231: Cameron Herold — How to Run Smart Meetings

This time I got the music fixed last time. It was weird. I couldn't like, it was. I had the mic set up wrong or something. In restarting the machine, I. I like a little background music, to be honest. I would play all kinds of different songs like I do in our workshops except. And our sessions with our teams except, of course. Then YouTube and others will suppress you and give you trouble and flag you and stuff. But I'm like picking like a song for the moment for the topic of discussion. All right, we're about to talk with Cameron Harold about why meetings suck and how to change things up. And this has been, of course, a topic that's great forever, but especially now that so many of us spend so much time in Zoom Land. This is my new. This is my trademark term. Zoom Land is mine. No, probably not, but. So we're going to talk about that in just a second. We have Cameron Harold, who's up in Vancouver right now. But you're kind of all over the place, whether real or no, in person or not.

Yeah. Events globally.

Yeah. All right, so some reminders before we get into how to make your meeting suck less. I'm Bill Gallagher, friendly neighborhood scaling coach, host of the show Scaling Up Business Podcast is all about how to scale companies, why some companies make it and why so many don't, and how to beat your odds. This is the show tied to the best selling book and all that we've done now. 230 episodes maybe. So we've been doing them for a few years on every topic with every kind of imaginable subject matter expert. We've had people like Gary Hamill and Tom Peters and Raj Sisodia and like just on and Cameron Herald and Brian Scudamore and just on and on. Many, many folks, authors, gurus, CEOs large and small talking about what it takes to scale and scale successfully. So if there's anything like this that you want or if you're looking for a coach in the scaling up world, we can help you figure that shit out. We just got relegated now. Got marked adult. Maybe I could drop an F bomb before we're done. So anyway, that's my. That's me showing through. But so anyway, we've got all these shows if you want to find all that and all the search something on a topic that's of interest or importance to you, whether it's people, strategy, execution, cash, or the fifth decision that I like to do some additional talking about, like what kind of leader are you going to be? You'll find all that@scalingcoach.com welcome to Show Everyone. Welcome to the show. So guys, Cameron Herald is a personal friend of some years now both my, myself, my wife and lovely human and all around coach with a particular focus on COOs and he runs a group called the COO alliance that I forgot to tag you in the other day but we were talking a little bit about in our coach panel conversation and he's with us here today to talk about the topic of his book why meetings suck because it's so, so, so relevant right now. But I'll let him say some more but you should know that by the age of 35 he built a couple of hundred million dollar companies. By 42 he drove 1-800-got junk from 2 million to 106 million 3100 employees and he's had many, many, many media placements speaking all over the world, been covered by Oprah like all, all that. So I maybe misquoted something there or got something wrong. But he's just got a great background, he's a great speaker on all things to do with growing up and that particular focus on. We'll talk towards the end of the show about the COO alliance and how to get your second in command getting the same kind of support that CEOs often get through organizations that we know and work with like Vistage and YPO and EO or once Y eo. So welcome Cameron. All right, so what are you doing up in Vancouver now? Hanging out.

Living here. Yeah, living part time in Vancouver, part time in Scottsdale, still going back and forth. I love that you mentioned yeo. I said that somebody the other day and they said there's never been a. Yeah, I'm like, yeah, there was, there used to be. We used to get kicked out at 40.

Yes. Which is actually I left the organization for a couple of years at that point right when I turned 40 and when the organization was like that and I just. But then I came back because there's kind of an unmistakable. I mean I've been a member of other things. Like there's another business group here, the alliance of CEOs that I was a member of as well for like 11 years with a couple different companies. And you know, the Y EO now eo, the entrepreneurs organization had a different flavor than a lot of them that I thought was really useful for what I was doing. In truth, I work with more companies from other groups than from eo.

But I'm mostly YPO and Vistage would be most of my clients. Yeah, it's interesting. I think it's an area that most entrepreneurs don't even know that these groups, these mastermind groups even exist. You think that there's probably 5% of the entrepreneurs or CEOs even know that these groups exist? We think everyone knows of EO and YPO and vistage. The reality is they really don't. They're often flying very blind. And I think there's a huge opportunity for CEOs to invest in themselves and plug themselves into a group that's outside of their industry. So it's like if you're a plumbing company, don't join just the plumbing association. Get in, get into vistage. Right.

And then.

And that was why I even started. The COO alliance was just a network to grow your second in command too. But we can talk about that at the end.

You know, one of the. I worked for a big telecom company early in my career and one of the like big breakthroughs I had came from reading an article, I want to say it was in like Brand Week magazine about something Subway Sandwiches was doing. And I'm like, oh, I could use that in the phone business. And just a little clever like marketing research slash communication thing. And I'm like. And that was huge in terms of what I was. But because it wasn't what everybody else in the industry was doing.

I call it ideas having sex. That you take one idea from one CEO, another idea from another CEO and it kind of pops into something that works for your industry. I'm actually a member of four different mastermind groups. I'm in the Genius Network. I go to War Room. I go to the main TED conference part of Baby Bathwater. I was in Strategic Coach for seven years. Like I'm really plugged in and investing in myself in those areas just for that reason. Yes, yes.

I was talking to another one that I've done some stuff with the Maverick group yesterday and they're like, why aren't you a Maverick yet? I'm like, I would love you. I played with them a little bit last year. I'm like, I feel a little tapped out with how many more groups I can join for the next yet anyway. But I, I probably will join them in a year.

