128: Elise Keith — Transform Your Meetings Into Something Great!

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Today, meetings. Oh, meetings, meetings. Are they great or terrible? But mostly our relationship meetings is, ugh, oh, they're gonna suck. It's gonna be bad. That's the common, most common one. We want to transform your meetings and have you see that meetings are where the action is in any company. Our guest today is an expert in meetings, has written about meetings, and will help you begin to make your meetings from something to dread to something that are awesome. Hope you get some value out of it. Keep listening. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast.

I'm your host and scaling coach, Bill Gallagher.

On the show with me today is Elise Keith. Elise is the founder of Lucid Meanings and she's the author of where the Action Is. It's a book all about meetings. So.

And you're up in the Portland area.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Delighted to be here.

Awesome.

So we're going to get into all of the, the world of what makes meetings good, what makes meetings bad, what we really mean by a meeting. It's value, the organization, it's how it evolves as you scale, like all that world. But let's talk about why you're even into it. Where did you get interested meetings? How did this evolve for you?

Well, you know, I mean, for me it started with a couple of key revelations and they didn't happen at the beginning of my career, but it was after a while. So when I started my career, like, you know, like everyone, I experienced a lot of needless, wasteful drama. And the first several jobs I held, I was also culpable in that. Right. In college, I worked at a blockbuster for a manager who insisted that we push every customer to buy microwave popcorn and copies of Cinderella on dvd, which I thought was just rude. So I didn't do it. And so she assigned Me to scrub the grime out of the door grates with a wire brush on my knees, which meant I had to leap up and down every time a customer came by. And that was meant to humiliate me into quitting, which of course worked, but not before I had a chance to share my opinion of this manager inside conversations with all the other employees. So turn off. Turnover in that particular blockbuster was just off the charts. It's a college example and I thought it would end there. But later I went to work for Internet software companies where yet again, I found myself participating in seemingly endless streams of negative side conversations. Each company I joined was growing, but none of them had teams that were aligned on the mission. In one, one founder wanted to create high end, custom service oriented software that would be service to very large customers, high end customers. And the other one wanted to create a product that lots of customers would pay not so much money for, but then would never expect anybody to ever talk to them. You know, the engineering team wanted to create things that were repeatable and they were very big on repeatability, scalability. But the project delivery team that actually talked to the customers was trying to give them these highly customized, you know, just so perfect little experiences. So they had these opposing values that meant that like every internal meeting we were in, everybody was at each other's throats. And because we weren't aligned internally, we were giving our customers mixed messages. So in these environments, when I worked directly with customers, I'd often wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. You know that dream you have in school where you show up to an exam but you didn't know it was an exam and you didn't study for it and it's starting and you kind of have to go to the bathroom but you can't find it?

This is a very specific dream.

And you know that feeling, that deep, oh my gosh, I am so unprepared and I'm going to fail and I'm going to embarrass myself here. I started having that dream anytime I had to go into a meeting with a client because I didn't know what they'd been promised. And I was pretty sure they'd be angry because it would be something I'd never heard of and that we couldn't possibly deliver. So in these environments, I learned how to pause outside of the office door and take a deep breath and steel myself before I walked in. They tried, right? All of the interventions. We did disc, we did strength finders. The disc profiles became Excuses. The strengths became weapons. The diversity interventions created more barriers between team members than they brought down. But it was always clear that everybody really wanted to work together. They cared, and they were in their jobs because they believed, at least at one point when they took the job, that it would be cool and that they'd get to be a part of something valuable and new in the world that never existed before.

Right?

So you see all this harm and this waste and these teams full of smart people who want to work together, but they don't know how to break past all the crap and get back to the mission. So at that point, two things happened for me. First, I began working with international standards organizations. And what these organizations do is they bring people together from all over the world to create new industry standards. A standard like companies who agree on how a USB plug will work so that everybody can make USB plugs that fit into all the devices, or exactly what kind of tests a nonstick frying pan has to pass before you can consider it safer food, things like that. By definition, standards work involves people who have competing values and goals. Like they're from different companies, they want different things, they're literally fighting about what that standard is going to include. And I saw that the organizations had a system for getting work done that got them past that. That system centered on a defined way for running meetings. Now, they were often boring meetings.

