Meetings are one of the most visible and most wasted resources in any organisation. As a new manager, how you run your team meetings sends an immediate signal about your standards and your respect for people's time. Meetings that are poorly prepared, poorly facilitated and leave people unclear on what was decided actively undermine trust and engagement. The principles of a well-run meeting are straightforward, and applying them consistently puts you ahead of the majority of managers your team has previously worked for.
1 Start with purpose: not every meeting should be a meeting
The first question to ask about any meeting is whether it is the right format for what you are trying to achieve. Meetings are valuable for discussion, decision-making and building shared understanding. They are poor substitutes for information sharing that could be an email, status updates that could be a written report, or individual feedback better delivered one-to-one. Running a meeting for things that do not require one trains your team to discount the ones that do.
Before scheduling a meeting, be explicit about what it is for: what decision needs to be made, what problem solved, what alignment reached? If you cannot answer that clearly, the meeting probably should not happen, or not in its current form. This discipline alone — consistently questioning whether a meeting is the right vehicle — saves significant time and raises the quality of those that do take place.
When scheduling a meeting, include the purpose in the invitation: not just a title but a one-sentence statement of what it is for. Something like: 'Purpose: decide on our approach to X' or 'Purpose: share findings and agree next steps on Y.' This takes thirty seconds, immediately raises the quality of preparation people do, and makes it obvious if the meeting is actually necessary at all.
2 Prepare the agenda — and share it in advance
An agenda is not a formality. It tells people what to prepare, signals what kind of contribution is expected from them and enables participants to assess whether they actually need to attend. Sending an agenda 24 hours before a meeting transforms the quality of the conversation because people arrive having thought about the relevant issues rather than being surprised by them.
A useful agenda item is not just a topic — it is a topic with a clear objective (inform, discuss, decide) and a time allocation. Without these, agenda items expand to fill whatever time is available and the meeting tends to run long on the wrong things. With them, you have a tool for redirecting the conversation when it drifts and a shared understanding of what the meeting is supposed to produce.
Format each agenda item as: [Topic] — [Objective: inform / discuss / decide] — [Time: X minutes]. For example: 'Project X update — inform — 5 mins' or 'Q3 priorities — decide — 20 mins.' Share this at least 24 hours before the meeting, including any pre-reading. Meetings where people show up having done preparation are categorically more productive than those where everyone is reading the document in the room for the first time.
Running effective meetings and building high-functioning team rhythms is covered in the LeadWise Emerging Leaders Program — with practical tools for facilitation, decision-making and keeping your team aligned without over-meeting.
Explore the program — €2993 Facilitate the conversation, not just the agenda
A good meeting facilitator does more than move through agenda items in order. They notice when the conversation is circling without progress and redirect it. They pull quieter voices into the discussion, especially when a group has a few dominant contributors. They keep an eye on the time without being rigid. And they distinguish between a productive disagreement worth having and a conversation that has drifted from the meeting's purpose.
For new managers, the hardest facilitation habit to build is restraint: the temptation to fill silences with your own views, or to drive toward the conclusion you already had in mind, is significant. But a meeting in which the manager does most of the talking is not a meeting — it is a briefing with an audience. The value of a meeting comes from the quality of collective thinking, and that requires the manager to create space rather than occupy it.
If you find meetings drifting, two phrases do most of the work: 'Let's come back to the agenda — what do we need to decide on X?' and 'We're running short on time — can we take Y offline or put it on the next agenda?' Neither is rude; both are professional. Building the habit of using them prevents the meeting from being hijacked by tangents while still signalling that you heard what was raised.
4 Make decisions visible and record them
One of the most common meeting failure modes is everyone leaving with a different understanding of what was decided. The conversation felt productive, but when people go to act on it they discover they were not aligned — they just did not realise it during the meeting. Preventing this requires making decisions explicit in the room and recording them immediately.
Before moving to the next agenda item, briefly summarise what was decided and who is doing what by when. "So we've agreed X, and Jamie is going to do Y by Thursday — is everyone aligned on that?" This thirty-second check at each decision point is worth more than fifteen minutes of meeting notes produced afterwards, because it catches misalignments while everyone is still present with a shared context.
Assign someone to capture decisions and actions in a shared document during the meeting — ideally visible to all in real time. Keep it simple: Decision, Owner, Deadline. At the end, read the list aloud and ask if it accurately captures what was agreed. Send it within an hour of the meeting ending. This practice, done consistently, eliminates the 'I thought we agreed...' problem almost entirely.
5 Close well and create accountability
How a meeting ends is as important as how it is run. A strong close takes two minutes: confirm what was decided, name who is doing what by when, and ensure everyone leaves with a shared understanding of the next step. Meetings that end with the conversation trailing off — people quietly closing laptops and drifting away — leave an accountability vacuum that undermines the value of everything discussed.
A brief retrospective question is also worth building in periodically: was this meeting useful? Did we achieve what we came here to do? Teams that feel genuinely consulted on the quality of their meeting rhythms are more likely to show up prepared and engaged. And the manager who occasionally asks whether meetings are working is signalling that the question matters.
Two minutes before the end of every meeting, do a quick close: summarise the decisions, name the actions and owners, confirm the next meeting if relevant, and ask if there are any questions. Then stop. This two-minute habit transforms the quality of follow-through because it creates explicit accountability in the room rather than hoping people remember what they committed to after they leave.
The bottom line
Good meetings do not happen by accident. They are the product of clear purpose, deliberate preparation, skilled facilitation and a consistent habit of making decisions explicit and recording actions. None of this is complicated, but all of it requires intentionality — especially for new managers who may be running their first regular team meetings and setting norms that will shape their team's culture for a long time.
The return on investment of meeting discipline is significant: less time in ineffective conversations, clearer alignment on priorities, faster follow-through and a team that feels their time is respected. In an environment where most managers run mediocre meetings, running excellent ones is a visible and meaningful demonstration of competence.