In order to lead people, you need to learn how to communicate effectively.

When I first got into a managing role, nobody taught me beforehand how to set up a structured meeting culture, so I read a lot and adopted meeting styles I saw working from other people and mentors.

In this article, I will teach you 4 basic principles I wish I knew when I first started out that, when followed, will 10x the productivity of your meetings.

1. Necessity: Does This Have to Be a Meeting?

Before even setting up a meeting, ask yourself, “Could this be a phone call or an email?”

Go even further and find out if this is something that needs to be synchronous communication, meaning “live,” or is it sufficient just to record yourself in a small video, maybe with your screen, and send it out to your team so they can watch it at 2x speed? (Loom is a great app for that.)

Try not to waste anyone’s time.

Also, remember: Just because you have a busy schedule doesn’t mean you’re actually getting stuff done.

2. Purpose: Define a Goal

Okay, so it has to be a meeting. Then let’s be precise about it.

How often do you attend meetings that don’t have any outcome? All of you are just sitting in a room, discussing, and then after an hour or more you leave, feeling empty because you essentially just wasted your time without achieving anything. Sounds familiar? Chances are that there was no clear goal or theme defined before the meeting. That’s why meetings, in general, have such a bad rep.

First of all, don’t set any meetings if you don’t know what you want to get out of them; I think this goes without saying. But if you need a meeting, define the goal in the name of the invitation.

Is it a Decision-Making Meeting (where something needs to be decided upon), is it a Work Meeting (where you want to work with others on a specific task), or is it an Update Meeting (where you want to get a status on a specific task or project)? The latter should be by far the shortest meetings you conduct.

An example of an effective subject line could be “[Decision] Salary Increase 2024” or “[Work] Presentation Board Meeting August 2024.”

3. Clarity: Set an Agenda and Breaks

This is crucial to keep the desired timeframe. Set a clear agenda with times, so everybody knows what topics will be discussed at the meeting. This gives your team time to prepare beforehand and nobody will be surprised.

Be rigorous in keeping the times; let’s say you’ve reserved 10 minutes for Topic X. Cut it after 10 minutes, note the status if you’re not finished, and set a follow-up to continue. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it’s okay to defer topics.

There is also a feature in Outlook to end a time slot some minutes earlier than originally defined. So, let’s say you set a meeting from 10:00 to 10:30, it will automatically be set from 10:00 to 10:25, giving everyone a 5-minute break between sessions.

Use this feature and stick to the times; thank me later.

4. Lead the Meeting

It’s your meeting; you invited people; they are investing their time, so it’s up to you to make something of it.

There are some things that are crucial in leading a meeting, first of all, and I think this goes without saying: SHOW UP (ON TIME). Do not let people wait, do not cancel last minute without an explanation; there is a team counting on you.

Another point is that people tend to discuss a lot and wander away from the topics. But if you’ve followed the steps above, you have an agenda, you have a goal, you need to stick with it and be rigorous. If the discussion starts to heat up, remind everyone about the goal and tasks at hand.

I know this sounds easier said than done because sometimes things come up that have to be addressed, but you’re better off noting them down and resolving them at a different time.

Nail these four basics and you will notice that people will actually like to attend your meetings.

Unlocking the secrets to mastering new skills quickly isn’t just about hard work — it’s about using the right strategies.

Here’s how you can supercharge your learning process with three powerful steps.

Step 1: Get in the Right Mindset

Before you even start to learn anything, you have to get into a mindset of growth. As with almost all achievements in life, motivation is the key to unlocking potential. Having the desire, or even better, the need to grow is a strong intrinsic motivation and will keep you committed for the long run. Of course, there are other motivational factors, like wanting to land that next great job or get a promotion to increase your salary, but those extrinsic motives are often short-lived.

Another strong motivation for me personally was scarcity. I was working as a manager for a company that went through extreme cost cuttings, and we wanted to conduct an employee survey. As I didn’t like the idea of going through hundreds of handwritten pages, I decided to learn programming. Over the course of 12 weeks, I learned to develop a full-stack web application that allowed me to conduct the survey digitally and automatically get the results in a neat dashboard.

(This was before MS Forms, so I actually had to deal with how to store the data in SQL 😃)

Step 2: Plan Your Studies

If you want to learn something by yourself, you cannot rely on the curriculum of a university. You have to plan your own curriculum, which means you need to learn how to actually learn. This has a huge advantage because you can focus on exactly the topics you are most interested in and can leave out things you already know.

When I learned Full-Stack Web Development, I started by looking at what universities were doing (the study programs are mostly public information) and how other people who learned it went about it. I wrote everything down in a checklist and used the following headings:

1. Information (Things I need to memorize)

2. Ideas (Things I need to understand)

3. Processes (Things I need to practice)

Then the research started, and I filled out my checklist with everything I could find. After that, I searched for the best resources to learn from for each of those things. In my case, it was a website called codecademy.com, an online learning platform called pluralsight.com, and the CS50 course by Harvard University (FREE).

Step 3: Learn Through Practice

Science suggests that actually practicing is the fastest way to learn any topic. So, start by setting yourself up with a project — something that brings value to you and is complex enough that you learn everything you planned in step 2.