But.

They worked right like the people didn't have to like each other to get the job done. And that was a revelation. That was the first one. And then second, the product team I was working on at one of these companies brought in Diana Larson, she's an agile coach, and they began using Agile. So for people who aren't familiar with Agile, it's a system teams use to decide what they're going to work on and then manage that work to completion. And just like in the standards work, it's centered on a set of well defined meetings that spell out exactly how the team is going to talk about what they're doing and how and when they'll coordinate.

Well, we talk about the Agile scale.

Up and if you're familiar with that, but not familiar with scale up or vice versa. The Agile approach to development team coordination is very similar to the way we get companies scaling up. The meeting rhythms, the alignment, all of that. The cadence of that is very similar to our work.

Absolutely. The foundation in the scale up. And actually if you look at some of the other systems, you'll see those same kinds of meeting cadences, and those are not like hey, let's meet every week. They're like, we're going to talk about these specific things in this way, in this order every week. Very, very different. And in this engineering team, when they pulled on agile, the engineers began to experiment. They came together, they realigned on what they needed to achieve. They got faster, they got better and they started to have more fun. So in that case, it was actually a path for them learning to like each other again.

Right, right.

So that was my second revelation, you know, and with these foundational two experiences, I discovered that the infighting, the toxicity, you know, it all changes when you change the meetings.

Sometimes we think, well, the meetings would get better if we had the right people, if we just had a different team or whatever. But what you're saying is that if you run your meetings better, people will get along better.

Absolutely, absolutely. And you know, here's what I, what we really found is that meetings are the, you know, they're an inevitable focal point for where the group's energy comes together. And while it's crazy impossible, hard to fix culture or relationships or people. Right. When was the last time it ever worked? When you went to fix a person, you can, I don't know. Right. I mean, it's just like, where do you even start?

My spouse has been trying to fix me forever. I'm pretty sure my mom is still trying to fix me.

Yeah, so. So there's no mountain too high. That's crazy. So, but you can absolutely fix a meeting and then when you fix the meeting, the rest starts to get fixed as well. It absolutely changes how you relate to each other, how you talk about your work. So that's it, that's where it comes from. At Lucid, our mission is to basically unlock amazing businesses through successful meetings.

So you start, you see really toxic meeting environments where people are fighting with each other, where things aren't run well and you learn from these standards environments where they have more boring meetings, but that, and you move into observing Agile team meetings where they become both fun and productive. But you talked about one other thing as we were getting ready for the show and that's well meaning but unproductive meetings where there's nothing really happening. Can you tell that story as well?

Yeah, you bet. So one of the, actually last spring we had an opportunity to work with company out of Australia and on the first call the director of this group called me and she said, elise, our team is full of wonderful people and we've got them all involved in our mission. But our executive group is meeting for three hours every week and we're chasing our tails. Our conversations are going around in circles, our decisions never stick. And while I know these people care, they're starting to burn out, they're starting to lose hope. It's starting to feel a little pointless.

Yeah, I've definitely been in that kind of meeting.

Right. And what we did with that organization is we helped them design and put in place a core meeting flow model. So a meeting flow model is a. It's basically like a business process, but it's from a meeting focus. So how are you going to begin this process and then how are you going to work it through to the end? And a leadership meeting flow model, I know there's one in the scaling up system separates out the conversations about strategy from the conversations about tactical execution. Right. So each conversation is on the calendar with a specific approach and a way to prepare and a way to get that result out so that, you know, you know, here's where we're going to talk about that, here's how we're going to check our progress, here's how way we'll make a decision and how we will then see that that decision gets carried out. The meeting flow model that we tend to help clients adopt is a little different than the scaling up model, but very, very similar and similar to models you'll see in large, highly successful companies as well.

