How to conduct a grant kickoff meeting

0:00 Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. As clinicians, we spend a decade or more as trainees learning to take care of patients. When we finally start our careers, we want to build research programs, but then we find that our years of clinical training did not adequately prepare us to lead our research program. Through no fault of our own, we struggle to find mentors, and when we can't, we quit. However, clinicians hold the keys to the greatest research breakthroughs.

0:40 For this reason, the Clinician Researcher podcast exists to give academic clinicians the tools to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. Now introducing your host, Toyosi Onwuemene. Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast. I'm your host, Toyosi Onwuemene, and it is an absolute pleasure to be talking with you today. Thank you so much for tuning in. Today, I am talking about the grant kickoff meeting, how to conduct it. Now last time I shared with you the importance of doing a grant kickoff meeting, and some of you were wondering about how you would do it in the first place.

1:22 And so I'm here to share my experience. Again, this is just the one grant kickoff meeting I've done. I've had other meetings that were not kickoff meetings, so this is the one meeting that really stood out in my mind. So I'm just going to tell you the process of what we did. And I just want to say that there is not one size fits all strategy to doing a grant kickoff meeting. You should definitely tailor it to what are the needs of your team and the availability of your team members, but I'm going to lay out what we did because I think it was a really great experience and I want you to remember that I'm not setting a prescription. And so I want you to think about how you can tailor it to yourself. Okay.

2:03 So the first thing to do is to set the agenda. And this is the PI or the PIs, or maybe it's the leadership team setting the agenda for the meeting. Why are you all meeting? Yes, it's the kickoff. We're all celebrating that this grant was funded. Good for you, but why are you meeting? There are many different reasons to meet in the course of completing your project. And they don't all have to be about the kickoff. For example, when our grant was first funded, actually, we had been meeting before the grant was funded, when we thought that the grant was definitely going to be funded, we already set up a whole list of leadership meetings. And so as the PIs of the project, we wanted to continue to have conversations so that we can address issues and be clear about what direction we were setting for the team.

2:56 And then we also wanted to have meetings with the individual members of the team. To be honest, we struggled in the beginning to have a clear sense of what the meeting structure would be like. For example, there are two teams, actually, really two major teams involved. One team is the health measurement team, the other is a clinical research team. And we were needing to think about, well, okay, so the health measurement team is going to be meeting on their own. The clinical research team is going to be meeting on their own, and the leaders are going to be meeting on their own. But we want to also decrease the burden of meetings so that one person is not going to three meetings a week in support of one project because everybody else has work to do.

3:37 And so we really had to establish what is the cadence of meetings we want for this project? When do we bring everybody together? When do we have people meet individually to address different issues? And when do we have a core leadership team meet? And so we have to establish who's the core leadership team. So clearly, we're the PIs, we're leadership, but we need people to support our leadership. So we have a core leadership team that includes the PIs and includes our regulatory coordinator and also our lead clinical research coordinator. And that is the core leadership team. Now as PIs, we're still meeting and we're making decisions for the project because we are ultimately responsible, but we have a leadership team that helps us.

4:17 So in deciding, there are many meetings you could be having, but in deciding the kickoff meeting, you want to be clear about what it is you want to do with this kickoff meeting. Now, if you missed my last episode, I talked about why you should have a kickoff meeting. Go back and look at that and the importance and the benefits of having a kickoff meeting. But you want to be clear, first of all, about the purpose of the meeting. And that's why number one is set the agenda. Be clear. Why are you meeting again? What do you want to accomplish? And what you want to accomplish from the meeting determines how you set up the meeting, who you invite to the meeting, when the meeting should be scheduled, how hard you should work to get everybody in the room.

4:58 Because the larger the group, the harder it may be to be able to find a mutually available meeting time. And so the agenda helps you clarify what you're doing, where you're going, and who needs to be there. So number one is to get the PIs together, or maybe it's a leadership team together, to set the agenda for the kickoff meeting, what you want to accomplish. All right, that's number one. Number two is to gather the people. Now, this is like herding cats, because we're busy people. There is nobody, nobody, no matter their job description, who works at an academic medical center or any job for that matter, who would say, oh, I have all the time in the world.

