36. Professor/Author, UNC Charlotte

Intro: Duration: (02:39)

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Jeff Hunt:

Hey everyone. I'm Jeff Hunt, and this is the Human Capital podcast produced by GoalSpan. My quest on this podcast is to uncover that deeply human aspect of work. And one of the things that we're faced with almost every day at work is meetings. I'm returning to this topic because as Josh Little, the CEO of volley said on one of my recent episodes meetings can feel so dysfunctional and the problem can seem so large and intractable that nobody does anything about it. Well, today we are going to do something about it.

My guest has literally written the book on meetings and how to turn this problem into a solution. Dr. Steven Rogelberg is an organizational psychologist who holds the esteemed title of chancellor's professor at UNC Charlotte for distinguished national international and interdisciplinary contributions.

He's an award-winning teacher and the recipient of the very prestigious Humboldt award for his research on meetings. And today we're going to discuss his latest book called the surprising science of meetings, how you can lead your team to peak performance. And by the way, I just finished reading this book and I absolutely love it.

I put it on my books list, the recommended books, reading list on the Human Capital podcast website. So you can go there to find it or anywhere that books are sold. The book was recognized by the Washington post as the number one leadership book to watch for. And Steven has been featured on all the major media outlets, including CBS This Morning, Freakonomics, HBR, WSJ, and BBC world just to name a few.

Adam Grant called Steven the world's leading expert on how to fix meetings. And he's currently the president of the society for industrial and organizational psychology. But before I welcome him on the show, I will share that Steven told me when he's not trying to avoid meetings or being depressed, having attended a bad meeting, he loves mountain biking, hiking fencing, watching formula one racing, and spending time with family and friends.

Welcome, Steven.

Steven Rogelberg:

Thank you very much. Thank you for that lovely introduction.

Jeff Hunt:

Yeah. Thanks for helping our listeners try to solve this, uh gosh, intractable problem, can we say that?

Steven Rogelberg:

You know, I actually don't think it's all that intractable. Just people have to have the appetite to actually do it so often, we think of meetings or bad meetings it's just a cost of doing business and that's not true. It can be fixed

Topic 1. Who or what inspired you most along your career path? (02:40)

Jeff Hunt:

Well, that's great. And I'm excited to unpack that with you. And before we do, I would love it if you would take us back on the journey of your career, give us the thumbnail of how you eventually ended up where you are and also share who inspired you most along the way?

Steven Rogelberg:

Sure. You know, as an organizational psychologist, I'd like to study issues at work that are causing distress. That is very common and I’d like to try to find solutions. And when you think about meetings, it kind of fits the bill, right?

We have tons of them. People are very frustrated by them. And so I thought research could be incredibly helpful. So that was why I was drawn to meetings. I just saw it as an incredibly practically meaningful question that was just thirsty for solutions. And I wanted to be part of that. In terms of who's been most inspirational in my life.

It's such an interesting question. And as I reflect on it, I don't think there's a single person. I think there are multiple people who I found inspirational. I genuinely believe that it's hard to find, it's hard to not find something inspirational in everyone you meet.

So, yeah I would say that it was multiple things from multiple people that have really inspired me to try to do meaningful work, to help people.

Jeff Hunt:

And going back to the very beginning, what brought you into academia and research and sort of work? What led you to where you are?

Steven Rogelberg:

As a doctoral student, I couldn't decide what I wanted to do when I finished. And in many regards, academics allows you the flexibility to pursue multiple paths. So it was the intellectual freedom, the intellectual entrepreneurship that can incur in academics that just allow me to, you know, basically enact a professional identity that, was multifaceted. And so it was an ideal fit.

Topic 2. Should we eliminate meetings? How to get rid of bad meetings? (05:00)

Jeff Hunt:

Fantastic. Now, as we sort of entering into this topic of meetings, some people might say, Steven, that meetings are so bad. Why shouldn't we just get rid of them?

Steven Rogelberg:

Well, I mean, a world without meetings is really much more problematic if you really think about it Jeff because you know, the fact is we need meetings.

Meetings are where communication, cooperation, coordination, consensus decision-making take place. In many regards, organizational democracy is manifested in meetings. So, the absence of meetings creates very meaningful problems. So, the goal is not to eliminate meetings. The goal is to eliminate bad meetings.

