Meetings Suck! - I Love Marketing Episode #258

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish and this is the I love marketing podcast.

Hello, this is Joe Polish and I am here with my good friend Cameron Herold. We're sitting across from each other at my office in Tempe, Arizona.

How are you? Good, man. Good to see you again. Yeah, you too.

Well, we see each other all the time.

I know. I've been working out here all day.

Well, you got this great new book we're going to talk about in just a moment, but let me give some background on who you are for anyone that does not know who you are. Cameron is one of the most sought after business minds in North America, which is true. He's reached a huge global audience through his educational and inspirational presentations to groups of CEOs and entrepreneurs on five continents in 17 countries. Cameron Herald is renowned as the driving force behind 1-800-got junk's spectacular growth from 2 million to 106 million in revenue in just six years. But this dynamic leader has been an entrepreneurial innovator since launching his first company at the ripe age of 21 years old. As well as coaching and mentoring hundreds of others. His expertise across all aspects of business covers operations and call centers to sales, marketing and primary. Combined with negotiating corporate acquisitions and developing numerous strategic partnerships, there are few real world business challenges that Cameron has not faced. So there you go. Cameron, well, what do I need to know about you for your bio that hasn't been mentioned here? The people that are listening need to know about you to really think, well, why should I listen to this guy?

Sure, I think in a lot of ways I was the dumb kid. I was the dumb kid in school, I was the dumb kid in university and I always tried to find the shortcuts and I started to take all those same shortcuts and same lessons into the business world. It's always driven me crazy watching entrepreneurs bang their head against the wall. And so I come at it from a very different perspective. A lot of people come at business issues with big complex problem solving methodology or lots of theory or even deep expertise. I come at it with kind of the simple to put in place systems that really any company can use. Whether it's a large company like Sprint that I coach and mentor or a small entrepreneurial company of 10 employees.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, you are a genius network member, which is awesome. You also have your own group called the COO alliance, which one of my team members actually attended. That said, it was unbelievable. So you teach the number two person in charge how to do stuff at Meetings, you are constantly giving enormously great advice. So every time we are together, I'm always hearing other people that are very successful entrepreneurs talking about how much insight and how bright you are. And you're one of these people that can say things in literally just a couple of minutes that would totally change someone's perspective or tell them what to do, tell them, not what to do. So we'll cover some of that stuff.

Now.

What has prompted us to do this particular interview in this episode for my podcast is you have a new book called Meetings Suck, turning one of the most loathed elements of business into one of the most valuable. I really am looking forward to talking with you about your new book simply because the title kind of says it all. And how do we make meetings not suck? And I do want to say that Richard Kolgaard, who I've met a couple times before, he's a publisher of Forbes magazine, says Cameron is today's CEO Whisper, which is right on the COVID of the book. That's a pretty big statement.

Yeah, he's seen me speak publicly about eight or nine times and actually I have him on video saying that I'm the number one business speaker he's ever seen in 19 years of speaking, which kind of blew me away and blew the audience away. But yeah, Rich is a great guy. I actually wrote the book Meeting Suck with another Genius Network member. I hired Tucker Max, who's part of the Genius Network, to help me publish the book using his company book in a box. The whole impetus for writing Meetings Suck was, I guess, over the last nine years of coaching entrepreneurs and CEOs. And then in my 20 years prior running companies, I kept hearing people say, meetings suck. Meetings suck. Meetings suck. I'm like, no, actually, meetings are fucking awesome if we know how to run them. But the only reason meetings suck is because we actually suck at running meetings. So I really wanted to give people the very easy to implement systems to turn meetings around so they can become the high impact parts of our company. Because you actually do need to run them. You can't get away from them. It's like death. None of us are getting out of death or life without dying. None of us are getting out of running a business without running meetings, whether it's conference calls or in person.

