The Meeting System That Lets Your Team Run Without You

Are your team meetings broken? I gotta tell you, your team already knows the answer. They've known for weeks, maybe even months. They are just waiting for you to figure it out too. I know it sounds harsh, but if you are the bottleneck in your business, I would bet real money that your meetings are a part of the reason why. And there's probably an opportunity here to restructure and redesign them so they are more efficient, more effective, and more joyful for you and everyone on on the team. This is especially important in an environment when things are changing quickly, when we are moving quickly on projects with our team and in our businesses. So you want to pay attention if you are working on big things and you've got change happening too, because you want everyone to be on board to mobilize and operationalize on the things you need to implement in your business. So I cannot lie, Meetings have a bad reputation. You've probably been to any number of meetings that you would say were a complete waste of your time. I have also been in meetings like that, but I've also been in meetings that were incredibly well run. There were meetings that I looked forward to each week because I could catch up, ask questions. It was a point in time where we all came together to update each other, and then I was clear on what my next set of priorities were. And what I could take action on if there was a roadblock or an obstacle I was facing before that meeting, because the right people were in the room to get answers so I can move to the next milestone. If you look around a meeting room and you think about the value and the smarts and the brilliance of the people in that room, there is a lot of opportunity to move things forward in that space and time if the meeting is well designed. However, if you look around that room again and look at the brilliance and in the room and look at the value. Meetings cost your company money. So we want to make sure that those meetings are doing their job, that they are giving clarity to every single person on the team. So everybody in the room knows what they need to do to move forward and to move the entire team and the organization closer to your current goals. Even though meetings can be expensive, it is still important that we have them. I am not one to throw all of the meetings out. And I gotta tell you, there was a season of me running my businesses where I actually thought, do we need to have meetings? Is there real purpose for this? And I, I believe that there is a big purpose for them, but 71% of people in organizations think that meetings are done poorly. On the flip side, 68% of people think meetings are still needed because they serve as that checkpoint to move things forward. Oftentimes the instinct when we're moving fast is, you know what to do, just keep going. It's an email back and forth. It's a Slack message thread. It is people checking in on the fly and doing the dang thing. And there is of course power in that. However, that instinct can also get us in trouble because if everybody is moving and grooving and not actually checking in in a coordinated way, there is a high probability that we are missing things. As we move things forward and those things that we are missing are likely going to cost us. They could also be sending us down the entirely wrong path and we won't have an opportunity to catch it if we don't come back together in an organized fashion. So here's how I think about a good meeting. A meeting is a decision-making machine, or it isn't. It's chaos. It is not productive. It is not helpful. But when you go into a meeting with intention and with a structure, you will walk out of that meeting having made a series of decisions that are going to make everyone more focused on the things that matter. So we want every meeting to produce 3 things and have 3 touchpoints within that meeting. What is the decision being made? What are the action steps that each person needs to take? And what are the deadlines and the timelines and the dates that we will follow up on these items at? So what are the decisions being made? What are the actions and who is taking those steps? And what are the dates, the deadlines, and the timelines we are following? But there are many more things under this that could sort of set a meeting up for failure. Number 1, to Many meetings. We want to right-size the number of meetings that you have in your company, either for project-specific activities, for the size of your company, for departments, et cetera. I, as you know, have run multiple companies of different sizes, and I've also worked within companies of different sizes and on projects that are very big and very small. And I gotta tell you, not every meeting structure needs to be the same. In one of my companies, I have a very strong operational lead. It is very focused and very clear what we need to do at any given time. It's a very cyclical, uh, systematized business. So we do not need to meet as frequently. Do we still need to meet? Oh, heck yeah. But we have a cadence that is more spaced out than, for example, my company that I ran that had more than 50 people in the company. In that instance, my business partner and I met regularly, but we also met with our leadership team once a week. That allowed the leadership team to have the appropriate meetings with their working teams. And we also set up regular quarterly all-team meetings so that everyone could come together at that point in time. So while