How do I make team syncs valuable instead of boring?
The dreadful team meeting is one of the most politically charged topics in any corporation. I don’t mean political as left or right, but more in the multitude of opinions and discussion it usually generates. For thousands of years, humankind has been practicing this aspect of life: gathering in a room to discuss specific topics. You would think with so much practice behind us, we would have mastered this by now… but sadly, we did not.
Meetings remain to this day one of those hit-or-miss things because, in most cases, they are a product of the leader’s charisma and the topic selected for the meeting. Naturally gifted leaders will have significantly better meetings because they just know how and what to say, while those less lucky must strive to find the right mix of things.
As a first-time manager, charisma or not, meetings don’t just fall from the sky in terms of “what to do” and “what is expected,” so a bit of study is required before you start. Since a meeting is not just about talking about a specific topic, but also about team values, engagement, collecting valuable information about “the team pulse,” and many more, we need to look at this subject from different angles while trying to answer the question: what does a first-time manager need to know about team meetings?
To run effective team meetings, first-time managers must establish clear agendas, focus on alignment over status updates, and strictly respect time. Choose emails over unnecessary connects, invite diverse input to give every voice space, and assign explicit action owners for next steps. Sharing meeting responsibilities, like rotating facilitators, turns routine syncs into engaging, high-value opportunities for team growth.
In this article:
- The Standard Team Meeting: Standard meetings often fail because short attention spans and recurring status updates turn them into passive, low-value obligations rather than productive alignments.
- “To Meeting…or To Mail?”: Leaders must balance communication channels by reserving meetings strictly for essential discussions while using emails for quick updates and simple reads.
- The Right Meeting Agenda: Effective meetings require a clear objective, a focused agenda that prevents off-topic discussions, and relevant materials sent in advance for team preparation.
- Running the Most Efficient Meeting of Your Life: Successful execution relies on strict time management, inclusive participation for all personality types, and ending with clear action owners and written follow-ups.
- The Meeting Responsibilities: Rotating roles like meeting facilitators empowers team members, builds shared accountability, and turns routine syncs into engaging growth opportunities.
The Standard Team Meeting
We all know them, we all experienced them, and I find them very boring, but sometimes needed – sadly. You might have another opinion on the subject, and that is perfectly fine; however, the reality is that your standard team meeting is no longer enough to capture your audience.
In the current era, with such a diversity of content and especially the fixation we have with very short content, talking to people for one hour and expecting them to stay focused the entire time is a bit nuts. Maybe worse when the meeting is fully online!
Even before the “age of shorts,” your standard meeting had a lot of issues that many – especially your first-timers – did not address, or if they did, not properly anyway. Let’s take a look at some of the most evident issues that the standard meeting brings.
“To Meeting…or To Mail?”
That is indeed the question every leader should be asking themselves before even attempting to click that send meeting button in Outlook. I know it’s hard for some of you, but honestly, not every single thing needs to be a meeting… some are just born to be emails.
Across my years, I have worked with many different senior managers, and – as is life – some have tried to “inspire” me and pushed me to absorb their own mentality (some good, some not so good). Among these mentalities, there was one about “anything you need to talk to your team about must happen in a meeting – gather your team and talk to them about it.” This is part of what I call the extreme leadership scenario: one side is focused on ignoring meetings as much as possible, while the other is intent on making anything and everything a meeting. Neither of them is the correct way.
Balance, logic, and common sense are what will save you here. You don’t need a meeting if you have a small topic or something that people are better off reading. Keep your meetings for things that actually need to be talked about, because a one-hour or even 30-minute connect is a big investment that people are making, so it must be worth it.
Another thing I saw across my years, sadly more of it post-2020, are the “status update meetings” that I feel are just a complete waste of time. It’s those “let’s have this recurring meeting just to have it.” Why waste so much time with this when you can use it to do something else?
Wasted time aside, there is also the question of perception and engagement with the people in these types of meetings: the more meetings like that you have, the worse it gets (well, unless there’s the right mix of people in them that actually enjoy spending time together and talking for the sake of it). I took charge of a situation at one point with a group of people that had no real progress on a project for over 6 months, but they had a weekly connect (kept and with meeting minutes). This is the example I always refer to when it comes to transforming a simple task into a “very corporate thing” where we meet just to meet – without any real substance to it.
One last thing regarding the standard meeting is the lack of focus on alignment and blockers. If you are taking the time (you and a bunch of people), make it about things that are actually relevant, like where and how you need to be aligned, and what is blocking your progress or what parts of the process need to be removed to push the work forward.