Well, you know, the late Peter Drucker had this quote I heard, which is, you're either working or you're in meetings. And you know, that quote in and of itself is kind of funny because obviously in the context of which he said it the point is, meetings seem to be a way that unproductive people escape doing actual work or prolonging productivity or whatever. Because Drucker had of course, a bazillion great quotes. You know, one of my favorite Drucker quotes is there's nothing more useless than doing really well that which need not be done at all. And I would correlate it to, you know, there's nothing more useless than having a meeting that is just run extraordinarily poorly and doesn't produce a result if that result is either figuring out what to do or stress relief or making more money or whatever. So let's go to the very basic thing, like what the hell is the definition from your perspective of a good meeting and a bad meeting?

And I think to your point that even if you have a really well run meeting, but you don't actually get anything accomplished, what was the point? As well? Right? So we have to run meetings that are being run for the right reasons and run in the right way. And I always look at American football and see one of the best analogies of a meeting ever. And that's the huddle that they have before every play. They literally get the whole team together. They talk very briefly for sometimes five seconds, sometimes 10 or 15 seconds. They say, ready, break. And they all hit the line and they all execute perfectly. And that is a meeting that has a pulse, it has a regular rhythm, it has a purpose and outcome and they literally execute it perfectly. So if you can take that same analogy from sports that we see constantly every kind of weekend, why can't we bring it into the business world? So a well run meeting is one that has a regular rhythm that is being run for the proper purpose. Maybe every meeting has a clear one sentence. Purpose has a maximum of three outcomes. There's the three main things you're going to get done. Every meeting has to start exactly on time. And we'll talk a little bit about why meetings tend to start late. Every meeting has to stop five minutes early. And there's a bit of a tip in there that we'll get into. And then I also like to book all the meetings for half the time that you first think about booking them for. It's kind of like a quickie. You can get it done in less time if you want to. So if you think about, hey, let's get together for an hour to talk about something, book it for 30 minutes, or if you're going to get together for a day, book it for half a day so you're Booking it for half the constraint. And then there needs to be three roles that are played in meetings. A moderator, a timekeeper, and a parking lot. We can get into all this in a little bit more detail.

Yeah, I'm like so tempted to jump in here and just say, wait, wait, talk about that.

But yeah, give it all cool.

And then we'll back up and go through each.

Yeah, so those are the core basics. The last being that you need to have proper communication styles for each agenda item. So on your, I always say no agenda, no attenda. So you've got your purpose, outcomes and agenda. You need to say, what are we covering in what order? And how many minutes are we spending on each agenda item? And then what's the communication style that we're using for those agenda items? There's only three styles of communication. There's consensus decisions, which is we're going to talk through stuff, create ideas and make a decision, or there's creative discussion, which is just the brainstorming, blue skying, or there's info share, where it's either I'm telling you, you're telling me, or we're telling each other, but there's no communication, no discussion, no debate. So you just tell people, this is what we're covering, in what order and how we're going to be covering it. Wow. Okay.

Well, you said a whole ton of stuff there. And like, one of my questions was, what are the most effective strategies you've discovered for running great meetings? And you kind of just laid it out, I guess. Do you want to elaborate kind of in the order?

Sure, let's say, you know, because the.

The person listening to this, the, the vast majority of people that listen to my, my shows are entrepreneurs, business owners, some that have, you know, thousands of employees and, you know, meetings happening all day long, in and out. And then there's others that are, you know, they don't have really a staff, but they have, you know, virtual assistants. They have staff throughout different parts of the country. So when you're saying meetings, these could be phone meetings, they could be, you know, Google hangouts, they could be Skype calls, they could be in person sitting around a big conference room. So let's kind of talk about, you know, how to even approach this. Because at the end of the end of the day, what is the outcome that you wanted for this book other than the obvious, you know, do more effective meetings. But what is like the real purpose of this book?

Because I want, I want people to.

Go out and get in your book. Because even your first book, Double Double is one of the best business books, like, ever written. I mean, like your chapter one, Vivid Vision is phenomenal. I mean, we've talked about that before. However, I want people to go and get the book.