Yannick. Yannick Silver, the founder of Maverick is one of my very first coaching clients. And I've been to two camp Mavericks and his old underground events. Great. Another great group.

Yes. Lots of really great things. And I think there's no like I. A great place to come from with this. In my view. We're going to get to the topic of the meeting. Sucker. Just a second. But is this notion of abundance, abundance of time, abundance of resource. If you approach life and your challenges and circumstance from the opportunities to play and to engage, I think you end up in a very different place than it's like. I've only got so much brain space and time and energy and that kind of thing.

So whenever I go to any of these events, I always walk in with three things that I have to get done. I go in. The first one is three people that I want to meet from the group that I don't know yet. The second one is three people that will be at the event that I know who I'd like to spend more time talking to and build a deeper relationship with. And then the third is three things that I'm thinking about or working on in my business that I'm going to ask everybody about. So I'm going in with a lot of intention and that's true. If I go to TED or if I go to Genius Network, I'm very much showing up with intention. I don't really think about the randomness. You know, there's going to be lots of random things come up too. But if I come out with those three things getting covered, I'm in good shape.

So say what they are again.

Yeah. The first one is three people that I want to meet in the group that I don't know yet. The second one is three people that I do know who are going to be there that I want to build a better relationship with. So I might sit and have lunch with them or go for a drink or sit and have an in depth discussion. And then the third is three parts of my business that I'm thinking about that I really want to pick their brain on and see if I can extract ideas from them on how I can grow.

Yes. You know, it's interesting you say that and where you lead with that from personally. Do you use the Gallup strengths tools at all?

I don't know.

Yeah, I know. Yeah. So Gallup Strengths Finder will take your 34 talent themes and then when looking at it as a leader, they'll break them into four groups. And it's execution, it's influence and relationship building, management and then strategy like DISC or Myers Briggs or other kinds of things. You may notice that you are a little dominant in one or two and weaker in a couple. And I am all about influence and strategy but weak in the relationship category. And your first two are structural kinds of practices that to that I will definitely use from here out.

I would, I wouldn't have ever guessed that about you. I would have thought you were stronger in the relationship area than I am. No, for real, because every time I meet you, you're gregarious, you're outgoing, I'm immediately attracted and talk to you. It's like easy to have those conversations. You're a guy that I think about, hey, come and join us for dinners. Like, it's a very easy, it's very easy discussion. So yeah. In fact, didn't I drag you to the French Laundry one night for dinner?

Fabulous. Yeah.

Because you're a good guy.

Here we go. This is a little memento here. The clothespin on the menu. Just one of a couple of good knickknacks around the office. So I'm actually pretty introverted. Like many public speakers. Very comfortable when I have a specific role to go talk about and that kind of thing. Just being part of the group, like, I'm a little uncomfortable.

That's me. Yeah, that's true. By the way, of most speakers. Most speakers would rather stand on a stage than show up at a cocktail party of 15 people they don't know. So the night before the speaking event is a great time to reach out to speakers. If let's say that the speaker is speaking tomorrow at your conference, drop them a text or a LinkedIn message or something and say, hey, I'm not sure what you're doing the night before your event. Do you want to grab a bite? They're going to say yes, because otherwise they're sitting in their hotel by themselves. And it's amazing the amount of really big high name speakers I've met just by offering to go for dinner with them.

Yeah, that's so great. And I think that some. I remember a guy who blanking on his name right now. Anyway, I booked a series of workshops over a couple of years and I went to this group and one guy would always come pick me up at the airport and take me to lunch.

Great.

Right, right. And I like, he got a couple hours of my time and attention and I sort of enjoyed like it made it nicer. But he got a ton of free coaching.

I've got a mutual friend of ours who offered to run my marathon with me to pace me to my marathon time. And we're in the middle of the marathon. I'm like, it's so good that you're doing this. He goes, dude, I get four hours of free coaching from you. It was Chris Kaplan. Chris ran my Marathon. He's like, I get to hang out with you for four hours. He goes, I'll run a marathon with you whenever you want. I'm like, God, you're so smart.

Yeah, he's smart in that regard. So thinking about that, that's kind of how. And you see different people. Like, I became friends with Tom Peters because I saw him in a mixer, and, you know, I just. I knew that I'd go talk to him for a second, so I just said something. And I think that, like, I interview for that relationship, and I have one. There's probably a few things that I will say and ask, but one in particular. Lucy will smile. She's in the background watching and managing us. But I ask, what does it look like when you leave a party? And describe it for me. And I know that there's a striking difference between how I leave a party and how my wife leaves a party. Right. And you know, Laurie as well. But Lori says, okay, it's time to go, kind of to you, reluctantly, if she's talking to us. And then she goes around to all the other people who are friends or that she's talked to tonight and says goodbye to each of them in turn and then proceeds to end up having another little conversation with each. So it takes a good hour to leave a party or gathering of some kind. And in turn, she really doesn't want to leave. She would just stay until the last few people are there and have one more drink and then go to the after party or the next thing or whatever. It just. It'll never stop. She's so sustained by that interaction, which, of course, you know, creates some issues for us. Sometimes when I, like, want to go or she wants to stay, but that's a useful thing. So I will just ask, what does it look like? And I know that person will manage the relationships differently, and I will tend to. I value them, and I am there for other people, but differently. And I will kind of take them for granted. I will assume them.

