7 Effective Meetings Tips for First Time Managers

If you're a first-time manager, conducting effective meetings can be a daunting task. However, meetings are an essential part of any successful team, and holding them efficiently and productively is key.

In this blog post, we'll explore seven effective meeting tips to help you conduct meetings like a pro and share how you can hack your meetings with Ace AI.

Advice from experienced leaders

Effective meetings tips

Most often, first time managers have difficulty with taking a leadership role during the meetings and feeling confident. To make it less stressful, use these simple tips.

Effective meetings tips for managers:

1. Set an agenda with structured topics and main purpose ahead of the meeting and make sure everyone has time for preparation.
2. Act as a leader: keep the focus on the subject, don’t cut people off before they’ve had their say, but don’t allow them to drift away.
3. Outline the meeting rules at the beginning. These ground rules might include staying on the topic, allowing everyone to speak, criticizing the suggestion but not the messenger, and so on. It will make the meeting run more smoothly and prevent a lot of interruptions.
4. Gather feedback from the participants after the meeting on how it went. It will take five or ten minutes and help improve the quality of the next meeting you run.
5. Only invite those individuals who should really be there. Moreover, invite as few people as possible, in order to avoid unnecessary interruptions and don’t waste their time. Teammates are also not required to attend the entire meeting - they should only participate in those agenda topics that concern them.
6. Make the meetings as short as possible. If the meeting requires 2+ hours, take breaks to keep everyone engaged.
7. Prepare a follow-up action plan with specific actions for each participant. Thus, you’ll make sure that the tasks you assigned to your teammates will be completed.

Hack meetings with AI

Preparing for meetings and keeping them structured and result-oriented can be time-consuming for managers.

Luckily, managers can use AI to save time on preparation for meetings. Ace AI analyzes the working activity of team members in integrated tools and recommends a personalized agenda for a 1-on-1 meeting.

See how Ace AI recommendations for meetings work in practice:

Ace AI identifies improved performance and offers agenda

Ace AI identifies lowering performance and offers agenda