So what's the purpose? Sure. So the whole purpose for Meeting Suck is really to tilt the universe in a way. I actually want to stop shitty meetings forever. And this book is not just written for the entrepreneur and the CEO. It's actually written for all employees to read as well. Because employees have to attend a lot of these shitty meetings too. Sometimes they're leading them, sometimes they have to attend. Either way, this book is covering those concepts. How to attend a meeting, how to moderate a meeting, or how to run a meeting. So the kind of strategy behind all this is every meeting, when you're booking the meeting, you have to state in the meeting notes, what is the purpose of the meeting? Just the one sentence. And then you can have up to three main outcomes in any meeting. Otherwise you have to book a secondary meeting. Step three is the agenda. So you just list out what are you covering, in what order are you covering them, and how many minutes will you spend on each agenda item. And then what communication style are you going to use? Infoshare? Creative discussion or consensus decision. That way people know why they're showing up, what they're covering. And they can also opt out of meetings, which I talk a lot about in Meeting Suck as well. I want people, when they see the agenda, to say, you know what, I don't really need to be at this one. This is one that I have more important work or different work I'd like to spend my time on. It looks like the rest of the people coming have got it covered. We really want to empower our employees to say, to opt out of meetings as much as to want to attend, because we all have really important things to do. When you're actually booking the meeting, the reason that most people show up late for meetings is they're booking everything back to back. They have no buffer built into their schedule. If you were an elite swimmer showing up for an Olympic swim race, you wouldn't come running up to the starting blocks as the guns going off saying, I'm here, I'm ready. You would be there five minutes early. So what I always try to put in place inside of every company is if you don't show up five minutes early, you're late, meaning you should be at the meeting five minutes before it's ready to go. If you have a phone call that you're having a phone meeting or a Google hangout meeting that starts at 9 o', clock, you should be ready and present and starting to think about that at five to nine. Well, the only way you can really do that is to finish every meeting and finish every phone call five minutes prior to the scheduled ending time. So let's say we were meeting, you and I, from 9 until 10. We would actually finish our meeting at 9:55, which would give us time to quickly debrief, go to the bathroom, talk to our assistant, grab a cup of coffee, walk down the hall, go to the bathroom, sit down at our phone, pick up the phone for our 10 o' clock call and say, hey, I'm here. Right on time. Just a reminder, we stop all of our phone calls and meetings five minutes early just to show our respect. So when you actually stop five minutes early, no one ends up showing up.

Late and you can go to the bathroom quite a bit.

Yeah, I go to the bathroom all the time. The other thing I always do is I also let people know that when you show up to a meeting saying, sorry I'm late, what you're really saying is f you, I'm disrespectful, I'm selfish, I don't respect you, I'm more important than you are. So I try to teach people that saying sorry I'm late really means I'm very selfish with my time. And when you set that kind of a mantra and that kind of a mindset inside of your company, people will stop showing up late because they've built in the buffer and they realize that they are just making excuses.

Well, you were kind of late for this meeting today, so I mean, what.

Were you really sitting here? I was sitting here on your couch.

Okay, so let's see. What if you legitimately are late? Like something comes down or whatever? Because I agree with you. I mean, look, it's a great policy to. It's kind of like Dan Sullivan has these referability habits. And the first one is show up on time, finish what you start, do what you say you're going to do, and say please and thank you. He says that those four referability habits really show that you respect other people's time and you appreciate them. That's why you say please and thank you. And if you violate any of them, you're going to have a reputation of someone that you know cannot be counted on. And you know as well as I do a lot of people that are very well known and very successful have a habit of violating one or maybe all of those, even if they're talented. And we have some friends that, you know, we know are smart because they've written good books or they do good podcasts or they have big followings, but they're kind of assholes because they don't.

