52. How To Not Run Sh*t Meetings

Previously, I worked for an offer for profit and in government and the meetings were shit and they would take forever. Everyone wanted to talk, we got nowhere. I came to Collective Shift, I was expecting nothing. I'm like, they're a startup, they got nothing right. The onboarding was actually incredible notion. Like the things you had documented was incredible, the videos you had. But then the way that you ran those weekly huddle meetings was incredible. The way I felt at the start of the meeting, the way I felt at the end was just amazing.

Welcome back to another episode of the Bennenberg Show. Today we are talking about how to run an effective meeting. If you're a CEO founder, I think we've gotten the secret sauce of running an effective meeting. Or if you're a professional that's sitting in meetings, go, what on earth are we fucking doing here? Listen to this episode, share it with your manager and we're going to help you make an effective meeting. Burks, how are you?

Good, mate, I'm going really well. And I've been wanting to do this episode for a while because this was the most eye opening thing of coming to collectorship. So previously I worked in, I worked for an offer of a profit and in government and the meetings were shit and they'll take forever. Everyone wanted to talk, we got nowhere. And I came to Collective Shift and we had weekly. I was expecting nothing. I'm like, they're a startup, they got nothing right. But the onboarding was actually incredible notion. Like the things you had documented was incredible, the videos you had. But then the way that you ran those weekly huddle meetings was incredible. The way I felt at the start of the meeting, the way I felt at the end was just amazing. And it's so strategic in your approach of what you've actually put in those meetings. And you're saying you kind of iterated over time. Like you've got bits and pieces from different people from eo, things that you've learned. And honestly, if you want to run a weekly huddle with your team, this is 100% the way to do it. I've actually talked to people at EO about it and they do some of the things that we do. But this is crickets, like the past, where we ask about the values and stuff. All right, so I'll go through how we actually run the meeting and then we'll break it down. So, right, we all jump in, we're a remote team, we get in there, we're on like, I think it's like Google Meets whatever it is. Doesn't matter too much. And we kick off with a feeling. So we go around the room in alphabetical order and we've got like a feeling chart and you choose a feeling that you have and it could be, you know, I'm angry, I'm happy, I'm sad, I'm motivated, I'm excited. Or you could be like me and have like a really fancy web and every week you're like, what does that mean? And it's funny. No one knows what I mean. Tim's like cheering because he's like, he's like a wheelie, really well read guy. I was like, I try and sound fancy. I've literally googled a tensei p t And I'm like, yeah, we use that word. So we go around the room, we all say a feeling. And that part's really interesting because you get to see where people are at. And usually like, we'll either have a chuckle or someone say they're tired, but occasionally someone will be like they're stressed and you can see it on their face. And immediately you have an opportunity to engage with that person. Say, hold on a sec, you're feeling very stressed. Is this something we can talk about now? Would you want to talk about it directly? After which I thought was just absolutely incredible. So we open with a feeling. The next thing that we start to go into is what wins do we have for the week? Which is just great because when you're a remote team, you work so fast, you're working on heaps of stuff, you just keep moving, especially in the startup. And we go through the wins. Like, we got these customers, we signed this deal, we launched this product, this content was cracking, this customer said this amazing thing about us and you just see people's faces absolutely light up and we're just like, holy shit, we're shouting each other away. There was another win. We even throw in personal wins where you're like, ben actually took a week off. That is a huge win. Or, you know, I hit a personal record for lifting. Like just celebrating human stuff. We never really do that at work.

And I have some context here.

We.

And like, this has been an iterative process. We didn't used to do this, we used to go like. And for some of you running meetings, you know, you go into, what were the minutes from last week? Have you achieved this? Where's this up to? Like, why isn't that being done? Are you like, you're straight in, you don't want to be there, you're tired, you're Grilled on a task. You don't even know what's happened last week.

You just.

You're already three minutes and you're like, fuck this, this is shit. But you start with AS wins and everyone says, because you don't know some of the stuff that goes on within the organization, we're only a small team. And some of the stuff we don't know, we bring it all up. Everyone's energized, everyone's like, pumped up. Like, man, we're crushing it. That's wicked.

Yeah, exactly. And that whole thing of going through a feeling and going through the wins takes less than five minutes, five minutes out of an hour meeting to focus your team, get everyone on the same page, get them warmed up. This is what great facilitators do. Whenever you go to a seminar, they, like, warm people up. You do that introduction. They always do it at eo because it worked.