5:44 Just let me know, and I can show up. There are a few people who have that kind of flexibility. Many people are in meetings. Or if you are doing the right habits as a clinician researcher, you should be in meetings with yourself doing some serious writing, or forecasting, or planning, or doing something that moves your research forward. So even if you look at your schedule, you gloriously have Mondays through Fridays from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. free. You are not free. You should be moving your work forward. And sometimes this happens when people are new at early career, and they're like, well, I only have 25% of a clinic.

6:25 I have so much free time. You do not. You do not. And if you have so much free time, that means that you may not have a strategic plan, and you may not be doing a weekly planning meeting. Because when you start to be clear about what your strategic plan is, or what you're planning to do strategically, and you have a weekly planning meeting, you know that you are going to fill in slots for your writing on a weekly basis. So the point I'm making is that everyone's busy, and they have priorities, and you certainly are very busy. And so one person is designated to figure out the schedules. One person that's not you, okay, can I just pause and say you are awesome and amazing as an MD, or you're an MD PhD, or you have another physician degree, but you're really good.

7:16 And if you think you can do it well, you can gather people in a meeting. You can do the doodle poll. You can see what's the best meeting time. It's like, oh, it doesn't even take me time. But I have to tell you that your job as leader of a research program is not to be scheduling meetings. And you might say, I don't have a physical assistant. I don't have a virtual assistant. I don't have an admin who can help me do that. Therefore, I'm on the hook. Please don't do it. People on your research team, even if they're an LP administrator assistant, can help you do the scheduling. Because scheduling can be a rabbit trail. They can take you down the rabbit hole and waste time that you really could be putting into moving the project forward or doing some writing or doing some research or writing a grant.

8:07 You have many priorities, and scheduling meetings should not be one of them. And I know it's easy for you to just pull together a doodle poll and then send it out to everyone. But invariably, someone's going to say, oh, yes, I know that we had found that perfect time on Sunday morning, and now I am X, Y, Z. And then it unravels everything. You have to start over. And so what you want to do, maybe one of the first things you want to do, is to set a habit of delegating whatever can be delegated. And scheduling meetings is something that should be delegated. It is easy to just pop in the meeting yourself, and I'm not saying you should deli it all meeting scheduling. If you can, please do. I certainly struggle with that sometimes.

8:48 But when it comes to scheduling this kind of meeting, you want somebody on the team who's designated to figure out everybody's schedules and make it work. It is a lot of work, especially if you have people who are as productive and as busy as you probably do. It's a lot of work to get the meeting scheduled at the right time. And so I ask you to have somebody else do it, because there's a lot of back and forth. And honestly, we had a team member who did this. And after the fact, we realized that there was one of the investigators who eventually was like, this is so hard. I'm just going to put it right in the middle of my clinic. He was in clinic. We had our meeting. I'm so glad I wasn't the one who scheduled the meeting, because I wouldn't have accepted that.

9:30 I would have said, no, we can't do it when you're in clinic. Okay, let's try to find another time. And not with waste time. So there are people whose expertise is scheduling. Please let them schedule the meeting. Let them gather the people, figure out the right times, schedule the meeting. You just want to make sure you give them the best times that you're available. Okay? All right, so number two, gather the people and have somebody else that's not you. That's not the other PI. Do it. Number three, now that you set the agenda, now that you decided on the date, have the core leadership team meet, and the core leadership team is important because everyone wants to be sure that their perspective is going to be addressed.

10:14 For example, it's like, what is the most important thing to address? And what are the things we lead out? So we had a number of things that we needed to address for this multi-site study, but we didn't do all of it in that one meeting because we decided that this might be too much for the first meeting. Right? So we focused on connection and alignment and clarifying the timeline and roles and responsibilities. That's already a lot. Let's focus and let's not bring in the SOP at this point because we have an SOP that we put together for how the sites are going to recruit and share information. We have an SOP and I'll tell you about that in a subsequent episode because I think it's really cool as well.

10:54 But there's a lot to discuss and we don't have to do it all in the first meeting. And so we, with the leadership team, in this case, the MPIs, we set the agenda for the things that we absolutely want to discuss in the meeting and the things that should be part of the agenda, but we're going to defer it to another meeting. And the things we're going to go into a little bit more detail on versus the things that we're not. The issues that we think maybe are pressing enough that they should rise to the top. And so being very clear about, okay, now that we've set the agenda, now that everybody's going to be gathered, we know who's coming, what exactly are we going to discuss in detail? What should we move away?