Oh, well, I'm very similar to Laurie that I'm always one of the last ones to go, and I'm always feeling bad. I've spoken at the EMP program at the EO and MIT hold. I've spoken there 14 out of the last 16 years. And every time I'm leaving the EMP program, I almost feel like my heart's being ripped out because I've built these relationships with these people, and now I don't know if I'm going to see them again. And I always Feel bad. It's a really weird feeling that I have.

Yeah, yeah, I could be. Well, it depends on the group sometimes if I'm not connecting, but I usually find I connect with small groups. One or two people, I'll find myself talking to you or somebody else to the exclusion of everyone else. I've learned things like to go in and to say hi and wave to people and to engage and that kind of thing. But my sort of normal comfort is to find one or two people that I want to talk to in depth and then kind of just stay there.

Well, and you stay very present in your conversations too. So that makes sense.

Yeah. So let's eventually get to our topic of why meetings suck. We all know this. I mentioned at the beginning how I worked for a big telecom company and for a while in kind of my last role there, I had like this leather bound notepad and I would walk from meeting room to meeting room all day long. And they would just have one meeting after another. And they did some work on investing in some meeting discipline and meeting practices, starting try to upgrade that. Because there were a lot of us that walked around the corporate office like that, talk about why meetings suck first, maybe, and how this became an interest before we talk about what makes them.

Yeah, this actually was prompted because of a company that I was coaching. I was coaching a group out of Florida called Blue Grace Logistics. And I'd taken them from about 45 employees up to about 400 over four years that I've been coaching them. They're now at about 700. And I was talking with the CEO, Bobby, and Bobby said something. I'm like, so what's bugging you right now? He goes, all my employees complain about our meetings. He goes, our meetings suck. I said, well, have you ever trained your managers on how to run a meeting? He said, no. I said, have you ever trained all of your employees on how to show up at meetings and how to participate in meetings and how to lead up while they're in meetings? And he said, no. I said, well then meetings don't suck. You suck at running meetings. And he laughed. And I said, it's kind of like a kid going off to play little league baseball. You know, if you didn't teach the kid how to hold the glove and how to throw the ball and how to catch a ball and how to swing a bat. The kid would come home from baseball the first night and say, baseball sucks. And the reality is, no, Johnny, you suck at baseball. So that was the impetus for the book. And then I Worked with a group called Scribe and they've helped me with three of my five books now and they helped me structure the book so that the first third of the book is how to run meetings. The second third of the book is how to show up and participate and attend meetings. And the last third of the book is what meetings you need for your meeting rhythms to really scale a high growth, high culture company. So that was the purpose for it. And there really hadn't been a book out there, you know, Death by Meetings talked about stuff, but it didn't give us the structure. And then we had Traction, talked about a level 10 meeting. And I know there's stuff in Scaling up and Rockefeller Habits about things like daily huddles, but there's never been anything around all the principles of meetings. So that's why I wrote it that way.

It's really great. So we've seen this a bunch. And even when we start working with companies and we go to implement, usually the one I implement first is not a weekly meeting or some equivalent to a level 10. I will work on the daily huddle first. And, and, and when taking over from somebody who's upgrading from traction and moving to the next level with Scaling Up, I will go to work on the daily huddle. And it can be like remarkable. But after they implement whatever meeting they sort of go to implement within the company, regular recurring kind of standard meeting versus ad hoc or problem solving, they, they'll encounter some problems. Like they'll come back and they'll be like, ah, this thing doesn't work for us. It kind of sucks. And I'll say, okay, abandon it, let me observe it or tell me what's going on. And almost always you can spot any number of things and then put in a little correct as the meeting work.

My background has been growing franchise organizations, right? So I was the second in command for 1-800-got junk from 14 people to 3,000. I opened up the west coast of the United States for college pro painters. We did it again with Gerber Auto Collision and Boyd Auto Body. So I was really good at creating systems that scaled. And for me that meant if I'm going to run a meeting, I have to systemize it with like, here are the seven things to really run that highly effective meeting, whether it's a strategy meeting or a huddle meeting or a finance meeting, etc. I love that you actually said when people are kind of leaving traction and going up to scaling up, because that's really the natural evolution for every company out there. Is I think traction gets you to like 30 to 40 employees. But after that, you really need to move into the scaling up world for sure. Because the systems aren't strong enough to really scale a bigger brand. Interesting. You mentioned you started with huddle. We put our daily huddle in place, which we learned from Vern, the author of Scaling Up. We learned that from him 20 years ago, we did a daily huddle at 1,800. Got junk. They still do it today, 20 years later. But when we put it in place for the first week or two, every employee was like, this is stupid, it's dorky, we hate it. We had one of our VPs, he's like, I will not participate. He was Russian. He's like, I will not participate. It's communism. We're all cheering with logos. This is bullshit. And we had to listen to them to go, we know it'll work, but we have to keep tweaking it. So Brian and I would look at them and go, no, it's working, it's great. And then we would meet around the corner and go, okay, it sucks. How do we make it better tomorrow? How do we make it better tomorrow? And that's where even putting a system in place for huddle and sticking with it, like, huddle is a seven minute meeting, not 20. It's a stand up meeting. Don't sit down. You know, one of my clients in England was like, we're having a problem with our huddle. I'm like, describe it. He goes, well, we all get together in the lunchroom, we sit down, we pour tea. I'm like, dude, that's not fucking huddle, that's having tea. Like, if you're gonna have a huddle, you don't see football players sitting down on the field pouring tea with each other. Like, huddle is a stand up, seven minute with a pulse, you know? So you create that huddles don't have finger sandwiches. Exactly. And then you have to iterate, you know, just because it says something in a book. Like, every employee talks at huddle. No, because when you get past 20 employees, you don't have time for every employee to talk at huddle. Like when you get to 50 employees, if every person is saying they're 20 seconds, that's now a 15 minute meeting. So you have to iterate. Right? So we did a business area update a day. So marketing would update on Monday, finance on Tuesday, ops on Wednesday, et cetera. We'd cycle through the eight business areas. Interesting. You start with huddle, I start with the annual planning meeting, which I think you do anyway. Scaling up, right?