Jeff Hunt:

So, to eliminate bad meetings, points us to what some of the best meeting leaders are doing? Can you share a little bit about, what are these folks doing that are getting it right? And obviously, we're going to unpack the structural aspects of the meeting, what to do pre-meeting, during the meeting.

Post-meeting. But before we do that, maybe share a little bit about what these best meeting leaders are doing.

Steven Rogelberg:

In my interviews with thousands of individuals about the best meeting leaders, there's one description that seems to emerge associated with effectiveness, and that's a leader fully embracing their role as a steward of others' time.

This notion of stewardship is very meaningful. You know, when you're a steward, the thought of people leaving your meeting, thinking that was a waste of time is very upsetting to you. When you're a steward, you commit yourself to spending a few minutes actually preparing for the meeting. When you're a steward, you don't go to a meeting with the only hope of hearing yourself speak.

You want to elevate other voices. So this notion of stewardship underlies the effective leadership of meetings.

Jeff Hunt:

It's just playing respectful as well, isn't it? I mean, it's the best leaders are, have the utmost respect for the people that they work with in every aspect. And what you're really describing is respect for people's time.

Steven Rogelberg:

Yeah. Interestingly, we often adopt a stewardship mindset when we're meeting with key stakeholders, because we would never want those people to leave our meetings saying it was a waste of time, but for whatever reason, when it comes to our team or our peers, we just don't have that same mindset. And that's highly problematic.

Jeff Hunt:

Yes. And I think what's coming to mind for me. Is when you think about other stakeholders, maybe the example is the customer. We're going to be highly respectful of their time and we want it to be efficient because there are consequences. Whereas if I'm a mediocre manager holding lousy meetings, there might not be consequences if I can hide or fly under the radar. Right?

Steven Rogelberg:

Yeah. But I would say there are consequences, those individuals, that progress effectively through organizational levels, they have a keen ability to work with and through others. And that takes place in meetings. So why we might think that our behavior meetings, ah, it doesn't really matter.

To me, it's an incredible differentiator. If you're that leader who can effectively navigate a meeting, that's going to be incredibly helpful to you.

Jeff Hunt:

Definitely. And I imagine performance goes up all the way around because people are more clear on what's expected of them. There's better engagement if you're doing meetings well, then trust levels are higher, right?

Steven Rogelberg:

Yeah. You're absolutely right. The consequences of excellent meetings are plentiful. While we often think about meetings as being places of the drain, when meetings are done, right. They can actually be places of gain. You know, we found that employee engagement with the job overall can be fostered through excellent meeting experiences.

So good leaders, well, I should say when leaders run their meetings effectively, they promote employee engagement. Obviously, they're promoting team performance. And as the team excels, it's only a positive reflection on the leader.

Jeff Hunt:

Exactly. And I love your contrast of the meeting gain versus drain and share a little bit about when you're, when you leave a draining meeting, doesn't that have an implication on, what's next for you?

I mean, for me, just as an example, if I leave a bad meeting I'm like sitting there. Ruminating on that for a little while. I would love to just kind of take that out of my brain and move to the next project. But isn't that a thing?

Steven Rogelberg:

It is a thing, it's called meeting recovery syndrome.

And when we have a bad meeting, it does indeed stick with us. We do ruminate and it actually affects our productivity post-meeting

Topic 3. Pre-meeting best practices (10:39)

Jeff Hunt:

All right. So if you, if we were to dissect meeting behaviors and talk about best practices from your, from your book, and your research. Talk to us about pre-meeting during-meeting and post-meeting practices.

Steven Rogelberg:

Okay. So, so much of effectiveness can actually be predicted based on some of these meeting design decisions made. First and foremost, it starts with meeting size, larger meetings are fraught with different problems. They tend to be rated quite poorly. So being careful with your invitations, keeping the meeting as lean as possible is essential.

That's a design choice. And obviously, those people who are secondary to the meeting, if we give them the opportunity for input, we provide them with notes afterward. They're going to be okay. Not going to the meeting. Compelling agendas are really obviously a meaningful design characteristic.

I actually have innovation in agendas. Would you like to hear that? So, most agendas are framed as a set of topics to be discussed. What I want to challenge a meeting leader to do is to consider designing your agenda as a set of questions to be answered and by doing so. You now have to think about the meeting, right?

