Imagine your boss just informed you that they’d like you to lead a committee. “It’ll be a great leadership opportunity,” they explain, “Especially since performance reviews are coming up. You’re looking for that promotion, aren’t you?” Naturally, your eyes light up with dollar signs and you enthusiastically say yes. After your 1:1, though, reality sinks in. Who needs to be in this committee? How can I get people to do work outside the scope of their day-to-day? Committees are so often a waste of time and achieve so little, how can mine be different?

Do not fear! In this post, I will share my top tips for running effective committees that get shit done and don’t waste time. It’s simply a matter of getting these 3 P’s in order: the Purpose, the People, and the Practices. Notably, this post will be most relevant to short-term project teams (a.k.a. “Tiger teams” or “working groups”), though hopefully some learnings can also apply to long-term committees (e.g. governance-type committees).

Let’s start with Purpose. It’s important to be very clear about WHY you are forming this committee. Is it just because you need a leadership opportunity to pad your resume in preparation for performance review time? Then maybe find other opportunities to lead. But if there is a thorny problem that will require diverse expertise to solve outside the scope of normal teams – this is a great opportunity for a committee. Start by crafting a purpose/vision statement (you can do this on your own, or do this as one of the first group tasks):

The <committee name>’s goal is to <goal>, so that <reason>. We are aiming to complete this by <deadline> so that <reason>.

For those in the know, this is more or less a SMART goal (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound). Being crystal clear on the purpose of your committee will help keep you focused. Here’s an example from a committee I ran at work last year:

The Dependency Problem Working Group’s goal is to improve local development of microservices, so that engineers can spend less time switching between environments when testing. We are aiming to complete this in 6 months, so that we have time to experiment but still remove blockers from teams’ workflows in a timely manner.

This purpose statement isn’t perfect (I could have been more specific about “improving local development of microservices”) but it got everyone aligned. Sometimes, the purpose and deadline will be given to you: solve this problem in the next quarter so that we can present the results to the board. If there’s no obvious deadline, it’s worthwhile to set a meaningful deadline, or you risk being a never-ending committee that does not achieve its goal.

Now that you have a rock-solid purpose, it’s time for the next P: the People. The typical advice is to have 7 +- 2 people. You want enough people that you have the right diversity of experience in the room, but not so many that it gets hard to make decisions. Identify the roles you need on the committee – do you need representation from certain teams or certain disciplines? If you’re able to identify these before naming actual people, it will be easier to determine the individuals who would be most effective in the group.

Now, we can’t pretend there isn’t a more insidious P that can come into play here: politics. It’s a bit out of scope for this particular post. Hopefully, if you are clear up front about the roles (not people) and size of the committee, it can combat some of the problem.

Finally, we get to Practices. This is the nitty-gritty: how do we work together? How often do we meet? How do we communicate? How do we share information? How do we collaborate? How do we make decisions? Many of these might be already answered by company tools; for example, if you’re already using Slack as your primary communication method at your company, that’s likely to apply to your committee as well. But it is still helpful to lay out the details (e.g. with Slack, will you use a private channel? A public channel? A group DM?).

Here’s a sample agenda for your first meeting to sort out all the Purpose, People, and Practices:

1. Make sure someone is taking notes (easiest if the person running the meeting is NOT also taking notes. If you have an assigned secretary that’s great.)
2. Introductions of everybody – if this is a volunteer role, why did they choose to be here? What do they want to do? If this is not volunteer, explain why they were chosen to be here. Everyone can highlight what they’re looking to get out of this experience.
3. Ground rules – how do we work together as a team? How much work is everyone expected to do outside of meetings? How responsive should everyone be to messages? What is the meeting attendance expectation?
4. If the goal/timeline is something given to you, share it. If the goal/timeline is more nebulous, start by doing a brainstorm on this so that you can all agree on this.
5. Agree on the tools you will be using for communication and sharing documents
   1. These things might be dictated by whatever technology is available to you via your organization
   2. I would suggest bringing a proposal (e.g. “we will meet biweekly, use this shared folder in OneDrive for our documents, use this channel in Teams”) to discuss so that it’s not just everyone throwing around their preferred tech tools
6. Closing – how is everyone feeling about this going forward?

By focusing on clarity around the Purpose, People, and Practices of your committee, you can set yourself up for success (and maybe that promotion!)