Increasing Your Happiness in Meetings

Engineers moving into leadership sometimes have a hard time navigating the increased demands for meetings. And when meetings waste your time, or go off the rails, it hurts your team’s productivity and even affect their ability to work together. How can you make meetings better? In her talk, “Three Ways to Grow Your Happiness in Meetings,” Marcy Swenson offers great strategies for making meetings vital and worthwhile.

This is the one of a ten-part series covering the sessions from Calibrate 2016, an engineering leadership conference held on September 30, 2016 in San Francisco.

One big step, she points out, is just thinking ahead: what do successful meetings look like? Are decision-makers participating? Is the decision-making process clear?

She also uncovers techniques for encouraging psychological safety in meetings. These techniques, reinforced by research done at Google and UCLA, can help shape meetings into opportunities for team-mates to participate and share equally.

Finally, she reveals a great tip that will make it possible for engineering leaders to iterate on what makes meetings successful and continually improve them. I won’t tell you what it is; watch Marcy’s talk to the end, and be sure to take notes.