Yeah. When they start. Right, yeah.

So I think the key is you start with the annual, then you go with the quarterlies, then you go with. Then I would go to the. Probably the weekly leadership team, then the one on one coaching meetings huddle maybe then you layer in the finance meetings and strategy meetings later. But yeah, you guys have. But most companies don't do annual or quarterly strategy meetings, which blows my mind.

Well, by the time they hire us, they're doing that. Right. Because that's one of the main vehicles that we do is the annual and the quarterly. And to be honest, it could start at any point. So if we start at this time of year, it's usually a mix of fourth quarter plus annual. And if we start coaching now and then in other times of the year, like in first quarter, it also might be like first quarter and annual. And then at other times of the year it might be a little mid year tune up and then just quarterly and then we'll wait for a while.

Exactly, exactly.

They're kind of getting that I'm talking about what they do without me. Right. So I don't lead the weekly, I don't lead the monthly, I don't lead one on ones. But I might teach them how to do it.

Right. And the key with the meetings is once you know you're doing them, block them into every employee's calendar. Have an alert set up for two minutes or five minutes before every meeting so their calendar beeps to say, hey, get off the call or stop what you're doing, get ready for your meeting and have all those meetings in everybody's calendars so then they can plan all their other work around them. But you shouldn't be having to find time for next week's weekly meeting because it should be there for the next three years.

Yeah. So I think this is a real struggle in the beginning and it's a great place to begin, is just actually designing in when the meeting should occur in a ideal flow. Right. And then having that meeting be there by default, recurring and planning the business around it. But I think that's like a little bit like covey starting with the end in mind. Right. Planning from the future, thinking about where do we want to be and then working. Because from here out, like I don't know about you, but in every company is a little bit different. But nobody's got any time for any of this. They're all busy, there's no openings for it and they'll Always preempt something for a key customer instead of saying to the customer, hey, I'm not really available then could you do any other time? In many cases, the customer is available at lots of other times for something.

It's rare that, well, it's no different than me. I mean, I don't work Fridays, so Fridays are blocked off with me. So like it's impossible to get on my calendar for Fridays. But my clients don't know that I'm not working Fridays. They just know that I'm busy. So I, I like, I blocked something in. Right. So yeah, you block in the meetings and, and yeah, it takes some time. But so what I challenge companies with is, look, if you're not willing to put all the meetings in everybody's calendars and force them to move around the other stuff to make it fit, that's cool. But get used to 7% growth for the rest of your life. But if you really want to grow like we grew 1-800-got junk. Six consecutive years of 100% revenue growth, six years in a row. We had gave out no equity, we had no debt. If you want growth, then you have to actually be intentional with this kind of stuff.

Yeah, I think that's a really good point out. So thinking about that, starting out in the future, what would it ideally look like and then designing that. The other thing you said there to underscore is don't try to do it all at once. You're not going to implement annual, quarterly, one on ones, daily huddles, weekly meetings, all hands. You're just not going to get all.

That stuff done and it'll really piss off all your employees. And what they then start thinking is, oh, it's the flavor of the month, so they don't really buy in. You take one, you go deep until it's working. Then you put in the next one, you go deep until it's working. I even work with training my employees on one skill area per quarter. So as an example, let's say that fourth quarter everyone decides that they want to train all their employees on meetings. So month one October, buy everybody the book meeting suck. Every employee, 15 bucks a book. Every employee reads the book, meeting suck. And then in the last week of the quarter, they do a five minute book report over lunch, what they learned from the book. In November, find two videos online about running effective meetings and show them those videos and then at the end of that month have them talk about what they learned in the videos. In December, find a consultant, some local consultant, pay them two grand or a thousand bucks, whatever, to come in and run a half day session on running highly effective meetings. So now they've read stuff, they've watched stuff, they participated in little workshops. You've really covered meetings well, for the quarter, first quarter, let's do it with interviewing. Let's have everybody read the book.

Who.

Let's have everybody watch. You know what I mean? So I'm very intentional about everything.

Yeah, yeah. I think that's a really useful thing, the phased introduction. Figure out what's working, make sure it's working before you move on to the next thing. Then you don't end up with that rejection and flavor of the month thing. You know, there's a term that an old coach taught me that I love. He said, you know, CEOs like you, you go off to workshops and you learn things. You come back, you bring it and they all know it, and they see it coming. After a while they know you and then they smile and pay you lip service. They shine you on because they know you'll forget about it.

You'll be.

And this phenomenon is called bohica. Have you heard this?

