How to Run a Meeting

No really.

Update: You can also read Part 2 of this post, which details a few specific techniques for running equitable, efficient, and short meetings.

Fear not (or fear greatly), we shall return soon to our consideration of the role of song lyrics in our understanding of American life, but first we’re going to take a detour to discuss meetings. You know, meetings. Those things that could have been emails. Those things that we had in person and then had on Zoom and now have in some bizarre combination of the two. The formal kind of meetings where we vote and the informal ones where we brainstorm and the truly awful kind wherein it’s unclear why we’re meeting at all. If you’re reading this, you’ve been there.

"team meeting" by woodleywonderworks is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

I have zero official qualifications for telling you how to run a meeting, but having attended, participated in, spoken at, taken minutes for, and run meetings ranging from high school student senate meetings of a few dozen people to antiwar coalition meetings in overflowing auditoriums to nonprofit board meetings to activist meetings of all sizes to union meetings to public library staff meetings to manaagement meetings to school board and city council meetings to professional organization meetings to IEP meetings¹ for the past 33 years, I have some Thoughts and Feelings.²

Without further ado, here’s how you should run your meeting, regardless of what kind of meeting it is and what rules you’re using.

Acknowledge Power Dynamics

Begin by acknowledging the power dynamics present in the room (or the Zoom).

I don’t care if you think there are no power differentials at play. There are power differentials, and as the person running the meeting, you are almost always in the position of greatest power, and you need to acknowledge that and think about how it affects how your meeting will run. But you also need to think about as many of the other power dynamics present as you can. Here are some questions to get you started.

• Where is the meeting taking place, and who is at home there?

• If the meeting is in a physical location, what’s the layout of the room? Where is everyone sitting? Is there a head of the table, and who is there? Is there a front of the room, and who is there?

• If the meeting is virtual, what are the possible conditions under which people may be attending? Mostly this is none of your business, but it’s worth considering whether the person who has a private office is in a position of power equal to that of the person who is having to attend the meeting while also trying to keep their kids quiet, or the person who is sitting in a car somewhere with wifi, or the person who’s having to attend on their phone, or—well, you get the idea.

• Who all is at the meeting? Does everyone there work for the same organization, or are there outsiders (note the language there—outsiders)?

• Who at the meeting is already at a disadvantage because of racism, classism, sexism, transphobia, or any other kind of stigma or bias? Who is at a disadvantage because they don’t speak the language, either because the meeting isn’t being held in their actual language or because they don’t speak the lingo of the people in the meeting?

You can’t fix all the power differentials in the world, but as the person running the meeting, the onus of recognizing them and naming them—to yourself or outloud—is on you.

Structure Your Meeting to Flatten the Power Differential

Recently I was at a meeting where I was the person in the position of (relatively) least power. I was told to “ask for a break whenever you need one.” I had relatively little power at this meeting, but I am still an upper middle class cis het white professional lady and kind of a loudmouth, so I pointed out that PERHAPS we should plan our breaks ahead of time because asking the person in my position to say when she “needs” a break puts that person in the position of looking vulnerable if she asks for a break even if she just needs a break to use the freaking bathroom and not because she’s having a nervous breakdown. (Furthermore, as I also pointed out, scheduling the break means that everyone at the meeting knows when they can use the bathroom, get a drink, run outside, punch the wall, or whatever.)

Depending on the nature of your meeting, stucturing to flatten the power differential might mean scheduling breaks, rearranging the seating, or making sure attendees are physically comfortable. It absolutely means that you pick a timeframe for the meeting and stick to it. Which brings us handily to our next point….

Understand and State Why You Are Having the Meeting

I mean, hopefully you know why you are having a meeting. If you don’t, you should not have a meeting.

• Are you relaying information? And if so, is having a meeting the best way to do so? Why? (I mean, it might be—for instance, it might be “here is a bunch of information and I know you will have a lot of questions which I would like to answer.)

• Are you working on a project (put on an event, decide on what terrible enterprise software to license, plan a rally to stop the war) that needs a bunch of people to do a bunch of different things?

• Do you have a problem (try to stick to one problem—we all have 99³) and you want to get a bunch of ideas to see if all together you can come up with a solution?

In addition to acknowledging the power dynamics of the meeting, if you’re running the meeting, you should be transparent about the purpose of the meeting. If you’re just going to tell people a bunch of stuff and you’re not going to take questions or feedback or pushback (or you’re going to take it into account but not act on it), have decency to own up to that.

If you’re having a meeting wherein a bunch of people are going to do a bunch of stuff, make sure it is extremely clear to everyone who is going to do what. If Archie volunteers to reserve the room, say, “Great, Archie will reserve the room” while making sure the person taking notes has got that down. Before you leave the meeting, review all those assignments (if you haven’t jotted them down or committed them to memory, ask): “So Archie is going to reserve the room; Bernice is going to design a flyer; Claude is going to get the flyers printed; Doreen is going to draft a press release that she’ll send to Eddie and Florence for comment and editing before they send it back to her to send out on Friday—is all that right? Did I miss anything or anybody?”

End Your Meeting

End your meeting in a timely fashion. End your meeting by reviewing again (really, you can’t do this enough) what everyone is going to do. And above all, end your meeting by thanking everyone.

I’ve said recently that every encounter should start with an acknowledgment of the power dynamics in place and end with a way that people can talk about how those worked, but I haven’t yet figured out how to do the second part in a way that’s not “fill out an evaluation form about this meeting,” so I’m still thinking about that.

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I was going to go into some more specifics on how you go about making sure every voice is heard and that no voice dominates and some of the strategies I like for doing so (a few come up in the footnotes), but this is too long already, so that may be a post for another day. Or not.

1. Some of these meetings have run by Roberts Rules, some by strict consensus, some with a steering committee, some using a stack (we’ll get to that), some have used twinkling (or whatever the hell we called that crap—we’ll get to that too), some have used the arcane rule system that the American Library Association uses instead of Roberts Rules, and many have used no discernable system at all. (NB: By “we’ll get to that,” I mean “in another post at another time.”)

2. I have also been told by several people who are not my mother that I am good at running meetings, so take that for whatever it’s worth.

3. If you have made it this far, you really deserve to read something better. I really can’t recommend Caleb Mason’s Jay-Z’s 99 Problems, Verse 2: A Close Reading with Fourth Amendment Guidance for Cops and Perps highly enough—though as someone else who likes to read footnotes pointed out to me recently, a law professor thanking a student for loaning him a book is a whole other kind of power dynamic at play.