So talk to us about that, talk to us about the meeting model and carry us through a little bit of that before we share some more of the stories.

Yeah, so let's. So a central meeting flow model for a leadership team is going to achieve those goals. Right. It's really about making sure that you have a strategy. And then once that you have that strategy, everybody involved in the business is kept in touch with that strategy on a, on a very regular, at least weekly, if not more basis. And that everything you're doing then drives back up to make sure that you're making progress that way.

Reinforce strategy.

Absolutely, absolutely. So the. It's a 90 day cadence and it starts with strategic planning, you know, or a strategic planning refresh if you don't, if you've already got one in place. And then there is the daily huddle. Now in people who use great game of business, it's just a check in, so you can name that meeting whatever you want to call it. But the 10 minute daily meeting, that's very much about blocking and tackling for the day. So there are no surprises on what's happening. And also if you look at that daily meeting. You'll also realize that it's a continuous learning event. Right? Here's what's happening in my context. Here's what's happening in my environment because our environments are increasingly complex and if you get too far out of sync, you've lost. So the daily huddles of continuous learning, check in, block and tackle meeting, very, very, very short. There is a weekly meeting that the leadership team runs where they have an opportunity to put in place a meaningful ritual that keeps them connected as a team. Check progress, check victories and then solve core issues. Right? What are our top three issues today? And actually solve them. It's wonderful to use that time to get actual work done and things off your plate. Of course, it inevitably comes up that an issue that will come up in your weekly team meeting is too big for that conversation. So these folks also have a dedicated decision making meeting on the calendar every month. They don't know what that's going to be. Right. You don't know if somebody's going to offer to buy your company or you know, your largest competitor goes out of business or who knows what might happen. Your star salesperson jumps ship. Right? There are so many both opportunities and challenges that come up unexpected that you're not going to solve in the 10 minutes you have allotted in your weekly team meeting.

Right.

But what you can do in your weekly team meeting is identify who can go get the critical information you need to make those decisions well and then put that on the calendar for later. So a process for doing that is part of it. And then every 90 days you pull that strategy back up and you make sure it's still relevant. Are we actually tackling the right kind of goals? Are our targets correct for what's shifted in our business?

This is really similar to the meeting cadence that we have, right? There's annual planning sessions where we review an update strategy. We're tending to look at our BHAG and our 3HAG, our 3 year and train year greater type goals. And we're using a variety of things to do that. And then we do an annual plan with specific objectives and so on for the year. That's a lot more tactical in that meeting. And then every 90 days we're saying, what are the priorities this quarter? What do we need to focus on? What does each person need to focus on? That's the 90 day. Then the monthly is actually like an extended weekly. It's a little bit of the weekly check in plus some decision making, some learning, that kind of thing. And then from the weekly Then there's the daily. And the daily doesn't really, it's too short, it doesn't tie into the rest of that stuff too directly. It's more just about keeping us in sync and in communication and conscious about how we're spending our day.

Right, absolutely. And mindful, you know, how many things are coming up in the daily that aren't represented in what we're tracking on the weekly.

Right, right. Well, if you think about it, so much of the daily stuff is emergencies and breakdowns and things like that, which is not always those important, critical things that might go into the other.

Right. That need to be dealt with and if they're persistent enough, need to be raised up, resolved. Yeah, but you have no visibility into them if you just wait and wait to talk for three hours every week. Right. So yeah, the cadence and the structure that you all coach folks to use is a variation on one that we see used in many companies and coached by many other experts as well. Inc. Bank in Germany recently, or ING Bank, I think, actually recently took on a full scale agile adoption. They had, their engineering teams were agile and then they decided to make the entire company agile. And they've reorganized themselves very much like SoundCloud did at one point, into pods and squads. And they've all got these very fluid team organizational dynamics. Yeah. And the way they make that work is that they have a very clear, very structured core meeting flow model. That means that each pod has a way that they talk about their priorities and decide what they're working on and they report that up to their next level on a monthly basis. And then these are reported back to the, you know, the mothership, central strategy, whatever it's called on a, on a quarterly basis. And everything, everything is realigned and kept in sync. So those cadences, you know, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, for tying everything back to that strategy and keeping the business going, but having those be distinct conversations that are planned for and that you have a way you do them that's really a foundational way to make a company healthy and able to scale past, you know, the individual discretionary meeting skills of any manager you might have happened to hire that day.