I have and I don't remember the term.

Now it's bend over. Here it comes again. Which is really crass and crude. But the idea is they're just sort of waiting for your nonsense to show up and they're going to humor you because they know many times you'll forget about it. Right. And then move on.

All the entrepreneur's doing is clearing their hard drive. They're getting all the ideas out of their hard drive so they have room for other ideas. But that doesn't. Those ideas are going to stick. So the only way that these systems stick is to be very intentional, like you said, and kind of work through it for a month to a quarter and then layer it on. And layer it on.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. So that's the first one. Like get it scheduled out and introduce them slowly. Right. What's next?

The next one is to give people the. The clarity on why we're doing this system or why we're doing this meeting so they understand the kind of core purpose for the meetings themselves. Every meeting is different. Right. You have a daily huddle, which is to keep people on the same page. You have a leadership team meeting, which is to keep a leadership team on the same page of strategy. You have your finance meeting, which is to review financials. You have your strategy meeting, which is just to talk about stuff six months or 12 months out on the calendars. Every meeting has to have a clear purpose. And then you give them the kind of the basics on running highly effective meetings. So every meeting starts exactly on time. Every meeting finishes five minutes early. So you have time to walk down the hall and talk to your assistant, get a cup of coffee and start on time, et cetera. You give them the basic rules.

Those are the starting points. I think so. When I was in corporate land, right. They taught us purpose, agenda, limits. So the purpose is the first thing you talk to, the why of the meeting. And I think some people have trouble articulating, but I'll usually say, what's the outcome? So what do we want to walk out of this meeting? That's the purpose of the meeting.

Yeah. So I say purpose, a maximum of three outcomes and then no agenda, no attendant. If you don't tell me the agenda with the purpose and outcomes when you're booking me, I'm going to say maybe, I don't know what. Like, you need to tell me why we're running the meeting and what we're covering, in what order and how many minutes on each agenda item for me to say yes to my time.

Awesome. So that agenda gives you an idea of the flow, of how we're going to get to that end point that. That fulfills the purpose. Right. Also creates a plan, and it also.

Shows people, hey, I know I'm requesting you for the meeting, but when you see the agenda, if you don't think you can fit into this or it makes sense for you to participate, that's probably because you have other higher priority projects to work on. Go work on those. Like, we don't need everybody here just because we thought we wanted to be there. Like, if you see the agenda, and we had a meeting one time and one of the things on the agenda was they were planning a Christmas party. And our VP of IT was pissed off. He leaves, he's like, I don't even understand. I'm Jewish. Like, what was I doing in there? I think a Christmas party. I'm like, I'm like, I don't even understand how you got into a meeting that was planning a Christmas party. He goes, well, there's no agenda like broken system, Right? Because if you'd seen that on the agenda, he wouldn't have showed up for that part. He might have stayed for the first two points and then left for the last two points that didn't really need his time.

Yeah. And I think that then the. It also then implies stuff. So the limits was about time and boundaries and things like that we're not getting into this. We're not doing that. Like, that world of that, I think, makes a real difference, right?

Yeah. The other part that you mentioned earlier was, like, how do you get these things to stick? Is just realizing that you have to stay very intentional with it. Like, we worked hard on Huddle for probably two months, where every day we were debriefing on how Huddle just sucked and how we can tweak it. You know, nobody's showing up with good News. We'd have to go and get people to show up with good News. We'd be like, hey, Bill, can you read something at Huddle today on Good News? Hey, Fred, can you bring something in from it on Good News? Like, we had to seed it. You know, we had to keep the energy level up. We had, like, we really had to work at it until all of a sudden, it was like a flywheel. That huddle flywheel started to go, and now they've run Daily Huddle. I think it's been 19 years straight at 1-800-got junk. They've run daily Huddle. So. But. But it took time to get that flywheel to go.

What I notice in what you're saying is that there's thoughtful tweaking and iteration on the business practice. And I think that while we might say thoughtfully tweak and iterate on a core aspect of our product or service, we don't necessarily do that on some of these business practices. So we'll go and we'll be like, we tried dashboards, and that didn't work. And, okay, how would you make such a snap judgment? Do you understand the intention, the structure? Have you thought about that? Have you studied that? Have you, like, taken it apart and figured out what part it didn't work? I had somebody tell me that once, and they're like, well, none of these numbers even matter. I'm like, okay, let's go through them one by one. And we went through and we erased, like, three quarters of them. Like, but we were left with four that really did matter.

That's like your car dashboard. When you look at your dashboard on your car, you've only got a certain number of gauges or dials there. And the most important one, the speed is really huge, and it's right in the middle. And then you got. The little gas one is really tiny over to the right. But when it gets below a quarter tank, it lights up and goes, hey, mother, you're almost out of gas. Like, dashboards work, but you have to think about what are we measuring, what are we going to do with that information? How often do we need to measure it, where should it be on the dashboard, et cetera.

Right?

