Want High-Impact Meetings? Steal This Exact Format

You would never send a kid off to play Little league baseball without teaching them how to hold the bat and toss the ball and catch the ball because they'd come home from baseball, they go, daddy, baseball sucks. It's like, no, Johnny, you suck at baseball because you haven't got the basics. So the problem isn't that meetings suck. No one, none of your management team, none of your leadership team have ever really been trained on how to run highly effective meetings. They've never been trained on how to get people to input and meetings. They've never been trained on how to allow people to opt out of meetings. They've never been trained on how to put together a proper purpose, outcome and agenda, how to start on time and stop on time. Like, so there's all this stuff. And then for leaders, we feel this pang of, oh, I was invited, I should come, or for an employee, I was invited to the meeting, I should come. No, it's optional. You look at the purpose, outcome and agenda and you're like, I don't really need to be there. Or based on the agenda. I'm only going to come for the first five minutes and then I'll let the team run the whole. I'll just make sure that you're on track and then you guys can do the whole group discussion, the brainstorming, come up with the consensus, tell me what you think. I don't need to be there for the 50 minutes in between. All of that is possible. Running a classroom session like class, one of the 12 modules in my invest in your leaders course is classroom training. So it's like to reset up and pre wrap and preflighting the moderator there. So that's really a skill that has to be taught, which is great. Running meetings is as well. And a meeting is, could be a phone call, could be a zoom meeting, could be an in person meeting. But one of the ways that you'll get out of meetings is for you to read that book, read that content and truly understand it. And then culturally, you don't need to be at all the meetings. Your job is to grow people. Your job is to let them get the results you're looking for. So if I was to come to you as one of your direct reports and I come in and I'm like, eliza, what do you think I should do about teaching our people AI? What you should be doing is saying to them, what do you think we should do? Because they're going to say, I don't know. And then say, well then go away and think about it and come back and tell me what you think we should do. If they come back and they go, okay, I went away, I thought about it, I come back and I don't really know what to do. And you go, okay, what did you do? How did you go through it? Then you can tell them the kinds of questions they could ask you, then make them go away and come back. But by you giving them the questions, you're not training them to sit down and think about the problem. Years ago, when my 21 year old was 15, I was in Vancouver, Canada, and we were sitting at home and it was the middle of the workday and I was just working on whatever projects and he said, hey, dad, can you make me an egg? And I'm like, sure. So I walk out to the kitchen and I'm like, grab the frying pan out of the bottom drawer. So he does. I'm like, go grab two eggs out of the fridge. He goes, I just want one. I said, I know, I'm making you an egg. You're going to make me an egg. And he started to laugh. And I'm like, grab the butter. Take about this much butter, put it in the frying pan, turn the gas on. No, no, press it in. Turn it like. I didn't do any of it. I told, I stood there and showed him what to do. And here's how you crack. All I did was crack the first egg and then I literally made him fry us both an egg. Then I made him put the eggs on the plate, then I made him wash the pan. Then I sat down and ate an egg with my kid. The next day I walk in around 1 o', clock, I walk into the kitchen, he's got stuff all over. I'm like, what are you doing? He goes, I'm making an omelet. I'm like, where did you learn how to make an omelet? He goes, I knew you weren't going to make it, so I looked it up on Google. So your job as a leader isn't to give them the questions to go and figure it out, it's to get them to start trying to figure it out and then come to you and say, I couldn't figure it out. You say, well, what questions did you ask yourself? What did you. How did you approach it? Walk me through that, then show them the gaps, then make them go back and do the work again. Your job is not to be in the meetings, to make sure that they're thinking through or talking through or debating or covering stuff. Your Job is to make sure that their meeting structures are set up properly so that they can get results. So your job is to grow them to run better meetings. In fact, when Elon sent out that famous text message about five years ago to all of his employees and said, if you're initiating meeting, stand up and leave the meeting. I sent his brother used to work for me, Kimball. So I sent Kimball a note. I'm like, tell Elon to not tell people to leave shit meetings. Tell them to fix the meetings so they're not running meetings. First principles is fix the meeting. So the basic rules that I cover on, on running effective meetings. Every meeting has to have a clear purpose. Why are we running it? A meeting can only have a maximum of three outcomes. If there's more than three things we need to get done, have a separate meeting. Because it usually involves a separate group of people. Every meeting has to have an agenda. I try to book the meetings for half the time. I first think about booking them for as a rule, and I teach everyone that. So if you're like, let's get together for a half a day, book it for two hours, let's book