What Amazon Gets Right (And Everyone Else Gets Wrong) About Meetings

0:00Chris Fenning:That is one of the most rude things that any of us can do to someone else. It's not a meeting request, it's a summons. My name is Chris Fenning and I help people communicate more clearly at work. Let's say you can be 7 % more efficient in your communication at work. How much of a difference would that make to your day, to your week? As few words as possible. That is the golden rule. you can get your message across in two lines do it in two lines if you are writing an email that ends up with a scroll bar absolutely too long there are three things every meeting needs when you're planning it prepping it inviting people and introducing it and those three things are

0:50our books are now open if you need help getting in front of your dream client we might just be able to help. If you're a business who's wondering how to grow in 2026 and beyond, but there's not enough meetings in the diary with either the right person or the person who genuinely wants to solve the problem, we might be able to help.

1:09Chris Fenning:Wehaveameeting.com. Chris, welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much for having me. I've been thinking about this through the morning and really looking forward to getting into the conversation. I've been looking forward to it So thank you for joining us. Big question, Chris. We're going to kick off. Who are you and what problem do you solve? Oh, you started with a tough question there. So my name is Chris Fenning, as I think will probably be in the show notes. And I help people communicate more clearly at work. More specifically, I help people communicate between teams, experts to non-experts, whether that's technical people to non-technical people, sales, talking to operations, but being able to be, let's say you could be 7 % more efficient in your communication at work.

1:55Chris Fenning:How much of a difference would that make to your day, to your week? And I help people achieve that. Nice. So if I'm doing the opposite of everything that you talk about and teach, what would my life in work probably look like, Chris? What are the symptoms? Well, one of the symptoms that you might not notice that people around you would is when you're talking, everyone around you is sort of eyes glazed, tuning out back on their emails, on their phones. So if you were long winded and couldn't get to the point, your conversations would take 10 to 15 minutes instead of three to five minutes. If your meetings weren't well organized, if they weren't set up well from the start, you'd have twice as many of them and they'd be half as successful.

2:40and when it comes time to be promoted you probably wouldn't because the people who

2:46Chris Fenning:consistently get promoted are those who communicate the best so let's look at something really actionable then right something that we can give people to take away in the first few minutes of this podcast the framework for starting a meeting is it something that's repeatable you can do every single time and see results from or does it differ from meeting to meeting what would you say to that, Chris? I would say that for the majority of internal meetings, not external sales client stuff, but although there is some crossover, for the majority of internal meetings, there is absolutely a repeatable framework.

3:22Chris Fenning:There are three things every meeting needs when you're planning it, prepping it, inviting people and introducing it. And those three things are a clear topic, a clear purpose, and a defined desired output. What are you there to talk about? What are you there to do? That's the purpose. And what are you going to produce? Whether that's a revised risk log, whether it is a decision, whether it's a bunch of ideas, there should be something that you can write down or print out at the end of the meeting. So TPO, topic, purpose, and output, that is the framework you should use whenever you're thinking, oh, I want to set up a meeting.

4:03so i'm already thinking there about i can't remember if it was amazon or another huge company but they basically have a framework that what do you want to happen in this meeting everyone basically either agrees or disagrees but if they agree that's the outcome the meeting then shortens right down sometimes not even happening in the first place because they say oh yeah i agree that's what we all need to be doing right now cool there's your action points see you later is there a way you could input this framework and actually that could be the outcome you have much

4:33Chris Fenning:less meetings as a result oh yes so when you're thinking about the topic the purpose and the output you're thinking about well who do i need to be able to achieve these things do in terms of the purpose if it's make a decision do you know the people you need do you know what the decision is that needs to be made can you write it down and if you write it down and send it to people Does it need a big discussion? Does it need 17 people sat in a room telling their Me Too version of, oh, yeah, I think this is important because let me tell you about the story from five years ago, why I think it's great?

5:07All that goes away if you start thinking in this framework.

5:12Chris Fenning:And there's another framework you can use at the beginning. I love three-part frameworks. We'll have as many of them as you want, depending on the topics. But there's a, why do I need this meeting? and that's what you should be thinking beforehand. Like, can this, does this topic require input from other people? And you'd be astonished how often the answer is no. Like I'm calling a meeting, but I don't need any input. I just want to deliver information. Well, in that case, send an email or make a phone call. The second thing is, does it need people to be live and together? Does it need a real-time conversation?

5:47And if it does, a meeting could be great.