That's the point. You just actually said. The point is they have a habit for showing up late. They're assholes. See, everyone actually knows that the people who don't deliver on their promise and do show up late all the time are disrespectful jerks. So really, you want to change that inside your company? Is that the company that we want to build? So what I try to coach people on, and even with the CEO alliance or my coaching clients are in the book, is what is it you're building? What's your company stand for? And do you want the customers and your suppliers and your employees to think of you as a disrespectful company or a disrespectful leader or a disrespectful manager or a disrespectful employee? I don't. And I would never be an Olympic athlete and show up late for my event and say, oh, I'm sorry I'm late. You wouldn't do it. You just don't see Olympians showing up late for their event. So it's a conscious decision that people make to over schedule themselves. But they're also being selfish by trying to slide that one extra thing in instead of just getting to the damn meeting on time or being prepared for the phone call. Hell, we've all got alarm clocks, we've all got phones, we've all got watches. Set the alarm on your phone to remind you to finish five minutes early. So you've got the five minute buffer built in. But the excuse of sorry I'm late is really people saying, I'm a jerk, I'm selfish, and I'm more important than you are. Okay, great.

So even if someone's a really nice, wonderful person and something really bad happened, like they had a car accident or.

Yeah, if you have a car accident, then it's not sorry I'm late, it's I had a car accident.

Yeah.

That's very different from saying, sorry I'm late. Right. If you're saying, my mother died and I had to take her to the funeral home, that's not sorry I'm late. You're saying my mother died. Those are very different excuses from sorry, I just got off a phone call and I didn't Have a five minute buffer. And I respected my time more than yours. See, most often like 98% of the time, people are just making it up. Yeah. And also 92% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

We know that that's scary. So I want to talk about this in my own company because there are meetings that happen that don't involve me at all most of the time. For every meeting that probably takes place in Piranha Marketing or Genius Network, every day, my team is having a team meeting, usually around 11 o'. Clock. I don't know how effective they actually are. What I do know is that they're constantly getting together. Things get done, things planned, stuff gets reported to me. Not all the time, but a good portion of the time. But I want all of them to listen to this so that they can take what's working well and enhance it, but also throw out what isn't because I will occasionally hear I don't want to be at this meeting, that sort of stuff. And you know, they'll. I think I'm a pretty cool boss. So most people will, you know, share with me their frustrations and not try to.

So think about your team for a second. Of all the employees that you've got, how many of them have ever had at least a half hour training on meetings?

You know, other than probably right? No, I don't believe so. I mean, they've had probably made up training.

Right.

But it's not like anyone that really is like, oh, I'm a meeting whisperer. Let me.

And how many of them have read a book on meetings? Probably the same. Probably zero. So probably most of our listeners haven't read a book and haven't been through training. Now think about Little League baseball for a second. What parent would ever send their child off to play Little League baseball without at least showing them how to hold the bat and how to put a glove on and how to toss the ball back and forth from three feet away. We would never set our kid up for failure and embarrassment by letting them go to Little League without a little bit of training. And yet we let our employees go into battle every day and go to these meetings and then come out complaining about them. But none of them know how to run them. That's why I wrote Meetings Suck is to actually turn this around a little bit. To say here's some basic tools in 90 pages on Kindle that can literally turn your life around. It's insane not to go through this stuff.

Let me mention it is a very short book. So yeah, you can get through this very quickly. Give me some case studies that you've experienced where companies got better results because they had better meetings. I mean, clearly you're working with companies all the time. So let's give an example of how this could actually.

Sure. So I've mentored companies like grasshopper.com, iContacts, Media Temple, Sprint, I'm mentoring a monarchy in the Middle East. Every single one of my clients I teach these formats of meetings to. So one really good one is called Achievers. Now Achievers used to be called I love rewards, kind of like I love marketing. But Achievers has five or six years in a row been ranked as one of the best companies to work for. Just sold for over $100 million. When I taught them their what they called to the point, which was their daily seven minute huddle that they ran around 11 o' clock in the morning, it completely changed the culture of the organization. They would get all their employees together for seven minutes. It was a stand up meeting. They started off the meeting by sharing good news. Then they went through the key numbers for their sales funnel. Then they had one business area would do an update so everyone would be on the same page for marketing one day, finance the next it the day, next, third day, etc. And then they would go through any missing systems or frustrations. And that daily pulse was very much like a football team having a huddle before a play. Not a half hour meeting, not a 90 minute meeting, a seven minute meeting covering three basic things. Good news, the key numbers and a business area update that changes companies where now everyone is literally on the same page. And they run it at 11 o' clock in the morning. Because there's two points in the day when your energy level drops 11 o' clock and 2 o'. Clock. That's when everybody wants a break. It's when everybody needs a bit of a jump start. So you run your meeting at 11 o' clock because it just juices everybody up for another hour before lunch.