The Right Meeting Agenda
Now that we know a bit about the standard one, let’s look at how we should be doing it. And we always start with the foundation, in this case, the meeting agenda.
Before you even think of creating the meeting invite and sending it to people, you need to clearly establish the meeting objective. What is the meeting about? What are you planning on talking about? Is there an underlying message you want the team to reach? All these things must be crystal clear before anything is done, because a good anything has – before anything else – a strong foundation, or in this case, a clear objective.
A big issue at times in meetings is the tendency to drift away and start talking about other aspects, most not relevant to the current scope. For this reason, a good practice is to limit the topics to subjects that require group discussion or decision. By doing this, you establish a clear path for everyone, keep the entire thing on the right track, and avoid wandering off into the depths of the mind. A meeting that drifts away is a complete waste of time, remember that!
Lastly, in the preparation stage, any material that should be sent out before the meeting should go. Say you have to talk about some changes in the procedure – instead of relying on people’s recollection of said procedure, why not just attach it to the email (or link it) and prepare them a bit, saying “before we meet, please read up on procedure X as we will need to talk about some changes.” When people have the opportunity to prepare a bit before the connect, most will do it, so it is a good practice to give them the opportunity and have a group of folks ready to tackle the subject, instead of confused and unprepared ones.
Running the Most Efficient Meeting of Your Life
With a solid structure, prepared people, and an agenda ready to be discussed, it is time to run the actual thing. Mind you, running a meeting is not easy, and some leaders will have a more difficult time than others. Interestingly enough, I have an entire article on this topic here: Leadership Style: Should I Change Who I Am? Truthfully, it’s all about the type of personality you have, but with the right help, some coaching, courage, and will, anyone can do it.
The biggest mistake that first-time managers make in a meeting is all about time: they don’t have a good understanding of how valuable time is, and for this reason, many meetings either tend to be too long or too short, in either case not touching on the topics and points that are needed.
For this reason, it is crucial you have a very clear, often practiced schedule for the connect: make a planner, use your phone to time it, or do anything that helps you out. The main idea is to be mindful of the time. Just be sure to always leave at least 20% additional time for questions – because they will have them one way or another.
On the topic of personalities, there is something very important to think about when hosting a meeting: leave room at the table for every voice in your team. In every workplace, there are those that have a louder voice and those that keep to themselves or are a bit more reserved. Because of this, a leader must be mindful and make sure that everyone sitting at the table gets their two cents in. Do a round-table check on opinions, and you can solve any issues you might have with those stronger voices. This way, everyone can talk and share what they are thinking about. Remember: input is important from everyone, the more diverse the better, because you need an accurate and close-to-reality sample, not just the opinions of two people.
Lastly, we have action owners and next steps. Never leave a meeting without a clear ownership of things and the steps to come (if that is the case, of course). Leaving things in the air for people to wonder about is the worst thing you could do. Just take three minutes before the end and clearly communicate who is doing what and the next steps. Then follow this up with a written email, because “if it’s not in writing, it never happened.”
The Meeting Responsibilities
This one comes as a bonus for that extra “umph” in leadership. Not many leaders do this type of thing, and when it is done right, it can make so much difference.
What I have seen across the years, at least in the companies I worked at and what I saw in others, is the tendency to always rely on the same person for different things. If you have a hard-working individual in your team that is always there, always “the fixer,” and always eager to stand out, it’s more than likely that they will be doing a lot of the things.
But what if you had a system in place that would allow more people to do this? For the purpose of the meeting, you can rotate, for example, the facilitator role among your team. By doing this, you will empower others to take a grander role, be more in charge, and also experience a bit more than just “doing my job.” Not everyone will like it, of course, but some will – and that can give you a path to uncover extra talent and room for growth.
On the topic of responsibilities, and in the absence of AI tools that can do this for you, how about a note-taker? Before AI took over, meetings always had “the note-taker,” the person writing down everything and then sending it as meeting minutes. Online meetings now no longer require that since most tools already have transcript capabilities and you can just use that. Face-to-face meetings, however, would still rely on a note-taker, so this is a perfect opportunity to assign more responsibility to people and also increase the engagement factor in your team (or have people actually hate you for doing this, as not everyone enjoys taking notes).
But all jokes aside, what is important, even more so for the first-time manager, is to have the team share accountability for how the meeting runs. This falls down to how the message from the leader is delivered, and great leaders always make sure that people understand one simple thing: we can have a very productive, to-the-point, and efficient meeting, or we can just waste one hour and then go back to more chaos. The better you explain this message, the better your meetings will go. If people understand that it’s not just about you, it’s also about them, things tend to run a bit better.
See you next time!