So we're talking about the cadence of meetings, the purpose of each meeting. Do you also address in your work the agendas, what goes in the meeting, what shouldn't be in the meeting?

We do. And you know, the, the thing about agendas is that actually an agenda is a tool. Right. You may or may not need an agenda. The daily meeting certainly doesn't need an agenda. What you need is clarity of purpose and clarity of expectation. We know why we're coming together, we know what this kind of meeting is and we know what it's meant to accomplish and if it is appropriate. There are meetings where an agenda is a useful tool. There are a lot of meetings where an agenda is a hindrance. So it's incredibly important, first and foremost to understand the distinction between the types of meetings. There are 16 core types of meetings used in most businesses today and sort of the parameters of what each one is good for creating and what they aren't so good for creating. So that you know then where to look for your examples. Because once you have that in place, for example, this is an interview. Right. Interviews have some clear expectations about how the dialogue is going to run, you know, how we'll end up and then what we're going to get out of this. We all have an idea about that. Not much of an agenda, Kind of a loose plan for how it might go. Totally fine. When you have that, you can go out and you can look. Well, how do I run a successful interview? That's a much easier Google search to do. It's a much easier kind of task for figuring out how to make that very specific to what you want to accomplish once you get the type of meeting down in the first place. And then yes. At our website we have over 40 templates for running different kinds of meetings. So very specific plans for things ranging from the weekly team meeting to how do you introduce yourself to a team when you're a new manager or a new leader to how do you solve a problem when you've got a big emergency? You know how different kinds of structures for running for different meetings in different situations.

Yeah.

So in our work we're often talking about the team meeting, but then there's also like a one on one meeting and you're referencing something that might be like an all hands meeting. Each of those are different kinds of meetings that you would have, I imagine you have like brainstorming, product planning. Those kinds of meetings.

Yeah. So basically there are three large categories. There are the cadence meetings, which are really these meetings we use to keep the work going. Right. We've got a plan, we have a basic idea of what we're trying to do. How do we make sure it's working out and everybody stays on target. Right. So the team meeting and the one on one and project updates and actually board meetings, they all kind of fall in that. That zone. Then there's a whole series of meetings that are Catalyst meetings. They're meetings where we get together to try and change something. Right. And yeah, brainstorming workshops, problem solving, decision making. You know, we are at a point where we're ready for something to become different somehow. We need freshness, we need ideas, we need a new path. Whole bunch of different ways to run those meetings. And those meetings, the Catalyst meetings all have research backed ways to run them that work better. Decision making works lousy. If you get everybody in the room and say, hey, what do you guys think? Worst possible way to make a quality decision. And yet that's also the most popular way to make a decision, which is too bad. Decision quality and performance are highly correlated. And then finally there's a whole series of meetings that are these meetings where we get together with somebody who is not on our inner circle that we are working to either influence or learn from. So we have the interviews, we have the negotiations, we have introductions, hiring, for example. And yeah, the All Hands is really kind of a broadcast. Right. Like I'm going to get up and tell you how it is.

It's an inform, a rally, right?

Yeah, yeah. And there are ways to do that that are more inviting and more life affirming. There are ways to do that that shut people down. So knowing that that kind of dynamic is possible gives you an opportunity to be considerate about how you approach it.

Right. You mean don't just start the meeting, here's how to keep your job.

You know, that is one path, I suppose.

Okay, good. So we've got a group of different types of meetings that are broader than the cadence meetings that we're mostly looking at. When I see the meetings that go off in our world, it's because people sort of mix the two. Like they don't use an agenda, they run long, they don't come in prepared. Everybody just sort of talks at different points. There's no rigor to the way they run the meeting. Then all that. And some are highly resistant to any constraint. Like now we just want to talk. As long as we talk kind of thing.

