting Run-book

Alright, let’s get started!

The Common Advice is Wrong

Engineers hate meetings.

It disrupts the Flow. It prevents deep focused work. You can’t get any real work done when your calendar looks like Swiss cheese.

And once you’re in the room, it’s a total waste of time. It could have been an email. Should have taken 6 minutes instead of 30. Or 60.

The common advice?

Every meeting must have a clear agenda.

Well, what is an agenda?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defined agenda as:

“A list or outline of things to be considered or done”

I actually prefer, to paraphrase Michael Lopp:

“What, specifically, needs to happen so we can all get out of this room and get back to actual work”

Using this definition, it seems clear that we must have a clear agenda for every meeting. It is clear that the lack of agenda is the root of all evil.

This is great advice for many types of meetings.

But not all meetings.

To see why this advice is often wrong, we first need to understand that there really are different types of meetings.

The Six Types of Meetings

Not all meetings are creates equal.

There are six main themes that meetings typically fall into. In some cases, a meeting may actually fall into more than one category.

1. Decision

These meetings are design to answer a specific question, to make a clear decision. Some examples:

• Setting quarterly goals

• Approving or allocating head-count (HC)

• A launch readiness meeting

2. Information Transfer

These meetings are all about spreading information, or knowledge, across the organization. Some examples:

• Onboarding sessions

• Skill training, such as interviewer training

• Feedback gathering sessions

• Questions and Answers with senior leadership

3. Process-Oriented

These meetings are all about how humans work together towards a shared goal. Some examples include:

• Daily stand-ups

• Operational review meetings

• Monthly Business Reviews (MBR)

4. Link

These meetings are all about building connections between the humans in the organization. It’s about forming stronger bonds. Some examples include:

• Happy hours

• Celebrating achievements

• Internal networking events

5. Optimize

These meetings are all about improving how the team, and the humans that make it up, work. Some examples include:

• Performance Reviews and rating calibration sessions

• Career development discussion

• Incident reviews to find and identify fixes to root-causes

• Mentor-mentee meetings

• 1:1 meetings

6. Mind

These meetings are all about creativity and finding new ways to approach challenges. Some examples include:

• Brain storming sessions

• Roadmap ideation

Six main themes to different meetings. You can remember them with the acronym DIPLOM: Decision, Information, Process, Link, Optimization, and Mind.

As you can see, each of the different types of meetings has a different objective.

And having a clear agenda works great for most types of meetings.

But what about:

• Link meetings, designed to strengthen bonds between people. There is no clear or even easily measurable outcome.

• Human Optimize meetings have, at best, fuzzy outcomes.

And so, the problem with the common advice is not that it’s wrong.

The problem is that it is the right solution to some of the meetings.

The TIP Framework for Engaging Meetings

As a leader, you always have two separate objectives at play:

1. Build with the team. Or, how to create business value in the present.

2. Build the team. Or, set the team up to create more business value in the future.