5:50Chris Fenning:But if it doesn't, if everyone can provide their input separately, do you need a meeting or can you make it an asynchronous piece of work? So answer those couple of questions and you can rule out a whole bunch of meetings before they happen. I love it, Chris. I love where we're going with it. I'm thinking about it though, and I think that good framework, sometimes when they end up in the wrong hand, can sometimes be dangerous. I'm thinking about like the information that you were given there, if it was delivered in an abrasive way could probably piss people off and if you're thinking about leading people not get them on side so when you think about the topic and the desired outcome things like that how how do you best kind of deliver that at the start of the meeting or how much of the delivery is in an email ahead of time how are you thinking about that oh yeah so i've got two parts to answer in this i definitely want to come back to the the wrong model in the wrong hands because Zach earlier mentioned the Amazon approach.

6:48Chris Fenning:So I want to come back to that. Don't let me forget. The rest of what you said is absolutely true. The delivery of it makes such a difference. And abrasiveness comes in tone and the words that we use. And that is like speaking face to face. If I said, I need to talk to you tomorrow at 10 o 'clock. That's very different from, hey, I need to talk to you tomorrow at 10 o 'clock. Even my tone has changed how you feel about that event. But when it comes to meetings, we often do something that's terrible, and TPO can help solve this. Have either of you received a blank meeting invite? Oh, yeah, loads of times.

7:33Chris Fenning:Nothing in the body. Loads of times. Loads of times. Okay, that is one of the most rude things that any of us can read to someone else. It's not a meeting request. It's a summons. Be in meeting room two at 1.30 tomorrow morning. You wouldn't send a birthday invitation. You wouldn't send an invitation to a social gathering with just a date and a time. You put some other information in there and you definitely wouldn't walk up to a colleague's desk and say, Jack, you're going to be in conference room three at 3 p.m. tomorrow and then walk away. like how rude is that but we do it when we get a blank meeting invite the way to change it and this will address that tone of voice question as well the way we change it is in the meeting invite just put three bullet points what is the topic what is the purpose and what is the desired output three bullet points and the person receiving it will know what that meeting's about they should be able to judge whether they can contribute to it in a meaningful way.

8:38And those three bullet

8:40Chris Fenning:points make the tone fairly neutral. It's hard to be abrasive if you've got those three items, and you're just clearly saying, we're going to talk about this. Our goal is to achieve this thing, and by the end, we'll have produced something. It's hard to make that seem abrasive. I love that. So let's go back to, I'm here to remind you, the right framework, at the wrong hand examples that you can think of where you've seen this end dangerously. Yes. And the Amazon example. So there was a period of time, it was about a year and a half ago, where the Jeff Bezos interview of him talking about the six-page memo and how no meeting happens without a six-page memo.

9:24Chris Fenning:And the first 15 minutes of the meeting is everybody reading that memo, making their notes. And then the rest of the meeting is the conversation to clarify stuff, make the decisions, et cetera. And this became quite a popular idea for good practice for meetings. Amazon's a successful company. This is how the head of the company does their meetings. This is the framework. Let's jump on board and use it. And my response to that is, oh my goodness don't do it just it's terrible for most situations it works for Bezos and the executives because they are making high level strategic decisions which requires a good structured layout a good amount of information some thinking time you want everyone to be on the same page so they all read it and then you have a discussion in that situation it's a great way to get busy executives on the same page.

10:20Chris Fenning:But for five people trying to do a transactional project meeting day to day, it's awful. Huge amount of work up front requiring them to fill in a template that's really quite restrictive and is six pages long. Silent reading for 15 minutes where people may not need to do it. It's just the wrong method. For execs at a high level making strategic decisions, brilliant. For the rest of us mere mortals, it's terrible. Wrong model, wrong situation. So let's talk about getting everyone on the same page. And you mentioned it then. And let's take it all the way to the top of the meeting. So the power of that first minute, everyone's sat in there, you're about to kick off the meeting.

11:05How do we really make the most of that first minute?

11:08Chris Fenning:All right. Well, there's two parts to it. One is the social element. So everything we talk about in terms of structure and intro and so on, that comes after we've been a human. So if you're in a room or if you're on online Zoom, it can be a great opportunity to build relationships, to be human beings, to interact with each other. Not everyone wants to, not everyone likes it, but it is a great thing to do. So don't forget about that. once the official meeting start begins, you can introduce it using topic, purpose, and output. And that gets everybody on the page. I know it sounds very repetitive.

