Good Meetings Are Actually Possible - Here's How
Summary
Libby Fischer used to dread meetings, just like the rest of us. But instead of accepting that "this meeting could have been an email" was just the way things work, she did something different: she figured out how to design meetings that people actually wanted to attend. Meetings where real problems got solved, where the team talked more than the leader, and where everyone left feeling more connected and clear about next steps.
What’s in it for you:
You're tired of meetings that feel like they waste everyone's time
You want your team to actually look forward to weekly check-ins
You're ready to stop being the person who talks the most in every meeting
You believe meetings can be where real work happens (not where work goes to die)
You want to infuse moments of joy, celebration, and culture—even when things are hard
Helia’s Perspective
From Jess
I am someone who oscillates wildly between wanting to work alone — going through emails and writing articles and reviewing and dropping comments/suggestions in Google docs like it's my job (which it sometimes is!) — AND wanting to be WITH HUMANS, talking and conversing and learning. There's so much good that comes from meetings, and yet...
When I had a chance to start from scratch with Helia (without lots of team meetings and 1:1s and special project check-in's and leadership team sessions and offsites), my world suddenly had so much more space. And honestly? Work became so much more joyful. More time to think and do. More time for 1:1 conversations, interviews, getting thoughts on paper, and walks outside when I feel stuck AND just for the joy of it.
Here's the thing though—I talk a good game about meetings. Clear agendas, shared leadership, only the meetings we "really" need. All the best intentions! But I totally fall into the traps too: putting time on my calendar because I want to talk instead of stare at a screen, or bringing everyone in when something feels urgent. After getting visibility into how much better work can feel with not just fewer meetings but better meetings... I honestly feel a little embarrassed about how I was doing it before!!!
When I first chatted with Libby about the idea for Helia, she said, "Let me do an article on meetings!" It took me a bit to say yes, and now I'm SO glad to finally have one. Because here's what I keep sitting with: there are some great practices for meetings, but also, getting clear on why to meet matters just as much. And Libby's approach is such a beautiful reminder that good meetings are actually possible—not just in theory but in practice.
A few things I love — one major company (Amazon!) has all meetings open with 10-ish minutes for reading the materials so everyone is aligned and on the same page. Another org I worked with opened every meeting with multiple folks with a check-in question — a "would you rather" like Libby lists below, a question about your favorite season, how many products you have in your bathroom (!), something you're feeling proud of. Beautiful way to connect.
All workplaces are based on and built from relationships with each other, and so many of these dynamics play out in meetings. Whether 1:1s (check out Jesse's template!) OR groups, this is how we build our workplaces. Respecting our time and using these spaces in a way that brings joy and ease AND moves the work forward feels like one of the most important things we can all pay attention to and start doing, whether company-wide or just in what you're responsible for.
Libby's Story
For the first few years at Whetstone, Libby’s weekly Leadership Team meetings weren’t all that useful. “If something really urgent was happening, it would be obvious what we should discuss,” she says. “But otherwise, the meetings just devolved into status updates. People would go around the room and basically just say what was on their to-do list for the week – not a good use of time.”
What was missing was a reason to meet AND a structure that helped the team use their meeting time in a way that would actually move the business forward.
The turning point came when Libby introduced a Company Scorecard. Each department was responsible for tracking one to three leading indicators – data points that pointed to how things were going early, rather than after the fact.
They finally had a reason to meet. “We were trying to catch issues while they were still small – not just when they got so big that we couldn’t ignore them.”
For Sales, it might be:
Number of new qualified leads added this week
Outreach-to-meeting conversion rate
For Customer Success:
Support tickets opened by new customers in their first 30 days
On-time completion of onboarding milestones
For Engineering:
% of open critical bugs
% of planned sprint points completed
Instead of rehashing their to-do lists, the team started looking for patterns. Where was something off? Where was momentum building? Where might an intervention help?
And the shift wasn’t just tactical. “It gave every department a shared language,” Libby said. “We were no longer reacting to fires. We were spotting smoke early and taking action. And that meant our meetings became places where real issues got resolved.”
Libby eventually developed an entire meeting cadence to enable her leadership team to stay on top of the business rather than reacting to it:
And she doesn’t just use meetings to drive business outcomes – Libby uses meetings to build culture, too. When she took over as CEO of Whetstone, she inherited a Monday stand-up meeting. At the time, it was just Libby and her CTO, so asking each other ‘What are you working on today?’ was actually pretty useful. But as the company grew? "A few years in, I realized we were just a dozen people standing in a circle reciting our calendars to each other," Libby laughs.