But again, most people, entrepreneurs are very guilty of this. Entrepreneurial CEOs more than the professional hired gun CEOs. Entrepreneurial CEOs tend to understand the idea. So they say, we need dashboards, but they don't know how to put them in place. So then they say dashboards failed. No, no, you just knew that you needed a dashboard. You didn't really know how to build them or how to create them or what to measure or how to implement them or when like, so you move too quickly and you dumped the idea into the laps of some bewildered person who didn't have a coach or a mentor or even a group. Like we. Again, the CEO alliance. We're actually spending a full day talking about dashboards and reporting at our in person event in November. CEOs would lose their minds having to spend eight hours talking about dashboards. But the CEOs want to. So then they'll go back to their businesses with more information on how to put in place the system that the CEO wants to put in place. And that tends to be a lot of the broken links is the entrepreneurs have the ideas, but they don't know how to do it. The CEOs tend to know how to do it. So you need to get them trained so that they put it deep into the system. And the entrepreneur needs to stop giving them so many random ideas and then later getting frustrated. The ideas didn't work. You're kind of putting them in place at the wrong time. Right. You have to build a home. You put the foundation in, then you put in the walls and you put in the electrical and the plumbing. The entrepreneur always wants to throw in the cabinets or here's the wolf stove. It's like, dude, we're still pouring the foundation.

I see this a lot of times. And it's funny, it's easy to recognize because I'm it, right? My number one talent theme is ideation. I wake up with ideas. I have ideas and ideas and ideas. And. And when I was CEO, you know, I'd have that idea, I'd come in and I'd talk about it to the first few people I saw when I got in the office. And then I'd have some more ideas later as the day wore on, and I'd share that. But because I control the budget, I sign the checks, I hire and fire, I, et cetera, et cetera. Right. They would often chase down my ideas. Now sometimes they'd be irritated by them, but some people wanting to get advantage would try to follow them. And of course that's, and then I would often tell them to chase them down. Too many of them, and that's destabilizing. Right? That doesn't scale, that's scattered.

And tying this into meetings as a theme, the system that entrepreneurs need is this. Take your ideas out of your head, put them onto a list. I have a one pager called the decision filter, which they fill out so they really understand what that idea or project is. And then your team, once a month or once a quarter, votes on which projects they get to green light, saying, yes, we'll put them into the starting plan, we'll start on them. Now, which one's the yellow light? Meaning, yeah, they're a good idea, but not yet. And then the last one is they're red lighted, meaning they used to be a good idea, but now they're not, we'll kill them. And as long as the entrepreneur knows the idea is out of their head and in a system somewhere, they're okay. But in the absence of that, they tend to delegate the idea to give it to somebody, and they end up starting things too quickly and too random so that that system of a place to keep your ideas and add to those ideas before you start the ideas will save the entrepreneur for themselves.

So I, I have moved what I think is beyond that. You can give me feedback on it. I have just learned to let most of the them go. I don't write them down. I don't anything. If I'm really like feeling anxious or spooling around with something, like I'm thinking about a global crisis or some impending situation, I might do a lot of that. But most of the time I just kind of let them be. And as they arise, I just ask myself, does this relate to any of my quarterly priorities or this quarter or next? And if it's now, then if it solves a problem, like a problem solving idea, then I might try to apply it. But. And if it's really sort of in the next quarter, I'll write it down. But aside from that, I just kind of let it be.

And you, you've got the methodology behind your madness that most entrepreneurs don't have. So what they end up doing is they come in and they talk to employees and the employees, the employees end up running with those ideas or getting distracted with those ideas. And meanwhile, the entrepreneurs already said, oh, that's a dumb idea, but they didn't hear that, so they're now running with it or they're distracted by it.

Well, I try to say like so the person I work with the most is Lucy. And I try to say when I'm sharing and I'm like, this is just an idea. Don't work on this. I just need to sound it out with you a little bit. But I see people, CEOs, founders, controlling folks, entrepreneurs of companies with 1,300, even 5,100 employees, like a big range of stuff who are still operating that way, who still march in with an idea and then get all worked up about it and send people chasing off and then it changes the next week and they're wondering why we're not making progress on things and why we feel stalled. Like because there's no rigor or discipline. Yes, you got yourself to 350 million. Yes, it's highly profitable, it's a fine product. There's lots of good people here. But you're stuck because you're still throwing things around. Like you're, like you're an early stage company. Stop it.

How old are you now, Bill?

56.

So when you were 6 years old, you were Bill Gallagher. When you were 16, you were Bill Gallagher. When YOU were 26, you're Bill Gallagher. When YOU're 36, you're Bill Gallagher. When you're 46, you're Bill Gallagher. When You're 56, you're Bill Gallagher. But you as Bill Gallagher has had to change. You would be a disaster as a scaling up Coach. As a 6 year old, you'd be a disaster. 16 year old, you'd probably be a disaster as a 26 year old. Your skills had to change. And every company as they scale has to change and adapt as well. Usually at the ones and the threes you go from one employee to three, from three to 10, from 10 to 30, from 30 to 100, from 100 to 300, from 300 to 1000. The companies really need to iterate in the way that they operate, especially in their areas of meetings.

Yeah, that mix of. And you think about all aspects of it. I think that where I have developed, I know I have developed. Right. Not to be too proud. I also know there's areas that I'll be working on forever and evolving, but was really from self awareness, being willing to look at the guy in the mirror and deal with that. What am I not proud of? Where have I screwed up? How did I cause this? The most useful thing to think is this whole Thing is, my fault, right? The way our meetings run, the way the business is, it's all my fault. It's perfectly matched to my current level, so I could go implement a huddle or whatever, but if I keep being the kind of leader I've been, we'll keep getting these results. I'll undermine in some way.

