Question 1

How do you run a meeting that is worth attending?

Accepted Answer

By deciding what **decision or output** the meeting exists to produce, and cancelling it if there is not one — because most bad meetings are not badly run, they are meetings that should never have been called.

**Before:**

**State the purpose as an outcome.** "Decide the launch date" rather than "discuss the launch". If you cannot write it, do not hold it.

**Invite only the people needed** to reach that outcome. Every additional attendee reduces participation and multiplies cost — a ten-person hour is more than a working day.

**Circulate the material in advance**, and expect it to be read. Some organisations open meetings with **silent reading time**, which is unusual and works, because it guarantees a shared basis rather than assuming one.

**Say who decides.** Ambiguity about whether a meeting is consultative or decisive causes most of the frustration afterwards.

**During:**

**Start on time** regardless of who is missing, which is the only thing that changes lateness.

**Hold the structure.** Park tangents visibly rather than following them.

**Draw out the quiet people deliberately.** The most informed person is frequently not the most talkative, and **senior people speaking first anchors the discussion** — which is why some teams have the most junior speak first on purpose.

**Name the decision out loud** when it is made, so everyone leaves with the same understanding.

**After:**

**Send the decision and the actions**, with names and dates, within the day. **A meeting with no written output is a conversation**, and its conclusions will be remembered differently by each attendee within a week.

**What to cancel outright:** status meetings that could be a written update; recurring meetings nobody has questioned in a year; meetings where the decision-maker is absent; and meetings called because a decision is uncomfortable to make alone.

**On remote meetings specifically:** cameras optional rather than mandated; explicitly invite contributions, since interruption is harder online; and **never leave remote attendees on a screen in a room of people**, which reliably excludes them.

Question 2

How do you run a useful one-to-one?

Accepted Answer

By treating it as their meeting, not yours — a regular protected conversation about how things are going, rather than a status update the manager could have read in a report. What it is for:

Question 3

How do you give difficult feedback?

Accepted Answer

Promptly, privately, and about observable behaviour and its effect — because the two things that make feedback fail are delay and vagueness, and both come from the giver's discomfort rather than from

Question 4

How do you actually prepare for a performance review?

Accepted Answer

By doing the work before the meeting — because a review is largely a negotiation over a narrative, and the person who arrives with evidence sets the narrative while the person who arrives to be told

Question 5

How do you onboard a new starter well?

Accepted Answer

By treating the first weeks as a deliberate process rather than an administrative one — because early experience predicts how long someone stays and how quickly they become effective, and most

Question 6

What should you actually do in the first 90 days of a new job?

Accepted Answer

Learn before you change anything — because the credibility you spend early cannot be earned back, and the most common failure of a new starter is arriving with answers before understanding the

Question 7

How to ask for a promotion?

Accepted Answer

Asking for a promotion involves preparation, timing, and effective communication. Understand your value, schedule a meeting, and be open to feedback to enhance your chances of success.

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