Yeah, totally.

And then after we've done the feeling and the wins, we go into company objectives. So with us, we used to have. What do you have? OKRs, individual objectives, where KPIs were doing, like, all sorts of shit, all fucking nonsense. So, like, they're great for massive orgs and when you're reporting and. But for us, we literally had a Kanban board we made in Asana and it's. We got things that we want to do that are on the shelf, things that are going to be done within the next week or two and things that are already done. So we load that up, we see all the different areas and tasks and we go through them. So it'll be something like Bergs, you said you were going to deliver this product feature or this mobile app, is it? And we have an owner for each task. Only one owner for each task. So you know who to ask. Ben can open it. Right, right. It's got my little head there in the sauna. Bergs, where is this at? And I explained to the team exactly where things are at. And it's an opportunity as well to say, okay, here's where it's at. I've done it. Or I had these challenges. And if you had challenges, the entire team is there to rally around you and help you, because these are company objectives we need to achieve. Yes, there's an owner, but everyone needs to work together to achieve them. And if it's been a week or two and you haven't achieved them, people will start to say, right, how can we help? What do you need? Is this the right thing to do? We even kill tasks as well, we're like, no, that's not important anymore. Get rid of it. Don't spend your time there.

And what I love about the shelf as well is like, you know, there's always new ideas, there's new strategies, new features, new, like, feedback, all this sort of stuff. But it's when you've got a small team or limited resources, you can't do everything and some of those things go to die, you forget about them.

Right.

But now we've got this shelf, it's literally like a digital shelf we can add new tasks to. And when we run out of things to do or when we're ready to bring new things onto the Kanban board to start, we can pull something off the shelf.

That's exactly right. And we've also got like a blocked category. An example is our Apple mobile app. We've done as much as we can do away for Apple. We put that in the block category and we move on to other things. Yep. And all of these tasks as well, they don't just come out of thin air. These are from our quarterly objectives. So we sit down, we've got an advisor, we run through our quarterly objectives, we run through it with the team as well. And this is the whole thing about alignment. So you're going through feelings, you're going through wins, you've got shared value, shared wins, shared struggles, and then which really bonds your team and builds a culture. We've got our quarterly objectives. So everyone has participated in that. They know what they are, they know what we need to achieve, what the important ones are. Then that breaks down to the tasks we need to do in order to fulfill those objectives. There's a straight line all the way through.

And I really struggled this in the past where we didn't have the strategic objectives laid out. It's really hard to sit down, go, what's the most important thing to do today when you don't know what you're working towards? So now we've got these strategic objectives where we know our yearly goal, we know what we want to get to, then it's like, okay, what are the things in the next three months that we need to achieve to work towards that higher thing? There's probably like, what are we, 20 things on that list? For example, we assign someone to each of those things, we rate them in terms of priority. What is the highest ROI thing on this list is going to help us achieve our goal? And then it goes into Kanban board.

Exactly. And other things. It's so easy to exclude things because there's unlimited things to do, but you have limited time. And especially in startup where you're resource constraint, you need to focus. In any business, you should be focusing, you should be killing tasks that. And whenever we finish a task like, great, that's done, you press a little tick button, a little unicorn flies up everybody, there's a little celebration and it moves over. We've got a little widget thing that moves over into a category so you see what you've achieved and you look back at that. Sometimes we even call that out while we've achieved this water and we're like, holy shit, we did so well.

Yeah, totally. I think also like, I use it in my personal. I've got my own personal Kman board I laid out a little bit differently. But it's the same thing with my shelf. I got my this week, my next week, my today list and you can just move things down, down the order and you can like visualize, you know, because there's unlimited things to do.

Right.

But it's about managing and prioritizing. So that's a good way to do it.

Absolutely. And then after we've gone through all of those, the next thing we do in our meeting is we bring up our company values. So we've got like five company values. Everyone knows them, they're, here we go. We can do a test.

Community first, fee first, get she done, get you down, play as a team.

Players seem hungry to learn, improve and innovate.

Yep.

That was the big one.

Isn't it?

Right. What do we have?

What is it? Community first, plays a team, get you done. How you should learn, how you learn, innovate. And this is amazing.

