You need more (shorter) meetings

Alysha Khan • public
• 2 min read

Yup, I said it.

Welcome to this week's edition of Campaign Confessionals and this Sunday, I wanted to talk about:

[It's Raining] Meetings!

Most of us in Marketing Ops have found ourselves writing a giant essay in Slack/email/a ticket, trying our absolute best to explain some oddball technical issue to some poor coworker who we know deep down is not going to understand.

But we do it anyway. And we get increasingly frustrated trading professionally spicy comments over the Internet and the issue takes weeks to resolve.

So the next time you find yourself channeling Shakespeare? Marie Kondo your calendar and find time for a 15 min sync.

Because really, when we talk about meetings, we're actually talking about effective communication strategies. In marketing operations, we face a triple threat when it comes to effective communication because we need to communicate:

  1. Very specific and/or technical information
  2. To a very diverse group of stakeholders
  3. Quite frequently

And because of this triple threat, meetings actually become a crucial tool in our toolkit. Sharing a room (virtually or in-person) can help us:

  • Leverage body language to assess understanding. Even if you're a cameras-off type of company, just hearing someone's voice and how engaged they are can help you determine how well your message/explanation is landing.
  • Build relationships with key stakeholders. Those few minutes of chit-chat at the beginning of every meeting build up to a lot of goodwill over time. And perhaps I'm a little Machiavellian but all of that goodwill is something I can eventually cash in on when I need to reinforce process or do some change management.
  • Ensure you have some good old-fashioned cover your butt insurance. When you stick people in a room, the "I didn't see your email" or "I didn't have time to watch your training" excuses get a lot weaker.  

But how do we find time for the good kind of meetings amidst a sea of ridiculously boring, could have been an email, I'm going to just eat my snacks camera off kind of meetings?

Be ruthless about the meetings on your calendar.

Is there an agenda or clear decisions that need to be made? Is my attendance needed or can I send someone else? Do I actually have a relevant and important contribution to make to a decision? Have I actually blocked time to pre-read and/or pre-prep any materials?

All of this is so much easier said than done. I'm still learning to fully be the meeting slashing samurai I imagine myself being in my dreams. This leads us to...

Tips for the coming week

  1. Go through your calendar rigorously and find one meeting to decline. Bonus points if it's a recurring meeting. Decide whether you're going to delegate the meeting, review the materials afterward, or just let it float on out of your life.
  2. The next time you find yourself in the middle of writing a giant Slack/email/ticket essay, stop. Take a quick break to decompress and then find 15 mins to review the issue face-to-face with your stakeholder. Then for that meeting...
  3. Check out this meeting best practices guide that I really like and find one change you can make to an upcoming meeting you are running this week. For example, maybe this is the week you get strict about starting and ending meetings on time.

See you next week,

🫶🏽 Alysha

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