That behavioral trait is called introspection. It's the ability to blame oneself before blaming external sources. It's One of the five things we looked for in looking for franchisees at 1-800-got junk. Because we wanted franchisees who had blamed themselves for screwing up or not doing well or not getting the results. Instead of blaming the franchisor, we didn't want them blaming the economy or the market. We wanted them blaming themselves. So we looked at leadership attainment, tenacity, introspection, and interdependence as the five core traits that would make a great franchisee. And I agree. Interdependence or that introspection as a leader is really, really powerful. Most people don't have it.

Oh, I don't start with it. My natural inclination comes from a place of arrogance. I first think, what's wrong with you? That's my first instinct. I only learned to be introspective and that it's powerful and useful because I can work on me pretty easily. But my first thing is what's wrong with everybody else. Right.

I think I learned introspection, by the way, by playing golf at a very young age because my dad was teaching me and our golf coaches were teaching us that everything was our problem. It was our swing, it was our approach, it was our stance. So I became very, very introspective just because of playing golf and ski racing as well. Like, I couldn't blame anybody on my result in a slalom course. It was me going down the slalom course. Everybody else had the same gates, too. So you just had to become very good at that, that level of introspection.

But you will see a leading athlete go, they set my bindings wrong. Or God damn, this wax job is. You know, they'll. We'll blame the equipment.

I think that's a level of frustration. But they know deep down that, that it's not true. Or it's that very, very random, random occurrence. Right? When, you know, Ken Reid's binding pops off on the third turn in the Olympics and he loses the race. Like, that's just. Yeah, there is sometimes that, but more often than not.

Yeah, you Miss Universe is random and cruel and uncaring. Right. The rain doesn't care how you feel about the day, it just gets you wet. Let's talk about engagement and control of the group. Right? Those are some things that I think you have some thoughts about how do we keep people engaged and how do we stay not lose control of the meeting?

Sure. So there needs to be a moderator at every meeting. Someone needs to play the role of moderator, make sure that we stay on track, we stay on the agenda, we control the idle chatter, and that we include everybody that's been invited. So one of my biggest pet peeves in a meeting and most employees pet peeves, is, why am I even there? Like, they invited me to a meeting. We spent 45 minutes at the meeting. The owner talked the whole time. Nobody else said anything. What was the fucking point? I'm like, you're right. So if the agenda calls for creative discussion or some kind of group sharing, it's the leader's job or the moderator's job to get every employee to contribute. Otherwise, why are you inviting them to the meeting in the first place? So that's the first part. If you're inviting them, make sure that they contribute. Otherwise, don't invite them. Let them stay on their normal projects and work on their normal work. Second thing is, I like thinking that the most senior people in the meeting speak last. The CEO should speak last, The COO second last, the coach, even after. Because the reality is our job isn't to steer the discussion. It's to grow people, to grow their skills and grow their confidence. And if the CEO will shut up and let people talk, you'll actually realize more often than not, your ideas are already at the group level. And when they come up with them and you go, that's amazing. You've raised their confidence and their skills up, and you don't need to be the one steering every discussion. So it's speaking last. And then I use a post it note exercise where I have people write down their ideas on post it notes. And I get the most junior or newest employees to read their ideas off their post it notes first, ending with the CEO reading theirs last. And more often than not, the CEO will be like, well, somebody said this, somebody said this, somebody said that. And then the team's like, wow, this is really good and empowering.

Yeah, you know, that's a. So when we are coaching, I'm moderating their annual and quarterly planning meetings. When we do some occasional training, I'm doing the same thing. So I'm an outside person. I don't have a horse in the race. Except I want the whole group to win. So I'm just working for that. And having someone who's able, willing, comfortable in doing that probably shouldn't be the CEO. And having that CEO speak last is really hard because to get this company started, they had to speak up and they had to start conversations to get things going. And it's very hard to pull out of that, to learn not to do that. But if you design the agenda that way and if they begin to train that it makes the team stronger, the work gets done. They don't have to push everything they can see and out of the team.

They have to grow as a leader. And the company has to grow as it matures, no different than kids do. When I was 13 years old, it was easy being a kid because my mom made all my food for me. Well, now my mom doesn't make my food for me. My mom's dead and I have to make all my food and my kids food. I had to learn how to make food and grocery shop. The entrepreneur needs to become more of a professionally managed CEO while not losing their culture. But they can't run the company the way they've always run it. And I believe now as well that the org chart is upside down. The org chart should be at the CEO at the bottom, supporting the VPs, supporting the managers, supporting the employees, supporting the customers, with everyone seeing the vivid vision of what we're building. And you build inside your core purpose and your core values. And if the CEO can recognize they're at the bottom of the org chart, support everybody. It allows them to shut up a little bit. And then the second part is the core role of a leader is to grow people. And all of our people are climbing up two ladders. One foot is on the skills ladder, the other foot is on the confidence ladder. Both ladders are right beside each other. So imagine climbing up two ladders. If somebody's shaking your confidence, you're certainly not moving your other foot up the skills ladder. And if your skills aren't getting better, you're not going up the confidence ladder. So when the CEO keeps talking and keeps speaking and keep sharing, he's not growing the skills or the confidence of his employees. And the more he can grow both of those or she can grow both of those, the faster the company scales.