Define a goal to stop you from procrastinating. For my example, it was telling my boss that I would have something ready in 12 weeks, and I delivered. Of course, I could have backed out because this wasn’t my job, and nobody expected me to do it. But sometimes, even setting such an imaginative deadline puts just the right amount of pressure on you to not give up learning the skill.

Bonus: Remember

Chances are high that you master your project and afterward forget everything you learned just as fast as you incorporated it into your memory. This is where spaced repetition comes in handy. I use an app called Anki for that, where you can put questions and answers on cards, and an algorithm will determine when a card is shown to you based on the last time you got it right. This is a proven technique to remember what you learned.

Last Words and Further Reading

I really hope that this article gave you some inspiration to learn about a new topic, not only on a surface level but to dive in deep to master a new skill. Most of what I explained here I got from a book called “Ultralearning” by Scott Young.

For someone who just started out in a management role, it might feel like the jump into cold water.

It’s a common story for many managers. Soon after being promoted to lead a department or business, you’re faced with the daunting task of figuring out how to lead well. There are best practices which you’ve heard about, but it seems impossible. This is why I wrote this overview of my perspective for other managers like myself.

Establish KPIs

You might not have had them in mind when you took the job, but establishing KPIs is essential to the success of any business.

It’s easy to ignore key performance indicators when you first start out. But soon enough, KPIs will become important for assessing your performance.

Accumulating data allows businesses to refine their processes and subsequently grow revenue.

You need to find out which particular KPIs are relevant for the business you are in and which new ones you want to establish in order to measure the progress even better.

You need to build KPIs that are useful for the company, but also ones that are useful for you.

All of those KPIs should be easily understandable and only measure relevant factors that are controllable and therefore the KPI can be improved by decisions. This is what a lot of new leaders get wrong, they create new KPIs just for the sake of it.

If you can’t make KPIs work for you because your senior managers stopped taking them seriously, try to work out why they stopped and start to reinvent the KPIs from there.

Learn to Delegate

Learning to delegate was the biggest game-changer for my career in management. I think this is essential for anyone who wants to be a great leader. It can be something you’ve probably never had to do before, and to many young managers, it feels strange or uncomfortable at first.

If you’re someone who likes to do things yourself — and if you’re someone with a lot of ambition, that will likely be the case — you might find it really hard initially to step back from your job and let other people take over.

However, there are lots of advantages of delegating. For one, it allows you to do more than one thing at once. It also creates opportunities for other people to learn and grow, which is great if they’re looking to develop their own careers. What’s more, it builds trust in the workplace.

Just try it, ask your team members to do things, it sounds so obvious yet many managers just don’t do it.

Doing everything yourself will just hold you back from reaching greater goals. Learn to trust others.

This brings us to the next big point.

Trust Your Team

Teams are like family in the sense that you can not necessarily choose them but you need to trust them.
When you learn to trust your team, your team will learn to trust you.
You have to be able to count on the people who work for you, and for them to be able to count on you. This is something that needs building over time.

You can’t expect people to become great at their jobs immediately. They will take time until they are comfortable in their roles and until they know that their growth is supported by the company.

I learned that you need to be very clear and direct about what you want and how you want it to be done. If you don’t, people will not understand what they’re supposed to do or how they should do it, or when they should do it and you will become frustrated in the progress because targets will not be reached.

I found that it was helpful to set up a meeting schedule with your team members and stick to it. This became easier as time went by.

In those meetings, you want to review the progress of your team. As they’re progressing towards the targets you have planned, you can give them more responsibilities.

Get Good at Presenting

Many new leaders are afraid of public speaking because of the way they were taught at school (especially if it was one of those schools where bullying was rampant). But there’s no reason to be afraid; it’s an essential skill for great leaders.

Confident people who are good at presenting themselves can convince others that their ideas are both interesting and thoughtful.

Those skills are especially useful in top-management meetings where you need to present the progress of your work.

Try to present your points without too many words or fillers. For every slide or sentence you want to present ask yourself: “Is this essential for the point I’m making?” if the answer is “no”, leave it out.

Read, A LOT

“Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” — Harry S. Truman

Top managers in companies are often not aware of the latest developments in research and books. This lack of awareness may pose a threat to the company’s operation. It is therefore important for top managers to read, listen, learn about what is happening in their industry.

This information will help them stay informed on what they need to do or when they need to do something that needs improvement in their company. It will also provide them with an idea on how to deal with challenges faced by the employees within the company which has been caused due to externalities related to competition, technological changes, etc.

I would strongly suggest subscribing to one of the top publications, even though those can be pricey at times, the knowledge generated will pay for it in the long run. I personally am a subscriber to “The Economist”.

Build a Network

The more extensive your network, the more opportunities it will provide you. Other people can benefit from knowing you, too. For example, you might help someone in their career when they’re in need of it or they, in turn, might help you when you need it.

At the start of your career in management, keep in touch with friends and family in order to stay grounded and to get used to working with people who are not involved in your job.

Start by giving your LinkedIn-Profile a professional look and begin connecting to various people in the same business as you are.

Heres’s a great tutorial I found on getting your LinkedIn to look professional.

Work hard and it will pay off. The more you study and learn about management, the better you’ll be at it.

I hope this article was helpful for you.