11:35 What should we just glimpse? Or what should we skim the top off of? So you're really, now it's really focusing. In number one, you set the agenda, but in number three, you're really honing down on, okay, these are the details of the agenda. Okay. Number four, we're going to co-create the slides. Now I'll tell you how we did it. So first of all, we had a member of the team draft the slides. Now we've written the proposal, we've written the timeline. There's so many pieces of the proposal that we pulled together. So we had one member of the team go find all of that information, find the specific aims page and write the first draft of the slides.

12:16 Remember, we already have an agenda. We're clear on what the details of that conversation are going to look like. And we don't have to create the first set of slides. Somebody else did that for us. And then they shared it with us on a Google Drive or it was some drive. I don't remember exactly. I think it was Box. We showed it on Box. And then we, one of the investigators, our principal investigator went through and put names on every, on each side for the core leadership team and said, hey, this slide is for you. Does it look good? What else would you change? Now then we all had opportunity asynchronously to go and edit the slide deck. Now we could have edited together at a meeting and I think we had planned to do that, but it turned out that we didn't have a meeting slot that worked perfectly.

13:02 So we said, hey, we've already set the agenda. The meeting is next week. Why don't we just individually asynchronously edit the slides and let's do it by the state. So we set a deadline and we went in and individually edited the slides. Now I went in and edited the slides and I am very particular about the way slides look, especially with regards to how much text is on slides. I favor pictures over text. And so I went in and I edited heavily and probably an hour into editing and I was like, what am I doing? But I think that the first meeting is important and I think that it leaves an important impression. And you don't want people to be overwhelmed by text. And the natural, the natural bent of people is to read whatever text you give them.

13:46 And so if you don't want them reading, then don't give them stuff to read. That's my philosophy. So I remove as much text as possible. I reorganize, I center, I make bigger. I really went in and really edited the slides. And I will tell you that the way I edit slides, that was a short period of time compared to how much I would have spent if I was creating the slides from scratch. Because what I didn't do was go back to our source data and remind myself, what did we say in specific game one? What did we say here? What did we say about methodology? What did we say about recruitment? Somebody else went and did all that for me. So all I really had to do was focus on how do we get the message across in the way that we need to. So we all co-created the slides.

14:27 And I didn't even necessarily finish. For example, there was one page where I started creating the format of what I thought it should look like relative to what had already been established. And then I wrote a note. I said, finish it according to what I did. Now I will tell you that what the person did is not what I would have done. However, that was not a priority. It was like, I've clarified the way it should look like and now finish it. And then somebody else went and finished all the slides, made them pretty, added all the notes. And then finally, somebody else went in and said, OK, this person will present the slide. This was my co-principal investigator, also known as a multiple PI.

15:09 And she went in and labeled the slides. So you're going to present this, you're going to present this, you're going to present this. So we really asynchronously pulled the slides together. And at the end, it was a really fantastic job. It was well done. You could tell it was polished. It was good because we want to leave a good impression. No one just half-hazardly throw slides together because people don't have a sense of what's going on inside you. They can't read your intention. They can only read what they see. And so showing up well is important. And it was important for us. And we did that. And we got good feedback from the meeting as well. All right. And I've co-created the slides. The meeting is set. Now we're going to conduct the meeting.

15:51 And we started out with introducing the NPIs. And then we actually, we started out with the agenda. We introduced the NPIs. We started out introducing the study. And then we now went to a question and answer session as we introduced the team and their roles and responsibilities. And then we went into more details of the study, including recruitment. And then we finally went to, oh, we went to the timeline. And then we had question and answer session again, question and answer session again. So that was kind of the meeting itself. And then at the end of the meeting, everybody left.

16:32 And the two NPIs and our collaborator stayed behind just to debrief the meeting. It was a really great meeting. And so we, you know, there's some meetings that are a part of it. You're like, that was well done. This was a well done meeting. And so that was what we stayed to share to say that was well done. This worked really well. And this is a great team. This is going to be a great study. And our other collaborator stayed on to say, I love the way you put this together. This was so well done. And it was just good feedback because we really did put in a lot of effort to make sure that we had a cohesive plan and that our slides looked good and communicated what we wanted them to communicate. And you know, you've done a good job when you do more of the work early on and you do the heavy lifting so that your viewer, your observer, your reader doesn't have to do that heavy lifting.