So even though we're doing them at 11 o' clock and I don't know if we picked that as a strategic thing, you're saying that's just a great time?

Yes, the perfect time of day, 11 o' clock or 2 o'. Clock. I have another client at my nurse next door out of Vancouver, Canada. They have two seven minutes meetings a day. The first one is their daily huddle. They run at 11am the second is called their Kaizen meeting which is at 2 o'. Clock. And that's when they praise each other for any of the good systems that have been happening and the good news that's going in the organization. So it's just that general pulse in the organization.

Okay, well, you know, I want to come back to determining different meeting styles because that's one way to do them. And certainly there's hour long meetings, there's all kinds of things you can speak to. But in your book, some of the chapters, you have it broken down into three different parts. And in part one, you talk about CEOs, managers and employees. And then you talk about introverts and extroverts. And I actually want to make the distinction. Like what role does the, like a guy like me who's the founder and the owner of a company versus like my COO or one of my key people versus just, I mean, we have all kinds of work.

Yeah.

Like I have a couple video people that work for me and they'll sit through meetings that talking about a lot of stuff that probably doesn't directly apply to them. But we, you know, we're a small team, so we're thinking, oh, let's have everyone in the loop. I'm not the one that makes those decisions, by the way. I usually don't run the meetings, but I wanted to get your perspective on the different players and then their personalities will go into that.

Sure. So a couple parts. So for each meeting, every meeting that a company has regularly, the company needs to decide who are the most critical people that should be at the meeting. And then let's not invite the rest of the people and tell them that they have other things that are priorities for them. And we have to get better about people feeling okay with the fact they're not invited to a meeting. It doesn't mean we don't value them. It means we value them more working in their area of unique ability, not showing up for this damn meeting that we have other people for. It's like the SEAL team. The SEAL team only does what they're meant to do. So it's okay if people who are your video people don't show up for meeting on strategy because they're not involved in strategy. Now, whoever you decide to have at a meeting, there's different personality profiles. You've got your introverts or your extroverts, you've got your high Ds, your high asses, whatever it is from disc, you need to make sure that whoever's attending has a voice in that meeting. So a few rules that I always use the entrepreneur or the CEO always speaks last or the most senior person in the room always speaks last. So let's say we were going to have a brainstorming meeting with how to make the Genius network more impactful for the annual event, which is already killer. But how do we take it from a 10 out of 10 to an 11? Well, if we've invited 10 people to the meeting, I want everybody's opinion to come out. And I, as the leader, I don't want to sway them by me giving my idea first. So I'm going to give my points last and I'm going to have the most junior or newest person give their ideas first because then they won't be swayed and their voice will get heard. The second thing that I do is I hand everyone a stack of post it notes and I have them write their ideas down, one idea per post it note, until everyone's spent two or three minutes and I give them a small container of time to write down their ideas. They write down their ideas on post it notes and then the newest person stands up and reads their ideas and posts them on the wall. And you're only able to ask a clarifying question. You're not able to discuss or debate them. So everyone's ideas get heard, everyone's ideas get posted. And by the time the entrepreneur is posting their ideas, most of them are already up on the wall. Because our job as leaders is to grow people. It's not to get our ideas heard, it's to grow people so that they have great ideas. Our job is to give them the vision and let them figure out the how.

That's, you know, that's really fantastic. I mean, I'm definitely, I would say a lot of times my team, if I'm sitting in on meeting, which is rare, and I think part of it is because I'm not always involved, they will sit and say, let's see what Joe says before they say anything to kind of like either be aligned with me or to, you know, bounce off. But I like to think especially when someone is extra extroverted versus introverted. How do you bring people in that are quiet or typically have a fear of speaking up but have really good ideas.