Yeah, it's a useful insight to get notice where you're, as a CEO or as any level of leader, are leading and dominating too much of the airtime and not then developing people. Right. Because you are filling the space of that, I think it's useful to notice also that gender wise men are much more verbal and more dominant and then there are others within who are more verbal and dominant and verbal and dominance is not the best thinking or the only perspective that's useful. It just, it just like controls the room. And I am definitely one of these kinds of people. But when I've learned to take an agenda and solicit every other opinion and use post it notes for the people that even don't want to speak, that aren't comfortable speaking, that gets the diverse perspective, gets everyone heard, gets the ideas out there. And then of course we will tend to put them up and organize them before we talk about them using the same kind of posted approach. And then people really say, okay, my perspective is included and it naturally falls sort of here or hey, it's an interesting counterpoint and it gets talked without necessarily having to advocate for that particular idea.

Right? But at least they've been heard, right? Because again, the role of the leader is to grow their confidence and their skills. Sometimes as their confidence gets up, they get better at their skills as well. And then when their skills are higher, their confidence gets higher. Those two things is what scales your company.

And it doesn't have to look or sound a particular way to be powerful and effective. Right. So I think there's one last area to kind of COVID and it's about the communication styles. Right. Before we do that, let me just remind folks that if these shows help you, right? The thing that could help us would be to write up a review for us so, you know, give us a rating but then give us some feedback on itunes or wherever it is that you get it. You could share it with somebody else that you think could also benefit from it. And if you want to give us feedback, send us an email to infocalingcoach.com if you want more of a topic or there's a question or you didn't like my swearing or whatever, do that. You can of course subscribe either@scalingcoach.com or on iTunes or wherever you get your or YouTube, wherever you watch the video or audio from these. And then you'll get them every week because we put out at least one every week. The audio gets dropped on Wednesday mornings and then these occur video as we record them. Before we get into communication styles and and Cameron stuff. Want to remind and give special thanks to Vern Harnish, author and creator of the Scaling Up Framework and the original Rockefeller Habits, and to Lucy Harness, who's in the Background. She's our show producer. The audio gets edited by Albert Burge at Podfly Productions and our shownotes are written by Ein Kudina and then proofread by Tim McGowan. So let's talk about, before we move on there, the communication styles. What are the different styles that you notice and how do we use that or manage that in the meeting?

Yeah. So in a meeting there's only three types of communication that are ever happening. There's either information being shared and it can be top down, or bottom or lateral. We call it info share. The second one is creative discussion, where you're just brainstorming, throwing ideas around, putting ideas up on the wall, post it, note exercises, mind mapping, whatever. That's the creative discussion. As a friend of mine said, there's no such thing as a bad idea. There's just bad people with ideas. There's such thing as a dumb idea, there's just dumb people with ideas. And then the last one is consensus decision, which is we're going to talk about it, we're going to share information, we'll debate, we'll look at numbers and we'll leave the room with consensus. We might debate, we might argue, we might get really heated, but at the end of the day we're going to make a decision around this. Either I will or you will, or we will as a group, but we will leave admitting that we've left all the debate in the room. We never leave the meeting while debating the issue. So then what I like doing is with the agenda, it's what are we covering, in what order are we covering each of those items? How many minutes will we spend on each item and what's the communication style for each of those items? Because one item might be infoshare, one might be consensus decision, one might be creative discussion. Next might be Infoshare. But it's important that people understand, okay, this is just info share. Like during our five minute updates, when each leader is doing their updates for the week, that's Infoshare. There's no discussion, there's no debate, there's no consensus, no decision. Just like, just listen.

Yeah, yeah. So there's one that people ask me about, they're like, but wait, isn't there a fourth one that I hear and that's planning and I say no, that actually is part of the consensus building the committee discussion.

That's part of creative discussion and consensus. Yeah, you're going to, as a group, throw post it notes up. You'll use the workout process, you'll vote on them, you'll organize them, you'll break them down, you'll put them into charts. That's the creative discussion, brainstorming and then deciding. Making a decision.

Yeah, it combines the two. Well, super, super useful. Let's. So people want to know about your COO Alliance. They should go to cooalliance.com we'll throw the link up here, here and in the show notes. And that's just a great organization where you train, develop, coach, they've got peer support, that kind of thing for COOs, the second in command, really critical, useful kind of thing and you do a top notch job running that. So send your second in command or if you are second in command go find out about it. Tell Cameron you heard about it here with us.

And we just signed our biggest, our biggest member company so far with, with true revenue of $1.7 billion in revenue. I'll let our listeners know here who it is. It's the American association of retired people, AARP. It's their second in command and that is, that's real revenue of $1.7 billion. So that when we've got members anywhere between 5 million. Our, our biggest before was around 700 million so we just doubled that in size.

Nice congrats. And then of course all of Cameron's books and speaking and other kinds of information@cameronherald.com and of course you can find the book why meetings suck on Amazon and if you need a coach or anything like that, please let us know. And we're happy there's 200 coaches in the scaling up world. I'm happy to help you find one that is the personality fit for you in your time zone or whatever is most important for you and in getting help scaling and growing and running your business well and leveling up your leadership. Cameron, thanks so much for joining us on the show today and talking and like that kind of thing. It's great to connect.

Hey Bill, you're welcome. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

I want to, we need a dinner or something. We need to be in the same city again sometime soon.

So next time I'm down in the Bay Area, I'll let you know.

Awesome. Talk to you later.

Bye everyone.

See you again next week.