Episode 186 – Mastering Effective Meetings: Strategies for Project Success

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Mastering effective meetings is essential for project managers, as successful meetings contribute significantly to project success. Rich Maltzman and Jim Stewart say we should apply the same strategic mindset to meetings as we do to projects, and they offer insights to enhance your facilitation skills to conduct successful meetings. Table of Contents 03:07 … Great Meetings Build Great Teams04:30 … Criteria for a Good Meeting05:44 … Allow Humor to Influence Meetings06:46 … Making a Sad Meeting Better08:32 … Why People are Attending a Meeting09:55 … Project Manage Meetings13:27 … A Meeting Planning Mindset15:12 … Don’t Worry about Being Liked17:06 … Kevin and Kyle18:12 … Dealing with Conflict in a Meeting21:12 … Goa the Garrulous23:16 … Pat the Passive-Aggressive25:56 … The Fear of Forage28:29 … Risk Register29:45 … Virtual Meeting Success34:01 … Get in Touch35:00 … Closing JIM STEWART: If you blow the meeting, you get to make first impressions once.  So the level of planning should be commensurate with the meeting. WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio are Bill Yates and our sound guy Danny Brewer.  You can catch us wherever you listen to podcasts.  One of the apps that we’ve come across is Podurama.  It’s a free app for podcast lovers, and we are also there.  If you want to listen to us, take a listen on Podurama.  You’ll find a link to them on our transcript. We love having you join us twice a month to be motivated and inspired by project stories, leadership lessons, and advice from industry experts. One little thing to mention is we got an email from Feedspot, which is a content reader that helps people keep up with their websites.  And they told me that we are one of the Top 30 podcasts for managers on the web.  So we were very excited to hear that.  Shout out to Feedspot.  Thank you for voting for us. And we have some industry experts joining us today.  We’re very excited to bring you Jim Stewart, as well as a previous guest, Rich Maltzman.  Since 2003, Jim has been the principal of JP Stewart Consulting, and he’s a certified PMP, and he possesses multiple agile certifications.  He is a longtime member of the Project Management Institute and served for several years on the board of the local chapter.  With Rich Maltzman, he also is the co-author of the book “How to Facilitate Productive Project Planning Meetings” and its update, “Great Meetings Build Great Teams:  A Guide for Project Leaders and Agilists.” Rich Maltzman also has his PMP.  He has been an engineer since 1978 and a project management supervisor since 1988, including a two-year assignment in the Netherlands. Rich is also focused on consulting and teaching, and has developed curricula and taught at several universities.  But we’re very excited about their book “Great Meetings Build Great Teams,” and that’s what we’re talking about today. BILL YATES:  Yes.  This is a key to success for project managers is being able to successfully facilitate effective meetings.  So this is going to be a great conversation.  Plus, just reading through the book, there are so many familiar names and concepts that are there.  They make reference to Andy Crowe and the “Alpha Project Management Study” in his book.  They make reference to Alan Zucker, our instructor, who’s fabulous, and some of the blogs and research that he’s done.  And they also talk a bit about Wayne Turmel and virtual meetings.  We had him on Episode 64.  Wayne was terrific.  And also Carole Osterweil.  She was on number 90, Episode 90 with us, talking about facing uncertainty.  So lot of familiar folks that are being referenced here, and we look forward to talking about having more effective meetings. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Rich; and hi, Jim.  Thank you so much for being with us today.  It’s so good to have you both on the podcast. RICH MALTZMAN:  Glad to be here. Great Meetings Build Great Teams WENDY GROUNDS:  So we want to first find out – we’re going to be talking a lot about the book that you wrote, “Great Meetings Build Great Teams.”  Can you tell us the why behind this book? JIM STEWART:  Sort of my idea in a sense, but not really.  I worked with a guy at Brandeis University, and this gentleman has since retired.  But when I was thinking about writing a book, discussing ideas, says, “You know those meetings you used to run at those pharmaceuticals?”  He says, “I would read a book about that.”  That seems kind of dull, but okay.  So I contacted Rich, who I’d known, and now we have this second revised edition. And the why is because I guess it’s like asking why you need to be able to lay concrete, or why you need to be able to put a foundation on a house.  It’s fundamental stuff that has to be done.  