17:21 And that's what we did. And it did come across and it was successful. So that was our meeting conduct. So during the meeting also, number six, that we had action items that came up as a result of the meeting. For example, let's double check the IRB. Let's make sure that this amendment is in place and then we're going to send the IRBs to the multi-site group. So we at the end of the meeting have a set of action items and everybody knows what it is they need to do before they come back for the next meeting. Number seven is the post-meeting follow-up. Now I told you that we had a brief debrief that wasn't actually scheduled, but it happened. Everybody dropped off and the MPIs and our chief collaborator stayed behind and talked about things.

18:04 But that was a very, very brief meeting. But there was also a post-meeting follow-up where somebody, one of the leadership, members of the leadership team, not the MPIs, sent out an email with the slides that everybody has a copy of the slides and also a set of action items for the study as well. I'll tell you something that we did that was really, really helpful. And if this is a tool you have access to, I recommend it. But what we did was we used the AI companion that comes with Zoom. And so if you don't have access to the AI companion, another thing you could do is record your meeting and transcribe it and then maybe use AI to summarize the meeting. But we had someone who was taking minutes of the meeting and then we had the AI companion transcribe or summarize our meeting as well, take the meeting minutes.

18:50 And so at the end we had meeting minutes and we had the person who had been taking notes. And we combined that because I think the AI overview is really broad and detailed and nice, but it's got a lot of details. People like to be very short and pithy. And so what she did was pull all the information from her notes and the AI and then made very, very a very brief summary. This was agenda item one, here's a follow-up. Agenda item two, here's a follow-up. And it was very, very much like a bullet point follow-up rather than the paragraphs of text that the AI summary did for us. And maybe the AI summary will do better over time. But I think it was important for us to not give people minutes to read.

19:31 That can always be added as an attachment. Hey, if you have extra time, if you really want the details, here are the meeting minutes as generated by AI, which can be very detailed. But here's the high level overview. And many of your team members will appreciate the high level overview because even if they go read the detailed meeting summary, they're going to forget and they're going to want to go back and they're not going to want to read it all again. And so it's nice to have a meeting summary that they can go back to and just refer to. And then we, of course, have a folder in which we keep the major sections of our study. And we have a section for meetings and meeting minutes and meeting summaries. And so that's in our folder as well.

20:13 So those are the seven steps. I probably mentioned eight, but I'll go ahead and just summarize. Number one, we set the agenda. Number two, we gathered the people. We had somebody else do that. Number three, we had a core leadership meeting to review the details of what the meeting would be. And before we co-created the slides asynchronously. Number five, we conducted the meeting. Number six, we had action items. Number seven, we had a post-meeting debrief. And we also have a folder in which we keep all of our meeting summaries. So I'll roll that into number seven. So that's what we did for our kickoff meeting. And again, this is not meant to be prescriptive. Please take it and do whatever you will with it.

20:55 Make sure it's tailored to your team. I'm curious if you use any of these items to create your kickoff meeting or maybe your monthly meeting, would you share how it went, how you did it, what extra things you added to it or things that you took away that didn't work for your team and share it with me? I would love to hear about it. You can reach out to me through direct message on LinkedIn, on Instagram, or on Facebook. And my preferred way of communication is LinkedIn. Please reach out to me there first. The others might be delayed because I'm not on those platforms as often, but I do, I invite you to please share with me. I'd love to hear about it. And as always, if you are looking for a coach, please reach out to me.

21:37 Happy to support you as you continue your growth as a clinician scientist. And finally, please share this episode with someone who is looking for guidance. Many times we're waiting for our mentors to hand things to us and sometimes they're so overwhelmed they're not thinking about what you need. You don't even know what you need. And so if this episode was helpful to you, would you do me a favor, do me a solid and share it with someone else who needs to hear it. All right. Thank you for doing one good deed for the day for me. And I look forward to talking with you again next time on the clinician researcher podcast. Thank you for listening.

22:20 Thanks for listening to this episode of the clinician researcher podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. If you found the information in this episode to be helpful, don't keep it all to yourself. Someone else needs to hear it. So take a minute right now and share it. As you share this episode, you become part of our mission to help launch a new generation of clinician researchers who make transformative discoveries that change the way we do healthcare.