So the way that I bring the introverts or the quiet people in the amiables is to give them the post it notes and to ask them to write their ideas down on post it notes. So I get everyone, including the extroverts, to write the ideas on post it notes and then you get the quiet people or the new people to speak first. And you'll be amazed when you give, I think, a couple of your team members that are quiet, a little bit more shy, but they're brilliant. Well, if you get them to write their ideas on post it notes, their ideas will finally get heard because they won't get steamed over with the extroverts. You and I are both type aaa, for God's sakes. We're both vibrating in our seats wanting to talk. But what about the quiet person that has a good idea? Our job, again as leaders is to grow people and to give them the confidence that their ideas are getting heard and give them the format for that. So the post it note exercise works well. And I ripped that idea right off of General Electric. They use it in what's called the GE Workout exercise. They use post it notes to get all the good ideas out from all their engineers and salespeople and marketing people. So I just take that and I use it in strategic planning and in any meetings that we're having. Creative discussion.

That's awesome. Well, I mean, how did you learn how to do meetings effectively? By doing a shit ton of ones at soccer? Or did you have someone in particular that was the most influential to you?

A few ways. So when I was 16, my dad pulled me aside and said I'd never be smart enough to figure this out on my own. He said my R and D should stand for rip off and duplicate. So what I've always done is look for the best systems that are being run by the best companies. And I R and D it. So the best meetings are being run by companies like General Electric, like Starbucks, like we ran at College Pro Painters. Any companies that are very tight restrictions around their time and have to operate with excellence tend to have tight meetings. I worked in the Internet space. We built a company that was growing very rapidly and we didn't waste time. And then you just take little bits and pieces of those ideas and as I pulled them together, they started to become a really tightly refined, easy to implement system. And again, I was that kid who was the simple kid. I didn't understand the complex, but I understood the shortcuts or the cheat sheets. I always looked at that fly trying to get out the window. You know, the fly that's banging its head against the window and it's trying to get out all day long and then you come back the next day and it's dead on the windowsill. But if it had turned 90 degrees to the right, there was a door that was wide open. Four feet away, but it kept banging its head against the window. I'm the guy who always saw the door and would just go out the door. I always like the path of least. Resistance and meetings are the same thing. There's great systems out there. The problem is nobody's reading them, nobody's condensing them to be very simple and easy to put in place. And then we're not teaching our employees this stuff. Instead we all walk around saying meetings suck when the reality is we just suck at running them.

Can a company exist by eliminating most meetings or do you feel like, I mean, what is a. If there is such a thing, is there a balance of communication and I mean, kind of give some standards on what you think is the best way to approach it.

So the reason that we need meetings is to get past miscommunication quickly. So a lot of people try to get around meetings by using written communication, you know, using Trello and Asana and project management software. The problem with written communication is it can be easily misinterpreted. I'll give you an example. Write down these six words. I didn't say you were beautiful. So if your listeners write these down as well. I didn't say you were beautiful. Now if you read those six words out and put the emphasis on the first word, what does it say? Go ahead and read it out loud. Okay.

I didn't say you were beautiful.

Okay, read it again, put the emphasis on the second word.

I didn't say you were beautiful.

Read it again, put the emphasis on the third word.

I didn't say you were beautiful.

Read it again, put the emphasis on the fourth word.

I didn't say you were beautiful.

Read it again, put the emphasis on the fifth word.

I didn't say you were beautiful.

Read it again, put the emphasis on the sixth word.

I didn't say you were beautiful.

Right, so there's a guy who's one of the most brilliant copywriters on the planet that just read a six word sentence six completely different ways. So the reason that we have so many problems inside of companies and so much miscommunication is because we don't have face to face meetings enough. Whether it's on Skype or FaceTime or Google Hangouts. Again, meetings don't suck. What we're trying to do is get around the problems of shitty meetings by avoiding them instead of fixing the problem. If you run meetings properly, they're highly powerful and you actually get rid of all the miscommunication of text and SMS and email chatter that Happens inside of companies.