And Rich and I, I know I can speak for Rich on this, I would think the majority of people running meetings aren’t doing a particularly good job.  And so we’re a bit evangelistical about that, about saying people should run meetings well.  The title of our book is “Great Meetings Build Great Teams.”  So we’re trying to get people to, A, run meetings better; and B, communicate better. So I think good meetings are meetings of the minds, and well-run meetings build great teams.  And we feel like we have a better mousetrap for that, and we can make that happen.  That’s really the why. Criteria for a Good Meeting WENDY GROUNDS:  Can you tell us what your definition of what a good meeting should look like?  What are the necessary criteria for a good meeting? RICH MALTZMAN:  Yeah, I’m going to take a creative approach here.  Think of it in terms of the ingredients of that meeting.  You need preparation.  You’re going to have a clear purpose, like a recipe, maybe even a picture of that cake or roast, whatever it is that you’re cooking.  You need the right people at the right time.  You need an agenda, a guideline of some kind, maybe a pinch of entertainment or excitement and fun, some means to record all the great ideas and conversation that’s taking place.  And one of the things that was actually in the title of our last book, facilitation skills.  This is a separate skill from running a project.  You need facilitation skills to make sure that everyone is joining in; and that, as we’ll talk about later, you don’t have people hijacking the meeting.  So those are the ingredients.  And I think if you put those all together with the oven preset at 350, you end up with a pretty good meeting. JIM STEWART:  And I’d like to add to the end of that, if I can, Wendy, which is that facilitation is at least as much art as science.  There’s even certification in it.  Facilitating is not an easy task, especially if you have 20 people from different cultures in a room with different expectations. Allow Humor to Influence Meetings BILL YATES:  The emphasis on facilitation in the book was one of the things that I really appreciated.  Another thing I appreciated in the book was the sense of humor you both have.  Just throughout the book, you guys drop these anecdotes.  You have little quips.  I really appreciate that.  I love it.  And I can see how that would influence more effective meetings, too. RICH MALTZMAN:  That’s intentional.  Jim is well known for his comments, snarky comments that he sticks in. JIM STEWART:  Yes.  However, however, you’re actually funnier than me.  Rich and I, when we meet, our meetings when we discuss the book, the first thing we do is rock and roll trivia.  The next thing we do is we clown around a bit.  We just do.  That’s our nature.  We found that we both like that.  And I think we talked about it in the book a little bit, be careful with the humor because it does grease the wheels, but you have to be really careful.  The humor that Rich and I grew up with earlier doesn’t fly.  The humor that makes fun of somebody doesn’t fly.  You have to be very, very careful.  When in doubt, don’t, is my mantra. Making a Sad Meeting Better  BILL YATES:  Yeah, in Chapter 2, right from the start you had me because, again, you talk about the musical references and the humor.  The title of the chapter is “Take a Sad Meeting and Make It Better.”  I love that.  What are some indicators of a bad meeting, and then how can we turn this around and improve our meetings? JIM STEWART:  It’s an interesting question.  First of all, even before you get to the meeting, there’s a grapevine.  People in your company will know who runs the good meetings and the bad ones.  So there’s that.  But if you go to a meeting, and the person running it is non-dynamic – I had that at the place where I was coaching.  It’s a young woman becoming a scrum master, and it was just not uninteresting subject matter.  It just was dull the way she presented it.  You have to sound like you’re interested yourself.  That’s the first thing.  You have to sound like you’re interested in what you’re talking about.  So that’s number one. Number two is having the agenda.  If I have no agenda, what are we going to talk about?  Number three is you’re 10 minutes in, and you’re discussing the first item because the owner is allowing Joe, Mary, Bob, whomever to hijack the meeting instead of saying okay, as we say on the agile side, “Elmo! Enough, let’s move on,” in a polite way.  And if somebody says, “We need to discuss this,” we go to the group and say, “Is this a showstopper?”  Is this, if we go down in the submersible to the Titanic, this thing’s going to implode?  Is it that level?  Or is something going to lead to a separate meeting?  You can make those decisions on the fly. So I think a bad meeting is when you come out, there’s either no agenda, or there was an agenda, and somebody says, “How did it go?”  We got through the first item.