Good or Bad Meetings with Wade Foster

Name: Good or Bad Meetings with Wade Foster
Uploaded: 2019-03-11T17:56:06+00:00
Duration: 2 min 8 s
Channel: Wade Foster
Description: In this interview segment, Wade Foster discusses how to run effective meetings for distributed, virtual teams across time zones. He emphasizes that…

11 Mar 2019 · 2 min

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2:08

In this interview segment, Wade Foster discusses how to run effective meetings for distributed, virtual teams across time zones. He emphasizes that meetings should not be used for status updates; instead, status information belongs in pre‑read documents that participants review beforehand. Meetings must have a clear agenda and specific problem‑solving questions to make the shared time valuable. As the company grew, meeting cadences evolved, but the core practice remained: after each meeting, the team rates its usefulness with a quick red‑yellow‑green feedback loop, noting what worked and what didn’t. This continuous feedback helps refine meeting structures and improve efficiency over time.

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All right. So, so many interesting questions around this. I want to talk about culture, but before we do that, I think I'm going to go a little more micro and how you do meetings. So like, how have you found is like the best way when you've got these people that are all virtual, different time zones to like actually meet and discuss stuff or do you?
Yeah. Yeah. We, so we do have meetings. We certainly have a lot more meetings than we had, you know, when we were 10 people. You know, I think the thing that's critical for running your meetings is it's a lot of the same things that you want to do when you're in an office. Um, honestly, like, effective meetings are effective meetings whether you're holding them via a Zoom conference like we're in or whether you're holding them in a conference room with a big table on them. Um, so for us, the thing that we focus on is meetings are not status updates. We're not going to get a bunch of people on a Zoom conference and have people read off status updates to us. It's an inefficient use of time. If you have a status update, it should be in a document that people read. So when we do a meeting, we try and make sure that all the status updates are delivered ahead of time. And then when you get in the meeting, there's a specific agenda. There's questions that you want to solve. There's things you want to ask so that you're making use of this time you have together to dig into the problems that I think are important. Now, it took us a while to sort of get some of the structure right for us. And it changes too. As we've grown, some of our meeting cadences have changed. But one of the things I think that we have done over the years that's been smart is we are constantly asking, like, how'd that meeting go? So, like, at the end of the meeting, when we close out of Zoom and Slack, we'll have a little, you know, red, yellow, green. Uh, is that a good meeting, good use of time? Was that a bad meeting, not a good use of time? And, and why? And so that's helped us sort of like tweak some of the things we do to run our meetings as we've evolved and grown to make them better.