That's wonderfully luxurious, isn't it?

Right.

How nice for them. Yeah. It's not how the highest performing companies do it.

Yeah.

So you can certainly do that. You can get along just fine by ignoring your meetings. You can get along. It's very similar to how people talk about how you really need to treat people well to have a successful business. Cultural success. Healthy cultures make for more healthy businesses.

Right?

Healthy cultures and healthy meetings, they're almost inevitably found in the same places and certainly we know it's quite possible to have very unhealthy, toxic cultures and still make money. It's a hell of a lot harder. So I don't understand personally, as a business owner, why you would choose to ignore the opportunity to get a higher return from something where you're making an enormous investment. You know, if you do ROI math on meetings, ROI math on your executive meetings, that's. It's incredibly expensive to have this many people involved with that much time in a place where you put in no design work in how you approach the work, and no skills training. Right. So that's just a waste of salary. But it gets worse once you interact with people who are not inside your company. Because when we talk with our customers, when we talk with our shareholders and our suppliers, those are all meetings too. And those are all places where they get to decide how well they would like to work with us or not. You know, business relationships are still relationships, and in this particular case, it's not the same. You know, conversations are lovely, but they are not meetings. So the mixing of the two is an unfortunate way to go about it. It's quite fun, however, to look at how the high performing organizations run their meetings and see some of the, you know, performance criteria they put in place and some of the, the fun and interesting rituals they use to keep everybody aligned with their values and moving forward. It's. It's a great place to explore once you embrace it.

As we're getting ready, you started to share a story about failure to scale and how a meeting approach that works at one size of the company doesn't develop. So why don't you share that as the connection between.

Yeah, so the way that most companies work when they're very, very small is they don't really have a whole lot of cadence or prescriptive way of meeting. They just get together and they talk about work and they get it done. That works just fine up to about 20 and then it doesn't. And so they start to get things like weekly team meetings and whatnot, hopefully with some structure, often not. And then you run into the company that finds that it is spending. Yeah. I had a call from a regional manager and he said, elise, I hope you can come in and help us because I keep hiring people and my projects are getting farther and farther behind.

Yep.

And he thought that perhaps it was too much paperwork, perhaps their process was too onerous, perhaps they didn't have enough training. So he started looking at giving them more training. He put in a project management system. He said, you know, what we need to do is more tracking so that we understand what's going on. And nothing shifted. So they went and they assigned a couple of assistants and they went and they looked at people's time and they found that up and down the company, on average they were spending 80% of their time in meetings. The meetings had. Basically, when we see that in a client, what we say is that their meetings have metastasized. They have become, you know, sort of a cell eating cancer that is going through and gobbling all of the time. Because they hadn't put in the systems yet to understand how to move information around the organization without talking to each other. It didn't work. So the more people they kept adding, the worse the problem got. And in that case, they absolutely needed a different way to approach their meetings.

Yeah, I've seen that in quite a few teams where they want to just wipe out all meetings because they just feel like the meetings are unproductive and they're too internally focused. Many cases they're right. But when you look at the meetings, they're these weird, unclear get togethers that just go all over the place with all sorts of bad communication habits, right?

Yeah. And then they go on a fast, right? They're like, okay, that's it, they're all canceled. Slack did this recently. They had went through and they canceled all of their recurring meetings. And Stuart Butterfield did an interview and he said afterwards, he said, we've done this because we're trying to be a great place to work. And we realized it was taking up too much time and probably some of them will come back, but we'll wait to see. Now that certainly probably weeded some meetings out of their schedule, but it's a lot like going cold turkey on food, right? Like you take out all of your food and wait to see what comes back. Not the most successful approach to getting to healthy eating.

Right, Right.