11:45Chris Fenning:There are other things as well, but it's such a core part of a successful meeting. And if you've written your invite that includes TPO, think of the situation where you're running from one meeting to another, back-to-back meetings throughout the day. You're leading the meeting. You've got a context shift in your mind to get from one place into the focus for that event. Well, your invite gives you what you're going to talk about, what you're going to be doing, and hopefully what you're achieving by the end. It helps you shift in. You read it out to the room, everybody knows why they're there, what they're there to do, and what the goal to produce at the end is.

12:23Chris Fenning:It's a very simple way to get everybody's focus from everything else they're doing and bring it in to focus on the actual purpose of that meeting. And it does it without a five to 15 minute long-winded rambling introduction. And people will appreciate that as well. I'm thinking now about, so people love the frameworks, right? And the time-sensitive framework of the first minute. The only issue here is if someone was implementing it for the first few times and perhaps had the time where it went a bit wrong and they lost a bit of control in that first minute. It wasn't delivered well. It's kind of derailed the meeting.

13:02Have you got any advice for those people who maybe it's gone a bit wrong in that first one to five minutes of how to kind of regain it?

13:10Chris Fenning:Oh, yeah. And there's all sorts of ways it can go wrong. Someone else jumps in with a different topic or they try and push the meeting towards their purpose rather than what it was set up for. So there's a way you can avoid it and a way you can deal with it. so to deal with it is as soon as you notice it's gone off grab hold of the framework and bring everyone back in so let's say we we were in a session there were a few other people here as well and i said we're here to achieve this thing and we're going to do that and then the topic takes a massive left turn and they we're now talking about something completely different i as soon as i recognize that i can say hey folks hi sorry just just for a moment this is an important topic, but it's not what we originally set out to do today.

13:54Chris Fenning:Our original purpose was to do this thing, to talk about next month's sales targets and what our approaches are going to be. What we're talking about now isn't aligned with that. And then here is the critical thing. If you're not confident, you can ask it as a question rather than making a statement. Because a confident person can say, hey folks, we're not here to talk about that. We're here I just want to check that topic is different from what we're here to do. Is that more important than what we originally set out to do in this session? Are we focusing on the wrong thing for the original plan for this meeting?

14:35Chris Fenning:Ask it as a question. And even the most obnoxious people will quite often sort of realize they've taken something in a different direction. and go, okay, yeah, no, sorry, we should go back to, well, maybe not the most obnoxious people, but most people will sort of have that moment of, oh, sorry, yeah, shouldn't have taken us off, let's get back on point. Or they will say, oh, no, this other thing is actually more important, and here's why. And at that point, you can choose to repurpose the meeting or not. But if you start with that clear purpose statement, you can always watch to see, are we moving away from it or are we still on track with it?

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15:52The way you asked the question was beautiful because I think if I was to ask that, I'd be far more passive aggressive with it of, oh, are we here to talk about this, Chris? So I read a study the other day and I think it was a Scandinavian company. country it could have been like sweden or norway and they were teaching empathy in school which i think empathy is a massive sales skill but it feels like we're not really taught how to communicate at work in university or school so all of our lives we we go into reception then we push through the system and blah blah blah you get ready to make choices but none of us know how to communicate when we get into the big wide world.

16:38So what's your take on that?

16:40Chris Fenning:I think you are 100 % right. Absolutely right. And I actually looked into this. So I'm specifically looking at tech courses at the time. I looked at the top 10 universities in the UK that offer computing and science-based courses. And of the top 10 tech programs in the top 10 universities, so 100 different programs, There were three modules in these three and four year programs, three modules out of 607 that included the word communications. And two of them were actually about communications. One of them was about tech and they were both optional. So we spend all this time in university teaching people a topic and then nothing about communicating.

17:34Chris Fenning:And the second problem in this education versus workplace is the way we communicate between the ages of 0 and 18, or call it 20, 23 if you're leaving university with a four or five year degree. The way we communicate in that whole time is almost nothing like how we communicate at work. And here's what I mean. As a kid, you communicate socially with your peers, not transactionally. It's about fitting in. it's about being funny or listening to someone who's saying something funny. It's about receiving instructions and so on. So you've got a big social and family dynamic. And then at school, we're taught to receive, to ask questions, speak when we're spoken to.