In reality, you're kind of really messing with people's heads by having a book called Meetings Suck. Because if they don't buy your book, then you've just instilled, probably on some sort of conscious level, that meetings suck, and then they'll go back to their businesses and they'll undermine it. And so everyone who actually buys the book and knows the process has an unfair advantage.

Yeah. And that's why I'm talking to you, because guys like you and other podcasters and other interviewers are going to interview me, and they'll actually get the real news out that meetings don't suck. Yes, we suck at running meetings.

Yeah. But everyone that's, like, too damn cheap to buy your book is just going to basically see this whole, I'm good meetings Suck. And it's just like, they'll catch up.

They'll just be the laggards.

That's awesome. So let's see what I want to ask you here. Here we have a genius network member, our good friend, Christian Cattuccini.

You know Christian, great guy, hero arts. Yeah.

And, you know, I did a great episode with him on company culture. And I can't remember if he said it on that interview or elsewhere, but I remember talking with him and he said, you know, you wouldn't have a meeting if there weren't any problems. You know, we have problems in business and we have meetings because we're trying to figure out problems. And. And I don't know if that's always the case.

Flip that for a second. If you don't have meetings, you may have problems because you might have miscommunication if you don't have meetings. What about having meetings for strategy? Meetings on what could happen. Meetings on where we might take the company, Meetings about opportunities, brainstorming meetings, collaborative meetings, creative discussions. Hell, when you're creating a TV ad, are you telling me you're not going to have a meeting to come up with the best possible TV ad? Of course you are. So you have meetings not just because there's problems. You can have meetings, but because there's opportunities. In fact, I think if you have the proper meetings, you won't actually have the problems because you'll be able to plan, brief, execute, and debrief. You know, the military, when they're out there fighting the wars, as much as they don't like what they're doing, they actually have a plan for every. Terry, every single action they're out there doing. They plan, they brief, they execute, and then they Debrief. You know, you should have a meeting to review the metrics. Not the metrics, just in the past, but to tell you where you're going so you can make better decisions. A meeting is very much like a dashboard of your car. You're going to drive your car. You have to look at some of the data. Right, right, right.

Well, so as it relates to culture, how would you actually define culture and how do meetings affect it?

I think every company has a culture. Right. Some people say, well, I don't really have a culture. Well, that's your culture. Your culture could best be described as beige. So your meetings can impact your culture in that one, you have the disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action, like what Jim Collins talked about. Or you can have a very team culture, like a football team that has a meeting before every single play. Or you could have a culture where your meetings are all about cheering each other and helping remove obstacles, where you're actually looking for where people are stuck and helping to unstick them. So there's all kinds of ways that your culture can eke its way out. If your core values are deliver what you promise, respect the individual pride in all you do, those core values will come out in the company culture or the company meeting.

Gotcha. So one of the things you talk about in the book is fostering useful communication. So let's just talk about communication. I mean, what we have here is a failure to communicate. I mean, this is where most problems come into play. And being in the marketing business, which is, you know, I always tell people, think of selling as influence and think of marketing as storytelling and the use of words and tonality and timing and all kinds of things go into effective communication. And, you know, I'm writing a book right now on relationships, how to develop relationships, how to make them work. Mostly business, but it applies to everything. And I. People are either in communication with each other or they're trying to escape. I mean, when you're talking to someone, you're either thinking about how to get the hell out of there or how to end it, or you're really just in sync. So being engaged in a meeting, being engaged in your company has so much to do with the energy you bring to it. So what are some recommendations on usefulness?