You have to think about really what you're trying to achieve. You have a better sense of who to invite to the meeting, right? They're relevant to the questions. You know, if the meeting's been successful, the questions have been answered. And if you just can't think of any questions.

Jeff Hunt:

Probably don't need to have a meaning.

Steven Rogelberg:

Exactly. Another design decision is setting times properly. We know that there's this phenomenon called Parkinson's law, which is that work expands to fill whatever time is allotted to it. So if you schedule a meeting for an hour, it will take an hour, but we can actually use this to our advantage.

Right? We can start scheduling meetings for 35 minutes, 42 minutes, whatever it is, and we will still get it done and be able to return time to other people. I guess the final design issue, I'll probably that I'll mention here. And it relates to a virtual-meetings, in particular, is the importance of having video on during these meetings. Video on improves presence and improves engagement.

So these are all things obviously critical to meeting a success. Now there are considerations around fatigue, however, what our research shows is that fatigue doesn't seem to really kick in if it's an excellent meeting. And so the video in itself is really not the fundamental problem associated with fatigue.

It's just a bad meeting is drains the heck out of you. So, that's probably the fourth design choice I would advocate for.

Jeff Hunt:

Video fatigue is such a real thing. And obviously, with the last couple of years of COVID, people are feeling that and it's potentially adding to burnout and some other problems that people experience in the workplace.

But one of the things that I've heard you mentioned that I really like is leaving the video on, but turning your view of your own video off, right?

Steven Rogelberg:

Yeah. So there are options in zoom and other packages that allow you to hide yourself. And that's what I'm doing during this conversation. So, I looked at myself to make sure I was in the frame, make sure I had no food hanging off my face.

And then once I did that, my video is covered. So now I feel like I'm just talking to you and this hiding self tool is really meaningful when you have yourself view on it's like looking at yourself in the mirror for extended periods of time. And that can be draining and taxing. So the hiding yourself view really allows you to minimize the downsides of video but still promote that presence, which is so critical.

And frankly, it reflects real life. Right? When we go to a meeting, we don't have a video in front of us. We don't have a mirror in front of us. And so turn off yourself, you and have your meeting.

Topic 4. During meeting best practices (15:04)

Jeff Hunt:

I love that. I love that. What about during meeting practices? So we show up, what should things look like?

Steven Rogelberg:

So first of all, you got to start the meeting well. Try to start it with energy appreciation, gratitude. This helps create more of a positive meeting mood state, and that's actually a thing. The best predictor of attendees' mood in a meeting is your mood. So, when you bring a kind of that more positive meeting mood into it.

Basically, the whole meeting will start to take on a different tenor and which results in better decisions, more careful listening thoughtfulness. So that's key. I think this also goes to facilitation. I'm kind of like what a great job you're doing here. Right? So when you think about you're facilitating a conversation, well, I'm meeting leaders doing the same thing.

So that meeting leader actively facilitating, making sure they're gaining lots of voices, if it's a larger meeting, encourage people to use the chat, chat's a fabulous option for building inclusion. And then I'd say another during the meeting practice that matters, you know, diversifying the meeting experience right now, almost all meetings, like look the same and you know, so people kind of habituate to it.

So one practice, for example, that has great promises to leverage silence in meetings. So, research shows that groups, op groups brainstorming in silence actually generate nearly twice as many ideas. And those ideas tend to be more creative and innovative. So why do you think that is? Why would groups brainstorming in silence, outperform those brainstorming with their mouths?

What do you think?

Jeff Hunt:

When I'm listening to somebody else talking I'm processing what they're saying rather than what I'm thinking about the issue.

Steven Rogelberg:

I love that. And so you're able to think independently, everyone's able to, in a sense talk at once, right? There's no waiting your turn and that's the ideal situation for brainstorming or, if you go back to what I said earlier about having agendas, framed as questions, right?

We could put those questions on a Google doc and people could have at it. And then after a short, short period of time, the meeting leader can look at it. See if there are some themes they can debrief in real-time, or it might be the case that they circle back with the group at a later date after they've digested it.

So silence is just a nice example of trying to diversify your meeting experiences. So those are some of the things I think help for the end meeting piece.