That realization led to one of her most important leadership learnings: the purpose of a meeting has to evolve with your organization. As the company grew, she scrapped the status updates and transformed that stand-up into a culture touchpoint – celebrating wins, sharing key numbers, AND helping her team shake off Monday Blues with deeply silly "Would You Rathers" based on her own experiences. ("Would you rather be divebombed by a crow on your morning walk or followed home by a clingy stray cat?")
The magic was in the rituals AND the shared mindset that every meeting is a chance to move the business forward.
Libby hit the foraging jackpot (chanterelles!!!) this summer, much to the dismay of Sylvie, who would just like to get on with her hike
What this looks like in practice (aka how to make it happen!)
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“If a meeting doesn’t create more value than giving everyone 60 minutes to catch up on email, cancel it.”
The first half of Libby’s meetings are dedicated to unearthing the business’s most urgent issues, and the second half is dedicated to prioritizing and solving those issues.
“The reason most people hate meetings is that they have not been designed to solve problems. The best way to get people engaged in your meetings is to actually solve their problems during the meeting,” Libby says.
To uncover the most important issues to solve, Libby learned to start every meeting with this question: “What’s keeping you up at night?” It worked across personalities, roles, and departments, AND it built trust. “It cuts through the noise of the day-to-day and puts the biggest problem(s) at the top of the agenda.”
At Whetstone, she saw this most clearly in leadership team meetings. “One team would be doing something that made another team’s life harder – like the Sales team selling to bad-fit clients, making the Customer Success team scramble to retain them.” Bringing those issues to the table early created space for cross-functional solutions. “It wasn’t just venting, it was: What are we going to do differently this week, this month, this quarter to improve the situation?”
Eventually, Libby added an agenda item simply called “Issues,” that her team could add to between meetings. “Once the team was in a rhythm of sharing what they needed help with, the Issues section just populated itself.” Her team started adding items before the meeting and, when Scorecard numbers were off, rather than delving into why at that moment, somebody would add a bullet point to the Issues section and the team could have a deeper discussion about it later in the meeting without derailing the rest of the Scorecard.
Once the Issues list is populated, Libby uses the rest of the meeting to resolve as many as possible. Libby asks her team to select the top three issues to resolve and they work through them one by one. If there is more time, they identify the next three priority issues and work through those. Any unaddressed issues get prioritized and resolved at the next week’s meeting.
“If meetings become a place where issues get resolved, you prove to people that meetings can be useful. In doing so, you build their trust that their time is being well-spent as well as the practice of solving issues as a team.”
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If you can only do one thing to improve your meetings, Libby is clear – MAKE AN AGENDA!!!!
Even better? Make one that works for both of you. “For 1:1s, I use a shared Google Doc that we both add to throughout the week as things come up.” Libby set a norm with her direct reports to call or Slack if an urgent or timely issue comes up, and to put everything else on the 1:1 doc. “This really helped reduce the context switching that comes from stream-of-consciousness Slack messages, and it also gave my team more time to think about the items they put on the agenda before the meeting so they could present them more thoughtfully.”
Her favorite 1:1 agenda structure:
Something Good
What’s Keeping You Up at Night
Strategic Items
Tactical Items
Next Steps
The order of the agenda matters, too. “Strategic first. Always discuss more complicated topics when you have the most brainpower.”
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Libby leans on a lesson from her days in the classroom: “In teaching, there is a concept of Teacher Talk vs. Student Talk. Whoever is talking is usually doing the thinking. Of course, we want that to be the students.”
So she applies that to meetings: “If the leader is doing most of the talking, they’re doing most of the thinking. That’s backwards.” Instead, she aims for a meeting where she’s just facilitating – opening with questions, nudging the conversation forward, and ensuring everyone else is doing the cognitive work.
Libby’s favorite phrases to get participants talking:
Can you say more about that?
Why do you think that’s the case?
It sounds like you’ve thought deeply about A and B. What are your thoughts on C?
What will happen if we don’t do XYZ?
What will happen if we do XYZ?
If [Team A] does this, how will it impact [Team B] and [Team C]?
If one person is doing all the talking: [Introvert], what do you think of [Extrovert’s] idea?
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“Tangents are the scourge of a good meeting,” Libby says with what she admits is a little too much intensity. “Tangents take you away from your meeting purpose and invite other participants to disengage.” While it’s reasonable to expect your team to be professional and stay engaged during meetings, if a leader allows tangents to go on for minutes at a time, they shouldn’t be surprised when people start checking their email.
