How to Run a Meeting, for dRTPs: All in One View

Content from Introduction

Last updated on 2025-05-15 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 16 minutes

Overview

Questions

How do you run effective and inclusive meetings to progress your collaborative project?

Objectives

Prepare an agenda for a meeting
Assign roles to meeting participants and set expectations for meeting culture
Enable good note taking
Facilitate inclusive discussions that enable everyone to participate
Identify and mitigate your own disruptive behaviours and those of other meeting participants
Guide meeting participants in effective decision-making
Prevent discussions from diverging away from the intended topic and/or going over time
Convert meeting discussions into actionable tasks on the relevant project

Introduction

This is a lesson created via The Carpentries Workbench. It is written in Pandoc-flavored Markdown for static files and R Markdown for dynamic files that can render code into output. Please refer to the Introduction to The Carpentries Workbench for full documentation.

What you need to know is that there are three sections required for a valid Carpentries lesson:

questions are displayed at the beginning of the episode to prime the learner for the content.
objectives are the learning objectives for an episode displayed with the questions.
keypoints are displayed at the end of the episode to reinforce the objectives.

Instructor Note

Inline instructor notes can help inform instructors of timing challenges associated with the lessons. They appear in the “Instructor View”

Our First Exercise (10 minutes)

Think of an example of a bad meeting you attended. What did you find was making you not want to attend more meetings like it? Why did it make such an impression on you? Try to differentiate between what was bad about the behavior of the chair and attendees and what was good about the setup of the meeting. Take a few minutes to write down some notes about your answer, then introduce yourself to the other participants and tell them about it.

Content from Creating an agenda

Last updated on 2025-05-15 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 45 minutes

Overview

Questions

Objectives

TBD

Key Points

TDB

Content from Assign meeting roles

Last updated on 2025-05-15 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 45 minutes

Overview

Questions

Objectives

TBD

Key Points

TDB

Content from Note taking

Last updated on 2025-05-15 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 45 minutes

Overview

Questions

Objectives

TBD

Key Points

TDB

Content from Facilitation & Disruptive Behaviours

Last updated on 2025-05-15 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 60 minutes

Overview

Questions

How can I handle and reduce disruptions during a meeting?
How can I ensure that every meeting participant can contribute effectively?

Objectives

At the end of this episode, learners will be able to…

intervene and provide feedback to remedy disruptive behaviours.
create contribution opportunities for all participants during a meeting.

Introduction

Everyone has been in a meeting that runs too long, is disorganised, has someone who talks too much, or has other pain points. Some of these challenges can be reduced by planning before the meeting but occasionally action will need to be taken directly during the meeting, e.g. interrupting the persistent talker, making people aware of the time left in the session, and implementing processes to reduce the likelihood of it happening again.

Identifying Disruptive Behaviours

The goal of a facilitator chairing a meeting is to complete the agenda within the assigned timeframe, giving each attendee a chance to contribute to the decisions being made.

It’s easy for certain behaviours to work against this, by slowing down the meeting or suppressing voices. Therefore, it’s important that the chair can identify these disruptors to prevent them negatively affecting the meeting.

Overly Negative

Overly negative participants may frequently complain or argue, in pursuit of perfection or simply personal attention. This has the effect of reducing the optimism of other participants, and slowing down progress.

Overly Positive

Overly positive participants may be too agreeable, leading to overcommitments without critical assessment of viability. This can lead to under delivery or increased team stress when deliverables are due.

Dominating Conversation

Some participants love to speak, they may have strong ideas or simply believe their experience/tenure gives them a larger platform. This may lead to rambling, and reduce the ability for all participants to feel comfortable contributing their own ideas.

Diverting Conversation

Some participants frequently attempt to divert the conversation, this may be an attempt to stay light-hearted during stressful meeting or simply disinterest in the topic. This may lead to the meeting running over time, or agenda items not being completed.

Handling disruptive behaviour

Dealing with disruptions can be slightly scary, but the other meeting participants rely on you, as the chair, to bring the meeting back on track. Most of the times this can be done in a gentle, non-confrontational manner. This can be done as a two-step intervention:

First, interrupt, if necessary, and state your observation of what is happening. E.g. “We are getting a bit of track here and are no longer talking about our objective.”
Second, suggest a constructive way forward. E.g. “Let us refocus, the question we were discussing was… Who can suggest a solution here?”

However, if this is not successful, it might be necessary to be firmer in calling out the disruption. Address the disrupting person by name, and tell them what to do or stop doing. For example, “Tina, please refrain from using dismissive language when talking about your colleagues work.”

Forming the Fellowship of the Ring

Setting

You’ve just gotten back from a project kick-off meeting yesterday. It ran too long, the agenda seemed aimless and no-one stuck to it, and Gimli rambled for far too long on tangential topics.

You’re part of the RSE sub-team in the project, and you’re determined that your meetings will NOT be death-by-powerpoint and that Gimli will talk about as long as everyone else in the team, no longer.

Now you’re in the team meeting. Gimli is talking about the project tracker you should be using, and he’s spent fifteen minutes explaining how good the Mithril Project manager (tm) is. Legolas would like to use the Lembas project tacking method, and you can’t quite seem to get a word in edgewise.

Exercise

Discuss in small groups (or write down, if you’re working solo):
- What types of disruptions are these? See the NOAA resource for more different types of disruptors and how to deal with them.
- What might be a good way to handle this?
- Assign the roles of Gimli and Legolas to two team members. Have a chair role-play how to redirect and defuse this type of difficult behaviour.

What did we learn?

Thinking about the exercise: What went well? What was hard? Interrupting when a meeting isn’t “going right” isn’t easy, but it doesn’t have to be hard. Some points to remember:

Address disruptions in two ways.
- At the time the disruption happens, make sure the behaviour is stopped.
- After the meeting, make sure that you look at systemic ways to reduce that type of disruption as well - e.g. if you always run over time, consider assigning a standard “timekeeper” role to every meeting.
Practice can make it easier to interrupt, but be aware of power dynamics: it’s one thing to stop a disagreement when you’re chairing a meeting, but it might (or might not) be wise to interrupt someone who is in a much “higher” position in a hierarchy, if they aren’t receptive to feedback.
If you do have power or privilege (e.g. you’re a chair, or you’re a member of an in-group), make sure to use that power and privelege to support marginalised members. Sometimes it could be as simple as repeating what another person said and attributing it to the original speaker.

Key Points

Set explicit expectations and be ready to intervene gently then forcefully if disruptive behaviours recur.
Invite and make space for contributions from meeting participants.
Reinforce and attribute the contributions of marginalised individuals.

Content from Making decisions

Last updated on 2025-05-15 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 45 minutes

Overview

Questions

Objectives

TBD

Key Points

TDB