Jeff Hunt:

And I'll just add one more thing that you mentioned in your book that makes the case for leaving the video on which is this concept of social loafing.

Can you just say briefly what that is?

Steven Rogelberg:

Social loafing is the idea that. Effort in the presence of others, it's kind of a diffusion of responsibility and this effect is stronger when we feel anonymous. So when the video is off, we feel quite anonymous. And as a result, we tend to multitask throughout the entire meeting.

So video, you can still multitask with the video on, but it's clearly harder. So having that video on. No, it just creates that engagement in presence. But I will say this, Jeff, that if you're going to tell people that your video is going to be on you better run a darn good meeting. Right. You know, because their responsibility is on you to make sure that you respect the gift of time that people are giving you.

And now we've circled back to that notion of stewardship.

Topic 5. Post-meeting practices, peer to peer accountability, and hybrid meetings (18:47)

Jeff Hunt:

That makes sense. All right. So now we've wrapped things up in the meeting. What about post-meeting practices? What should the wrap-up of the meeting be? Cause that's one that we really didn't cover.

Steven Rogelberg:

So first of all, end on time, you know, our research shows that while starting a meeting late.

Is not well-received ending a meeting late is horrible. People absolutely can't stand that. End meetings well, and basically what that really speaks to is, is the idea that meetings need a closing. They should have a finale, right. And where things get wrapped up. So really with five minutes left in the meeting, that's your time to stop and say, all right, here's what we talked about.

Here's what we decided, here are the takeaways. Here are the directly responsible individuals, and here are some issues that will kick to our next meeting. You know, basically, your goal is to make sure that everyone leaves your meeting, knowing exactly what was accomplished. And next steps.

Jeff Hunt:

I would also ask you to comment a little bit on this concept of peer-to-peer accountability.

In meetings versus this traditional structural accountability of superior-subordinate or manager-employee accountability, are there ways that we can leverage meetings, Steven, to maximize the opportunity for peer-to-peer accountability?

Steven Rogelberg:

The meeting is run in a highly inclusive way. The decisions and choices made truly represent the collective.

When we have our closing and we recap those and we identify the owner of all of them publicly, then that peer-to-peer can't help but kick in. The key though is making sure that the process was highly inclusive. So, therefore, if you don't do what you said you were going to do, you're not just negatively affecting the supervisor.

Right? Because the meeting was inclusive, you're affecting everyone. And that's where you have some of that good peer-to-peer pressure.

Jeff Hunt:

I see. I've heard that there are a lot of organizations that have struggled with trying to do hybrid meetings as well. So in other words, you have a group of people that are in person.

Some are back in the office, some are virtual, like do those work?

Steven Rogelberg:

Yeah. Our research doesn't paint a lovely picture of hybrid meetings. Ultimately those attending virtually, tend to have a different experience. They just don't have that same level of inclusivity. They represent an out-group of sorts with those present being the in-group.

The meeting rooms are not truly designed with hybrid meetings in mind. Y. So let's say we flash forward into the future. Imagine a conference room where at each chair is a virtual participant or a real participant, right? That's a different type of meeting room structure. We're not, well, we are there, but we're not there practically in most organizations.

So, and, if you're a leader and you're leading a meeting and, it's a hybrid, meaning you have to level up your skills. It's much harder, right? It's much more challenging to make sure that those people who are remote are included. So, basically, hybrid meetings can work, but typically they don't work and that's due to the physical environment and the lack of skills of leaders.

Topic 6. Can non-leaders do something about bad meetings? (22:47)

Jeff Hunt:

Is there anything that non-leaders can do about bad meeting culture? So if I'm, if I'm listening to this podcast and I'm somebody that is an attendee of bad meetings and we have a bad meeting culture, what can I do?

Steven Rogelberg:

Yeah, well, that's part of the problem. Attendees are basically relinquishing their power when they enter into a meeting.

And that's where a lot of the frustration emerges. But there are still some things you can do. First of all, you can make sure that you are a model attendee, right? Behave passively well, listen, and keep it concise. Don't dominate. You can also engage in shadow facilitation.

You can do things such as Sasha, I know you were working on something like this, was there anything you want to add? So they can actually do some facilitation behind the scenes which is wonderful. And then finally, while we often spend a great deal of our time griping about the meetings we're in, is often the case that we're still part of the problem for the meetings that we lead.