there are many things happening and many different meeting cadences in the business, I did not necessarily need to be in all of them. I had a meeting with my business partner. I had meetings with our leadership team, and I would have other meetings as needed, or I joined department team meetings as needed. And then we had a quarterly check-in with the entire company so that we could all come together and make sure we were in sync on anything and answer any questions that were showing up across teams or departments, so to speak. Then there's something in the middle. In my consulting company and online education company, I focus on 2 team meetings a week, one with the operations director and our technology CRM, a little bit of everything specialist. So there are 3 of us who come together once a week to discuss pure execution, operations, delivery, taking care of our clients with a little bit of strategy mixed in. The second meeting we have every week is purely a marketing meeting where then our marketing ads manager joins us, our social media manager joins us, and we focus in on a more specific topic. Will there be other meetings throughout the week? Maybe like last week I had a very specific meeting with our social media manager. When we're kicking off a new project, we may meet with specialists or we may come together just on that project. We may come together to do deep work, but those are purpose-driven meetings. So again, the goal here is to right-size the number of meetings that you have based on what you are working to accomplish at any given time, as well as the structure and the size of your company. Before you schedule any meeting, I want to also invite you to consider these 3 questions to make sure a meeting is actually necessary. So before you put anything on the calendar, ask yourself, what do we need to do or decide at this meeting? Who actually needs to be in the meeting to support us in achieving that goal? And what happens if we don't meet? And if the answer to that question is not much, then rethink if you need to have the meeting at all. Remember the information that we have that 71% of people think meetings are not well done. This is part of the reason why the answer to any question there may be is not, Let's have a meeting on it. Throw something on the calendar. We should meet on this. Maybe you should, but maybe you should not. So just check yourself to make sure we're putting something productive on the calendar. This benefits everyone in the organization, including you. You don't need a million meetings on your calendar. Now we ask the question, who needs to be in this meeting to move that decision forward? But I want you to think about keeping your meeting participation kind lean, because what happens when you have too many people in the room? Social loafing can occur. I've done it. I've been there. I am not calling anyone out, but when there are more than 8 people in a meeting, oh, somebody else is likely going to answer that question or share if they disagree with something. So I can kind of sit back. Or if there are more than 8 people in the room, we start to observe and see that, oh, okay, they got that covered. I don't need to share on that. I can rethink that. I can withhold. We observe the room first before we start to speak out. Now converse that with, if there are 4 people in the room, I am likely going to have to participate in this. I can't hide. I can't let someone else speak instead of me. I have to be an active Participant. Now, this is different than the all-hands sort of meeting that I mentioned that I would have with my team quarterly. And that meeting, you could see that not everyone is going to speak. Someone else will ask a question that I am thinking. So that load is, is taken off of my shoulders to participate. That is okay. That is a space in time when it makes sense for this to be a meeting, although really that's less of a meeting and more of a presentation, a Q&A session, a forum, a town hall style. So there Certainly different types of meetings, but if you've got a decision and you need to move things forward, don't invite too many people to that meeting. You wanna keep it lean so that every voice in the room is heard because that's when we're gonna get the diversity of thinking. That's when we're gonna get inputs that we might not have thought about before, or questions are going to be asked that someone needs to ask for us to really make sure we are on the right track here. So really think about who needs to be invited and what the of each person in the room is. Again, that's not to say that you might move out of these bounds a little bit, but you may also say, hey, so-and-so is here to listen because this is going to impact what they are doing next. So if there's an expectation that someone may not be actively participating in this meeting, just mention it, just say it so that that is called out. But generally speaking, when everybody is invited to a meeting, it's because we want to hear from you. You've got perspective on this that we wanna hear. Or you're listening to carry it forward to your next meeting where you're going to implement on these things here. This is one of my biggest, most important, we've got to have this in place pieces of a meeting. And that is the dreaded agenda. I know, I know. I hate taking time before a meeting to prepare an agenda. I just want to get to the meeting. Let's do this thing. Let's go. However, it is so important that we know what we are going to be talking about at this meeting for