18:18Chris Fenning:And there's very little agency, very little self-direction on how we should communicate. It's all very, very structured. And then in one day we leave school or university, we go to work and employers expect us to be able to communicate by email, set up meetings, run meetings, talk to people about issues and problems and ask for things. And we've had no education on that at all. And it's totally different from social communication. Totally different. So let's play a little bit of a game, Chris. Let's say I'm going to give you your own university, the University of Chris. And if the main course there was communication at work and you had to break that down to communication into different modules what what what do you think is definitely necessary and what what may be some of the optional modules that you could throw in there but like what what would you put on the agenda oh i love that question what would i do if i could wave a magic wand and rule the world so from a comms perspective i'd actually like us to my university would consider the approach to communication skills training differently from how it's talked about anywhere.

19:31Chris Fenning:I would not use the words communication skills. What we would teach is we would teach methods and techniques for communication situations. And there are fundamental techniques that are required across all situations. And that includes things like tone of voice and paying attention. but then when you get to specific situations there are different models and the way i would think about it is communication is a little bit like cooking where you want a certain outcome you want to make a lasagna or you want to make a particular cake you get a recipe and it involves a bit of this and a bit of that and a bit of something else and you mix them together in a certain way communication situations require a recipe of techniques in different amounts You have somebody selling.

20:22Chris Fenning:Well, that selling isn't one skill. Selling from a stage to a room full of people requires a different combination of techniques and methods, a different set of ingredients and a different recipe versus selling one-to-one to the CEO of a company versus selling through a formal bidding process. Each one of those is different. You can't go, You can't hire a salesperson expecting to win in every situation. You've got to hire for specific situations. So my communications university would teach communication situations. And there's foundational level skills. That is, can you summarize? Can you be clear and concise?

21:03Chris Fenning:Can you be organized? Can you adjust your message to fit with the audience? Which means thinking about their perspective, making things relevant, thinking about impact to them or things they care about. There would be that foundational layer. Year one would be everyone learns this. And then they could specialize based on situations. And you've got giving status updates, speaking from a stage, writing a report, asking questions in different situations. That's how I would structure it. And then the content would teach to those situations. So there's probably a good example what we can think of if we continue down this rabbit hole a little bit.

21:43Businesses will have probably within them a technical expert or a technical team and then perhaps more broadly a jack-of-all-trades kind of persona, someone who's maybe more commercial business-minded. And perhaps those technical updates get lost on the broader business because of the jargon or the language that's used. So how could a technical team better communicate with the wider business?

22:10Chris Fenning:Yeah, yeah. And I'd expand it from technical to any expertise. I work quite a lot with finance and marketing, finance and legal teams, marketing as well, but finance and legal teams, because they're so steeped in their expertise that they struggle to communicate clearly at the level of their audience. So how can they do it? The first thing is to consider the perspective of the person or people that you're talking to. As an expert, if I'm a process owner in an organization, I own this process, making this thing run smoothly end-to-end is what I'm responsible for, or a product, making sure that that's successful.

22:48Chris Fenning:If I talk about the product or the process to somebody outside my team, they probably don't care. What they care about is what does this product or process mean or do for the business? What does it mean or do for the customer? What does it mean or do for the employee? So the first thing everyone should do, but let's keep it tech for now. A tech person should say, I'm talking to another person in my organization. What do they care about? What is their perspective? Do they care most about impacts to the business, impacts to the client, or impacts to the product itself? And if they don't know, they should ask, But it's usually pretty easy to work out based on role.

23:32Chris Fenning:Talking to someone higher up in the organization, they're going to care mostly about impacts to the business. And I've used a word a lot there, which is impact, which is the second thing. So step one, consider the perspective of your audience. Business, people as in clients or employees or product and process. And then think about the impact of your message, of the thing you want to convey. and the reason this is important or the reason this works is most of our work conversations are transactional. I want to give you an idea that's going to have an impact to make things better for the customer, better for the business, better for me or I want to talk about a problem that's making things worse for the business, for the customer, for me, for the product but I'm talking about the impact to something that the other person cares about and it strips away the tech info it strips away the jargon and it makes something relevant because we care about impacts to us and the things that we care about so perspective and impact if we can think in those terms our communication gets an order of magnitude clearer right away so then those people who are those topic experts right that the feedback loop is probably really easy if you're working in a startup it's really agile i can kind of see people in the office and maybe i can spot in the body language not really quite landing in the way that i thought it would yeah someone going yeah exactly but then as businesses get more complex it's probably hard to have that feedback layer of is all are all the different parts of the business communicating properly does sales understand product does marketing some does legal understand you know all the different parts are they communicating cohesively?