So make sure your house is in order, make sure that you're running your meetings with stewardship. Right? We can all find some meetings on the calendar that we lead. So while we could be held captive in other meetings, let's just make sure that we're doing a great job and ours, and hopefully over time, our excellent meeting practices will become normative.

Topic 7. Lighting round questions (24:24)

Jeff Hunt:

I love that we're going to shift into some lightning-round questions. I'm going to ask you some quick questions. You just give me a top-of-mind answer. All right. The first one is, Steven what are you most grateful for?

Steven Rogelberg:

Well, the answer that came to mind immediately was everything, and I'm just one of those people.

Gratitude comes pretty easy for me. And, so I get grateful for most anything. I'm grateful my pug is no longer barking. I'm grateful for the opportunity to chat with you about a passion area of mine. And so, I tend to always find something I'm grateful for.

Jeff Hunt:

What's the most difficult leadership lesson you've learned over your career.

Steven Rogelberg:

For me, I overweighted con the feelings of cohesion over productivity. So when I would lead a group of very diverse individuals, Sometimes I was afraid to address certain topics, out of fear that conflict would emerge. And I recognize after some time that my job as a leader is actually to create that positive turbulence, allow those conflicts to be discussed in a safe way.

So that was the leadership lesson I learned that I think has been very.

Jeff Hunt:

Who is one person you would interview if you could living or not?

Steven Rogelberg:

Oh my gosh. Living or not. I mean, a list would be unreal. I mean, I could go historic. I mean, I could go, oh my goodness. There are so many. That would be a lot of fun.

I mean, I'd love to go from Moses to Albert Einstein. Hey, let's throw Jesus. Then there is Muhammad in there. I mean, there are so many fascinating people, you know, I revel in learning from others. And so the thought of having meaningful conversations to understand what people experienced and the choices they made, that's pretty exciting.

Jeff Hunt:

Do you have any top book recommendations?

Steven Rogelberg:

Well, I assume you mean besides mine. I tend to read fiction. I read a lot of journal articles, so I tend not to read much non-fiction other than the kind of scientific work. So from a fiction perspective.

I'm really reading a great book right now called the hail Mary project. It is really good at one, a ton of awards as if one of the best science fiction, but it's just executed fantastically well, so I'll throw that out there as a good fiction book if people want to read.

Jeff Hunt:

All right, well, I want to be respectful and end our meeting on time, but I'm going to ask you to share what's the single most important takeaway for our listeners. If you had to summarize it.

Steven Rogelberg:

So, first of all, before I do that, I want to thank you. You've been a fantastic steward of my time. I feel very well-respected and I'm grateful to be on your show. So, thank you for that. Probably the takeaway that I'd love for folks to have stemmed from a bunch of media interviews where.

Especially television, where they basically would ask me, what's the one best piece of advice to making meetings better. And it was actually the question that I did not know how to answer, because if someone who does the science things are never so simple as one best piece of advice. But now I have a piece of advice that is true to the science and I think is a good way to wrap up our conversation.

And that is if you want to make your meetings better. Ask the people who regularly attend your meetings, what's going well, not so well. And ideas for improvement, collect some information, go through that, learn, reflect, grow, try some new things. Asking people for their input is really the ultimate act of stewardship.

And so by doing so you not only get better, but you also send a message that you recognize that meetings are a collective phenomenon and that you have a responsibility to make sure that everyone comes out of that experience, feeling like their time was valued.

Jeff Hunt:

I love that. And it's such a simple thing to do with such profound implications, isn’t it?

Steven Rogelberg:

t really is. And people want it right? The frustration people have about their meetings is so significant. So, if you're a leader that actually is going to is trying to do something about it that really reflects well on you.

Jeff Hunt:

No question, Steven, thank you for coming on the show and sharing so much wisdom. I loved our conversation.

Steven Rogelberg:

Well, thank you. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. And um, I hope our paths cross sometime.

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Outro(29:41)

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Jeff Hunt:

Thanks for listening to the show this week. We release new episodes every other Tuesday. Let me know what you thought of this episode by emailing humancapitalgoalspan.com. Human capital is produced by GoalSpan. Subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts. And please share this podcast with your colleagues, team, or friends. Thanks for being human kind.