many different reasons. Number one, an agenda is going to help us stay on track so that we don't go overtime in any of our meetings. We want to be respectful of people's time. So if you've got an hour blocked for the meeting, you have 4 items to cover, you've got about 15 minutes per item. So if you get through the first item, you're like, oh boy, that took us 30 minutes. We only have 10 minutes left for each of the remaining 3 items on this agenda. Call that out, right? It also gives you an opportunity to bring the meeting back into focus. Hey everybody, we've got 4 items on the agenda. We are at our time mark for this one, but it sounds like we need a little bit more time on this. Do we want to continue knowing that we might not be able to cover everything? Or do we wanna put this in a parking lot and schedule a follow-up just for this? You've got options. Speak to those things, bring them to the attention of everyone so we all know, okay, we are tracking to our schedule. I'm gonna stay on track here and everybody knows it. Call it out. I wanna be, again, really respectful of everyone's time. And so that if this meeting looks like it's gonna go over, I can notify someone that, hey, I'm gonna be running late. This one's definitely gonna go over, or ask. Ask, right? Hey, we have, um, we have an hour scheduled for this meeting. This one item could take an hour in and of itself. Can everybody stay 15 minutes over? Right? So just ask that at any point in the meeting, you can bring that up. Another thing that you can do to set your agenda is get to the meeting if you have not pre-created agenda and say, hey, I've got a couple of topics specifically for this meeting, including how fast, our AI is moving and how our company is adopting it and what our philosophies are on this and the action points for that new project we've got going. Does anyone else have anything to add to the agenda that we need to discuss in our meeting today? And you can create that agenda real time, but it's beautiful because there is an agenda that everybody agrees on at the beginning. Or we say, actually, that one's not gonna fit. Can we save that one until next week? Yeah, no problem. Not a priority. Thank you. Right. I have the opportunity to add agenda items. I am heard. We all know what we're going to cover today. We've all agreed to that at the beginning. Another way that I like to use the agenda is a rolling agenda. That's kind of always there for your team and for your company. This takes the pressure off of any one single person to create the agenda. Now, certainly if it's a specialty meeting, there may need to be a special agenda that is created for it. But if it is one of those weekly one-on-ones, those weekly department meetings, those weekly leadership team meetings, you might have one rolling agenda that you can quickly sort through and update. Hey, what is coming up? What is current for this week? You could sort dates, you could sort by name, who owns what right now. Hey Amber, can you give us an update on your stuff? Hey Sarah, what do you have shaking How are your things going? And you can just flip the agenda to Sarah's items that are always regularly being updated. In that case, as things are being done, Sarah can say, hey, I got X, Y, and Z done that we talked about last week. Done, done, done, as updated in our rolling agenda. Then our focus is moving on to these 3 things next. Awesome. Everybody's got an update. The agenda is always active and always being worked, and anyone can access it at any time. So before the meeting, they can go in and say, hey, this is what I'm tracking to. This is what I need to get done before that meeting. This is what's coming up. This is what's new that we may need to add. They could add that at any time, or they could add it right as we go through their individual updates on the team. So this rolling agenda concept is pretty cool because again, it takes that pressure off. It's always there for everyone and you can organize it in a number of different ways based on how your team organizes its meetings. So we've got date that you could organize for, you could put priorities in there and you could organize by high priority, medium priority, low priority. You can organize by person. You could also organize by topic or category. Let's say that marketing is one of those items. That you have as a category in this particular team meeting. And you also have money and financials that you're going to discuss and review in this meeting. So you could say, hey, let's cover all the marketing stuff first. Pull that up from your rolling agenda. It's a beautiful thing. Highly recommend you use a rolling agenda for those recurring meetings that you have on a regular basis. So when things are moving fast, here's the counterintuitive piece. You actually need more structure, not less. When things are moving fast, you've gotta have a closer eye on culture. When things are moving fast and people on your team are asking the same question over and over, we've gotta pause to check in. When you need to make decisions on things, but things are moving fast, so you're not prioritizing that, this structure is going to allow you to see very clearly what those high priorities are so that you know where to put your attention. And if you need support in making that decision, In the meeting, you'll have the people that you need in the room with you to help you make those decisions so that you can keep things moving forward fast. And if you can't step away because things are moving fast and