Luckily, Libby has a whole playbook for them.
Her favorite norm? “Tangent Alert!” She gives everyone a card with “Tangent” written on it and full permission to hold it up when the group wanders off track – even if it is Libby herself leading the tangent. (Beyonce is Libby’s favorite tangent topic.)
She has scripts, too:
“That’s important and I don’t want to forget about it. Let’s put that in the parking lot and revisit later.”
“Sounds like something for you and Spencer to discuss 1:1 – let’s move the rest of the agenda up and you two can have the room to discuss after we adjourn.”
“Yes, the Coldplay concert schadenfreude is delicious… but back to revenue numbers.”
Her advice: plan great meetings to begin with, but if you do need to redirect, do it with clarity and care. “The key role of the facilitator is to ensure the meeting is achieving its purpose. If you lose the thread, you lose the room, and eventually you lose the trust of your team.”
Secret Sauce & Takeaways
If you called the meeting, it's your responsibility to make it valuable—and good meetings are meetings where issues get solved!
Good meetings don't happen by accident—they're designed with clear purpose and ruthless focus on outcomes - which means - ALWAYS define the purpose of your meeting before anything else (As a result of this meeting, we will be able to…)
Use shared, living agendas to reduce one-off questions during the week and improve meeting preparation for both parties
Shift the cognitive load to your team – your job is to facilitate toward solutions, not solve everything yourself
Acknowledge that tangents happen and use norms and scripts to redirect gently
Remember that meetings are where you build culture – make them feel human, not just efficient (aka joy and ease are possible!!!)
Libby's two favorite views: (1) Pittsburgh's bridges and (2) her toddler's curls
Questions you might want to sit with
What’s the real purpose of your weekly team meetings? Are you achieving it?
Are your meeting agendas designed to uncover your biggest issues, or just review what has already happened?
Who’s doing the most talking in your meetings? What would it look like to shift the cognitive load?
How do you currently handle tangents—and how might you create shared norms around them?
What’s one small joy you could bring into your next meeting?
Want to Try This?
Templates & Guides:
Kick off your meeting with joy—try a “Would You Rather,” a Small Victory, or Song of the Day. Here’s a list of our favorite Light-hearted Meeting Openers to start meetings with humanity and joy.
1:1s are the foundations to ALL things!!! Two great options:
Libby's 1:1 Agenda Template - Simple structure: Something Good, What's Keeping You Up at Night, Strategic Items, Tactical Items, Next Steps
Jesse’s 1:1 Template that builds trust AND gets results!
Adopt a Tangent Alert norm—print cards, name the norm, and model it yourself
Scorecard Meeting Template - add a scorecard to your weekly team meeting agenda and use it to uncover issues to discuss during the meeting
Strategic Planning Process - Libby's full eight-meeting process for working "on" vs "in" your business to make sure we’re all on the same page and organizing together (follow this with her OKR recommendations and you’ll be flowing in the same direction AND have the scorecard you need to ground your meetings!)
Recommended Reads:
Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni - Libby's go-to for meeting transformation
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni - Helia's FAVORITE leadership fable for building trust and connection
Connections
Libby Fischer, in addition to producing amazing content as a Helia Collective member, is available for jump-right-in strategy sessions and other help from day-to-day operations and process optimization (i.e., chaos reduction) to building/improving organizational culture. Book time with her today!
Lauren Johnson for tips on effective supervision meetings with front-line staff at a social service organization. Fostering a culture of peer supervision -- the kind that goes up, down, and sideways -- leads to better client outcomes. Connect by emailing her at lauren@stcharlescarecenter.org.
About the Contributor
Libby Fischer is one of the most thoughtful and joyful leaders we know. She led Whetstone, a teacher coaching platform, through its acquisition by SchoolMint—and somewhere along the way, turned meetings into something her team actually looked forward to. She’s a former teacher and CEO, a current writer and Business Operations consultant, and someone who brings humor, clarity, and care to every conversation. She’s also the kind of person who once got chased by a stray cat on her morning walk and turned it into a team-building ritual. That’s Libby.
This article comes from a coffee chat with Cindy in June 2025. These conversations form the heart of the Helia Library – because I've learned the most from doing and from talking with other doers willing to share their wisdom. We don't need to start from blank pages or do everything alone.
As always, take what's helpful, leave what's not, and make it your own.
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