So, you know, that's not an approach where you say, okay, well, wait a second, why are we meeting in the first place? You know, are there places here where the meetings we're having wouldn't need to happen if we, you know, wrote stuff down, for example, or can we, can we like, look at this and say, okay, this information that we're looking at actually falls into these categories and we can handle it all at once more efficiently. There are techniques like that. In this case with this client, we actually taught them how to use a real time agenda. So we canceled all of the extraneous meetings and gave them a meeting per day, because they were meeting so much, they didn't know how to do anything without meeting. And help them put in a real time agenda, which is a technique where the team gets together every day and they say, okay, well, what do we want to talk about? And then they prioritize. These are the top three things. And then they work through the things that they have prioritized to talk about in as much time as they have.

Yeah, it's very similar to the weekly meeting that we have where people look at their dashboard as a team and then decide, okay, what are the two or three things that we're going to actually have time for? And they spend that a lot of time on them.

Yep. And that's it. You get through what you get through.

Right, right.

And then you get back to work. And in doing that for a while, they were able to go, okay, here's. Here's what the different people actually need to work on. You know, oh, it looks like these four people always want to talk about X and nobody else does. Yeah, well, how about they get their own meeting to talk about X? That one actually needs to go on the calendar.

Yeah, right.

So it was a way to help go stop the madness. Let's put a little bit of structure in here that manages the time while you then figure out how to manage the business.

To summarize a little bit, I think the biggest thing that I'm hearing, first of all, is that there's a bunch of different kinds of meetings. And getting really specific about the purpose of the meeting itself is a fundamental thing to do. What is the point of this meeting? And having that be crystal clear that it be a particular kind of meeting, not just a meeting.

Absolutely.

And then the second thing I hear is a whole system of meetings that work together. Well, this is obvious in our world in the cadence of meetings. And you talked about cadence meetings daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual, that sort of flow of meetings. And then there could be a couple others things, like one on ones and like that, where you're doing board meetings that fit in sort of regularly scheduled meetings where we look at how we're progressing, we make adjustments to our work. But then there's a whole range of other kinds of meetings that might be called, declared, used for different purposes to do stuff. And that all of those work together as a set of well run, productive meetings. And maybe through it all, I hear the opportunity for meetings to become not something that you dread, but something that you feel great about, you look forward to.

Absolutely, absolutely. Like just like that Central Cadence meetings helps a leadership team manage their strategy and manage their growth. You'll find similar systems used by your sales team to manage a prospect into a fan. Yeah, right, right. Every single opportunity like that to get together with other people and perform at a high level is truly an opportunity to be excellent and thrilling together. And that's pretty exciting.

Awesome. Well, so this is a good beginning of something for folks. If you want to read more and follow up about it, the book is where the action is. Elise Keith, founder, Author her company is Lucid Meetings. You can go to LucidMeetings.com, you can also find the Amazon link to the book right there. And then you can see more about the company and their software and stuff as well. Elise, thanks so much for being on the on the show and talking about meetings with us today.

Thank you. It's been fun.

For this kind of meeting, I want to remind everybody that we bring a little topic like this, something to do with scaling up your business, scaling your leadership every week in all the different areas that might apply from people, strategy, execution and cash. And you'll often find that certain topics like this span a couple of them where we're talking about people in meetings, both execution and the people side of things. So every week we bring something new to you here on the Scaling Up Business podcast. You'll find the rest of the shows we're, I don't know, 126 or so in now at our website scalingcoach.com along with free downloads of tools we worksheets, agendas, things like that that you can use to help your team get Scaling up along the process. So go find us@scalingcoach.com find Elise Lucidmeetings.com and we'll see you all here again next week. Thanks. Well, I want to give special thanks to our original growth guru, Vern Harnish. Our show is produced by Shannon Amos with audio production by Podfly Productions. Our audio editing is done done by Albert Burge and our show notes are compiled by Ein Codena with proofreading by Tim McGowan. If you got some value out of our show today, please share it with somebody else that you think could use it and let us know what parts made a difference for you. You can send a Note to info scalingcoach.com thanks again for listening and keep scaling.

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