you're worried things will fall apart, if you step back for a second, this is especially why you need to get your meeting cadence reset. If you don't have these things in place, these are all opportunities and places where you may become the bottleneck. And if not you, someone else on your team may may become a bottleneck simply because clarity is lacking. And in these meetings, you're going to now redesign your meetings so that everyone gets clarity on the things that they need clarity on to keep moving forward. The goal of a good meeting is that everyone leaves on the same page and knowing what they need to do, not asking again, hey, what about this? What about that? What are we doing? Where are we going? There was one point in building my companies early on where I was checking in with different team members and Why aren't we doing the thing that we needed to do? Why isn't this project that we discussed moving forward? I feel like things have stopped or stalled. And the feedback I got back was, oh yeah, our priorities changed, so we stopped doing that. I was like, wait, our priorities changed? No, they didn't. When did our priorities change? They're like, well, I thought this was our focus now, so we stopped doing that thing. Like, oh my gosh, that was just a miscommunication and a miss on my part as a leader. So in those meetings, you'll constantly be coming back to what is our focus? What are our priorities right now? But then you're going to layer under it the conversations and the talking points that support that so that everybody can get back in sync. And while we think we just talked last week, we just talked Tuesday, confirmation and reiteration of where we are going is It is so important for us all to maintain our momentum and moving in the direction we want to be going. So these meetings give you the opportunity to slow down, to speed up. And I know that it is hard sometimes to do that, but if you get intentional, get focused, reset here, the impact is going to be huge because remember, 68% of people say we We need check-ins. We need those meetings so that we can stay on track. Now there is one final piece of meeting structure and meeting design that I think is so critical and so important, especially when we're moving fast, especially if you've got a remote team and especially if people are kind of all over working on different things. Now we bring people with different perspectives in different areas of expertise together because we want that value add to our team. We want to be able to learn from the experts on our team. And so it is important so that people feel comfortable sharing their expertise openly, especially if they think something is not going the right direction. But to do that, people have to be comfortable to share. So the other thing I want you to think about as you redesign your meetings is to build in just a little space space and wiggle room for the conversation around life, getting to know people. If we are meeting in person, this would organically and naturally happen. You hear things, you notice things, things randomly come up, but in a virtual meeting, right, people are a little bit more likely to mute, to stay quiet until it makes sense for them to unmute or kind of try to get in there. So I want to invite you in those leaner, meetings to check in. How's it going? What's new over there? Hey, I noticed you've got a new backdrop. Are you somewhere different today? Uh, I hear construction. You got some— you got something, a project going on over there? Oh my gosh, that's awesome. Because this allows people to build rapport and build relationship, and that rapport and that relationship that you build in your meetings is going to go go so far in serving number one, getting you to where you want to go, but maybe if not more importantly, it's going to make it more fun and more engaging to work on your team. Now, at the beginning of this conversation, I shared that I've been in some not so great meetings that have made me wonder, why am I even here? And then I've been in some really great meetings where I was sad if they got canceled because number one, we were getting things done. We were making decisions. We knew what action items were and who was doing them, and we knew when they needed to be done. And that just makes my soul happy. But what also made my soul happy is that I was getting to know people. And if I wasn't gonna see them in any given week, I was kind of bummed out about it. Like, oh man, Lauren's not gonna be at the meeting this week. What a bummer. I was really looking forward to hearing how she was doing that. I'll have to follow up on that. And when those connections are built informally, we're going to be much more comfortable sharing and moving things forward formally in your company and on your team. So with all of this in mind, I hope you take some nuggets from this. I hope you think about how you may need to redesign not only what's on your calendar, but how what's on your calendar is structured so that you can have incredible meetings that keep you focused and on track, especially when things are moving fast and things are changing. Okay. That is it for things to think about to redesign your meetings. And it was kind of a lot, but remember, all you gotta do is start small because the small adjustments that you make can have ripple effects on how your company operates and the culture you are creating. With that, you are right on time to make your next move. And I can't wait to catch up with you in the next episode. Good.