Ideal Meeting Rhythm

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Hey there. So I want to talk to you about the ideal meeting rhythm. Well, the ideal meeting rhythm is not whenever you can fit it in. The ideal meeting rhythm is not to find time to have your regular meetings after every client, phone call, interruption, demand, whatever want, desire. The ideal meeting rhythm is before everything else and all the other business is actually around the meeting rhythm. And there are some typical things that work really well. So let's start. I like to start with the end in mind. So first of all, the annual plan. I think most teams are going to benefit from two days of annual planning. Now some bigger teams further along companies might want to do three, even four days. Especially if you add like a round of golf or some other getaway time to reflect and connect and that kind of thing. You might want to put a little more time in faster growing teams, bigger, more evolved teams might want to do three or four days. A lot of our teams two days enough. If you're very small and very early, one day is enough for your annual planning. So when does that occur? Well, many teams will do it as early as November. So they're starting to think about the upcoming year and they're kind of laying out the annual initiatives and they might do it then November, December timeframe because they want to have it in place before the year. In some rare cases we even get into October, September, they do it as part of the Q4 planning. So they finish the year and they think about the next year all at once. So your earliest side you're going to do one or two day off site in September, October or you might do it November, December to be a little bit as a standalone thing by itself. The other one is you want to do it as early as possible in January. So right after people get done with their New Year's break, you get them together and you go off site. The challenge is there's a lot of like coming back in the office and getting back in. So you probably need a little bit of time to come back in the office, like January 3rd, 4th, 5th, somewhere in there and then like the next week. So that second week in January is a really great time to get your annual plan done. But once you get it established, like we want to start the year with the annual plan or we want to finish in the fourth quarter sometime with an annual plan for the upcoming year, whatever it is for you, then like keep that and put that in ahead of time every year for the next year and beyond in perpetuity. Have a regular pattern there that that's what you do. So that's the annual. Then every quarter you want to have anywhere from a half a day to a full day of quarterly planning. Our really fast growing teams might even do two days a quarter. Our fastest growing biggest funded teams will do two day quarterly planning sessions in a three day annual. But most of you can get done with a day, a quarter and then some could even do it in a half day. But I would say most of the time you want to spend a day for most teams doing quarterly planning. So when does that occur? Well, in our world, most of those quarterly plans happen just before the end of the quarter or right in the first part of the quarter. So three weeks before and two weeks after the quarter is kind of the parameter. The deciding thing here is do I really need in my world psychologically or for our business, do I need to know all my numbers about how I finished the last quarter before I plan the next one? So I want to get every last day out of it. We're very sales driven or whatever. And then I want to make my plan and say the first or second week of the coming quarter. So I don't, I don't go very far. Or can I get kind of a projection? I know about how I'm going to finish the quarter and I'm going to go ahead and plan the next quarter. I would say most of our teams get the plan for the coming quarter done in the week or two before. Some do it as early as three weeks before the quarter turns. So March, April, um, for example, right the, the last three weeks of March and the first two weeks of April. Those are busy times for quarterly planning. You want to figure out what is yours and then plan it there. Is it going to be midweek, end of week? I tend to have teams that are like A Monday, Tuesday or they're a Thursday Friday for these things. I don't hardly do anybody on Wednesdays. Wednesday is usually a day that I am traveling or doing online things for our online groups that meet on zoom and like that. So that's when the quarterly happens. And then every month most of our teams are doing an all hands meeting and a leadership meeting and all hands meeting every month. So leadership meeting and then followed by an all hands where they connect and do depending on how the company's located all over the place. Then the weekly meeting is really, really in a critical meeting. We have a meeting thing we call the 4D weekly meeting. That weekly meeting is typically 60 to 90 minutes, as much as two hours. But we try to get people done 60 to 90 minutes and if you run it really well, you can do it in that time frame. So those are usually on a Monday or Tuesday morning. Don't do them like the very first thing. You open the doors. Do them after people kind of arrive in the office for a little bit or even in the afternoon. So somewhere between mid morning to earlyish to mid morning but not first thing and early afternoon, not very end of the day. Those are optimal times on Monday or Tuesday for most teams. That's the time to do it. Right. And then there's the daily huddle. Daily huddle. You're going to do one every day except the weekly meeting. And except like when you have the quarterly off sites, that kind of thing. You do daily huddles for every team. The leadership team and all the other teams have daily huddles. And this is a 15 minute, 10 to 20 minutes is your range. 15 is, is often typical stand up meeting. Also again not very first thing in the morning. Have it somewhere mid morning or even early afternoon. But mid morning is the most common thing. Early to mid morning just not first thing. And so that's the daily huddle. And then there's one other meeting that many people do. Not everybody needs to or whatever that those are one on ones. For your one on ones we suggest that you do them not every week. So maybe let's say you have eight people that report to you. You want to do like four one week for the next week and so not try to have a one on one with everyone every week. It's a lot of touches to do that kind of deep dive. Sure you're seeing them and talking to them at midweek but looking over their things. If you do it every month, it's too few. If you miss one, you're really off. Not enough touches. Every week is a lot, so. So every two weeks actually works out really well. And these are most often for many teams, Friday afternoon or Thursday afternoon, whatever the last day of your week is, that afternoon is often the best time to get them in because it's when people kind of start to check out mentally or disengage and the people they're talking to, their suppliers and customers are also doing the same. So that's a great time to fill in with a standing meeting like that. If we do this, we can get everything down and done in a really compressed timeframe. Hope that's helpful. We'll talk to you again soon.

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