This is like we know our company value. You can bring it up, it's the one right down the bottom and the re. Like, to be honest, the reason we're forgetting is it's actually a double up that we've just added recently there. But everyone has to come to this meeting and everyone has to shout out someone else that has displayed our company values that week. Do you have the last but simple, keep it simple. There you go. And I think we, we call out those things, but we always keep it simple in our business is like the default thing that we do.

Yeah.

So for example, I like call out Ben because he's done this awesome thing and he's kept it simple. He's hungry to learn improvement, innovate. Because now he's doing sales calls and the way that he set it up and then I'll talk about that experience. And you should just see people's faces light up when they get called out or if they get called out multiple times because they've absolutely been crushing it and going above and beyond and it just spurs people on. You feel so good and you feel valued, you feel part of it.

So you've seen.

Yeah, seen. And it just builds that cohesiveness. And, and I was talking to someone at EO and I was like, this is the way we do it. And they were like, well, we do that every meeting and we kind of ask everyone. There's this cricket that no one speaks up. And I'm like, no, like for us it's mandatory that you have to, you.

Have to shout someone out.

It is not optional. So the whole week when you're working and you're like, wow, that was amazing. Like, you know, you keep that in.

Your mind and remember. Yeah, yeah, like, oh, that I'm going.

To shout that out like literally every week I have a couple of bites of the cherry because there are so many people to shout out and the things that they're doing. Yeah. And, and just having that checkpoint and knowing that, you know, you can be shouted out or you'll be recognized in that way is just incredible.

Yeah, it's a good feeling.

Oh. And by that point everyone's feeling pumped up, everyone's amazing. And then we close with a feeling and generally it's like, you know, excited, happy, whatever it may be. Like it's generally the exact, unless you were good at the start, the exact opposite of the. That you had. Because these meetings are structured to align us to. We know we're in the trenches together to go through the wins that we've had and then work together on what we need to achieve. And also the camaraderie in shouting each other out.

Yeah. And I think it's super important with a remote company. Like if you're, you know, starting a startup, you've got a remote dev, you've got a customer support person, whatever. Like you're not in the same office. You don't get that alignment. Super important to have that effective weekly call. Some people have them daily. Not as effective for us because we're not like scrumming around everything you and the dev team might.

But like we do have a stand up that's for task oriented.

Yeah, yeah. I think having an effective weekly meeting gets everyone set up. It also gets them excited. You know, sometimes I'll come in and talk about the mission or tell them a story about like a customer interview we had or like A problem we sold and really like get people back towards the mission because so much happens throughout the week. You get lost, get, you know, you lack, lack focus. But so it's about bringing everyone together. It's like the team, like if we go and play the sport.

Right. Yeah.

The coach comes in and gives the pep talk. This is the game plan, this is what we're doing.

You constantly need to remind people why we're here, the values we have and storytelling of experiences. This is something that Fiona Mold work did incredibly well where she'd sit down, all the children sit around and she'd tell a story of like I had this patient, this thing happened and then I met with this person and just putting it all together so you really get that understanding of where your leader is taking you, the vision that they have and it's actually lived experiences every week and it just helps to reinforce that vision and those values.

Spot on, man.

Right.

Just to recap, we kick off with a feeling then we go into the wins for the week and we have a few stories along the way. We have our Kanban board with all of our tasks that we'll need to achieve that week and people get around it and say where they're at. We then go through the company values and we shout someone out and then we end with a feeling. And I think having that method is just incredible. It works every week. It is the theme that I look forward to. Can you believe that? Looking forward to it. Wow.

Is that a good thing to say? I enjoy it too. So guys and girls listening, if you are in shit meetings, please please, please put your manager aside. Share in this episode, show them how to increase your meetings. And if you're a founder or you're you're in a startup and you're you meetings aren't really wanting running that great trial this model out. It might not be 100% for you but iterate. This has been an iterative process for the last two and a half years to get to this point. But bring your team together, get them inspired, they're going to do much better work for you.

Absolutely. It's how you create really cohesive, high performing teams.

That is how you run well. That's how we run our meetings. Guys. If you liked that episode we'd love for you to share it with a friend. Share with a manager, share it with a colleague, share with your teammates. We'd love for you to improve your meetings. And if you love these episodes please give us a like or a subscribe or a review on the podcasting app. We'd really, really appreciate it. And folks, will see you on the next episode.

See you then, folks.