an hour meeting, book it for 30. Like you'll get. It's like a quickie. You can get it done in less time if you need to. Right? Every meeting has to start exactly on time, regardless of if somebody's showing up late for meeting start because there's not a single Olympic athlete in the world that shows up going, oh, sorry I'm late. Or right. They're like, the race has already started. The reason that people show up late for meetings is everything runs back to back. So what the rule becomes internally, every meeting and every phone call and every zoom meeting finishes five minutes prior to the scheduled ending time. So what people say is, I'll block off five minutes between meetings. No, it doesn't work because if somebody else books you into a meeting, there's no five minute gap anymore. So what really works is the cultural norm that we finish every meeting in five, five minutes early. So you start a one hour meeting. Let's say you start a meeting at 9:00'. Clock. Everyone knows that we finish at 9:55, including your suppliers and customers, because you tell them, by the way, I know we booked the meeting for an hour. Our cultural norm is we finish everything five minutes early so that we can show up on time for shit. And we can actually go to the bathroom, get a cup of coffee, talk to our assistant. Everyone's like, oh my God. Finally there's all these little game changing tricks that better if you teach every employee this. Employees start leading up in the organization, right? So employees read the book, meeting suck. They start saying, you know what? No agenda, no attenda. Like I can't CS to come to a meeting. When you didn't tell me the purpose, outcome, agenda, this is the one that hit me when I was the COO at morningtunder. Got junk back in the day. I walked by a meeting room with glass walls everywhere so there was no blinds and. Cause we didn't want like secrets. We wanted because there's always fear, right? And I walk past this glass vault meeting room and there's one of the women from hr, somebody in finance, somebody in ops, a marketing person and the VP of it. I'm like, there's no possible reason that that group should be meeting. So I asked the VP of IT later. I'm like, roman, what was that meeting for? Oh my God, it was such a waste of time. I'm like, why did you go? He goes, well, our new HR head invited me. So I said yes. I'm like, what were you talking about here? She wanted one person from each business area. And we were so busy in IT launching the next phase of the site that I showed up and we were talking about the Christmas party. And he goes, and I'm Jewish. Because there was no purpose, outcome or agenda. And he had never been trained on how to opt out of a meeting. Like he shouldn't have been there. If he'd seen the agenda was to talk about a Christmas party, he would have said, no, I'm not coming and no, I'm not even sending an IT person. Just tell me what's going on. The meeting has to be called for a purpose. So what's the purpose of the leadership team getting together? Is it to go over results? Is it a goal setting meeting? Is it a goal setting and metrics review? What are the things that you're covering? Is like an update meeting because the leadership team is getting together, but that's not the purpose of the meeting. So for any recurring meeting, you should be naming it based on the purpose of the meeting. And that allows you to realize, should we really have people coming to it? Because sometimes the whole leadership team doesn't need to be at that meeting. We had three leadership meetings. We had our war meeting, which, which was our weekly action review. That was every week. We met to talk about what we were working on and we reviewed the dashboards and we did our five minute updates. It was like an L10 meeting, but we call it our war meeting. So weekly action review, that was one. Number two is every month, the leadership team had our storm meeting, which was our strategy and review. It was for us to talk about stuff at least six months to 12 months out on the calendar. Six months out for us was strategic because we were doubling our revenue every month or every year. We doubled six years in a row, thinking six months out was pretty big growth. And then the third meeting that we had was our finance meeting. And that's when we reviewed the budget, the cash flow. We reviewed the, you know, general ledger at times that we. But it was just. And it was called the finance now at all those meetings, the whole leadership team was there, but we didn't call it a leadership team meeting. We called it finance meeting or war meeting or storm meeting. So that way the leadership team could sit in on their team's meetings, or the leadership team could sit in on other functional meetings. Like the head of finance could go sit in on a marketing meeting if they wanted to. So everybody's meeting rhythms, cadence, every business area should have their weekly. And they're all those weekly should happen at the same time. That should happen right after the leadership team one. And that way there can be information. So if something happened at leadership team that needs to get out to the whole marketing team, the head of marketing walks out of the leadership team meeting, walks in. The other cultural norm that we taught is when you say, sorry, I'm late, what it really means is, f you, I'm disrespectful and my time is more valuable than yours. Everybody I've ever worked with knows that, so you don't do it. And then the next part is just making sure that culturally, as a norm, you allow people to, based on the agenda, decide to either not be there for the whole meeting or only be there for part of the agenda that is necessary.