So the first part is, as long as when you're booking a meeting and asking people to attend the meeting, you clearly show in the notes what the purpose, the outcomes and the agenda are, then at least everyone knows why they're showing up. They know what's expected of Them. At least now everyone who's attending knows why they're there. Second thing is, you have a rule regarding email communication while you're in the meeting. My general rule is if I think somebody is checking their email, I can call them on it. They literally stop what they're doing and they turn their phone around or they turn their laptop around. And if I'm wrong, if I called them out on typing emails, but they were actually typing up their notes, I have to buy everybody lunch. Who was at the meeting. However, if they were breaking the rule and they were actually just checking their email, they were farting around, they have to buy everybody lunch. So that's an easy way to make sure people are completely engaged. The last step is finish every meeting with a statement who is doing what by when. And that way you just go around the table and each person commits to what they're going to get done and when they're doing it. Not when it'll be done by, but when they're doing the work. And then you can actually make sure that two things happen. One, that people are committing to what they're doing and when it'll get done. The second part is you can actually stop a few things that you didn't intend to get stopped started that were merely discussion items. Because that can often happen as well. The miscommunication can send people down these rabbit holes. When we were merely talking about something, I mentioned one time in a meeting that our customer service was shit, we needed to fix some stuff and we really had to rework it all. And I was literally just thinking out loud. And the next day somebody came up to me with this new project plan to re engineer all of customer service and they thought it was an action item that had come up in the meeting when it was merely just me thinking. So if we had finished that meeting properly with who's doing what by, when they'd said, I'm going to do this planned, I would have said, whoa, wait, stop. I was just talking. I didn't need you to actually do anything with it.

So you've been through two day meetings with me when we're doing genius network things. And I don't think of that as like a meeting where we would get together. However, there are times when I'm incredibly effective and there's times when I'm less effective or I just suck. And so much of it has to do with when I go into things with an outcome. So I mean just the simple act of what's the outcome? So do you go into meetings with, when do you go in saying, here's exactly what we need to accomplish, here's how much time we have and we're going to make this work versus we're going to quote, unquote, brainstorm or we're going to be open ended.

So you never go to a meeting open ended. You always go to a meeting with a final time that you'll finish five minutes early on. And in that open ended discussion meeting, you, you might break it off into chunks that you talk about part A, part B and part C. But as an example with the Genius Network, one area where I see that you can sometimes go sideways is controlling the group. You get guys like me that keep wanting to contribute and put our hands up and add to the group. It's hard for you to be the moderator and also the leader of the tribe. So I often will not be the moderator of the meeting. I'll have a third party person. Like you'll have Raquel or Eunice will kind of go, hey, we're a little off track here. And they're the timekeeper.

But we also, we have to correct her name.

Rachelle. Rachelle.

Because if we call her Raquel, she's gonna get temperamental.

We're gonna have to have a meeting to talk.

Yeah, she listens all this stuff. She'll be like, damn it. No, I'm kidding. So I just wanted to call that out.

So, Raquel, Rachelle, Rochelle, thank you.

You're wonderful.

No, so with this whole idea, though, is you need a moderator to control the idle chatter in the group and to make sure that we're not going off into the these weird areas. And then that third area I talk about is the parking lot. It's like, hey, that's a good idea. Let's put it on the parking lot and we'll cover it if we have time because we have to come back to this agenda. And those are just three really solid rules that work well in every kind of meeting format, whether it's a two day Genius network event or a one hour strategic planning meeting that you're having. Great, great.

So knowing your role, I want to expand on that.

That is.

That I think would be very beneficial for some people that if you're new to a company. For instance, today I hired a new personal assistant. And this is a guy who's going to get. It's a guy, he's going to get highly paid and we'll see how he integrates with the team and all that. And you know, this is all Brand New. So I've not even had an opportunity other than having gone through, you know, the referral process. Highly referred by someone, has years of experience doing this stuff. Can't wait to have you meet this person because then, you know, because I always usually run things by you. This particular one, I'm pretty, I think I'm pretty, pretty solid on it. But you know, he'll come to the first meeting and you know, probably I wouldn't quite know how to onboard someone, you know, for the first time into a meeting other than throw them in with the lions. Right. Although this person I think is going to be fully capable of that.

Sure.

But, but that being said, I'm saying this more for a lot of people that were. They have a lot of new people that come in and they just kind of put them into meetings hoping that that's going to onboard them and I think onboarding it or whatever term you want to use to.

What's their role?

Yeah, get someone in there. How do you most effectively define it and do it?

So again, this goes back to the purpose, outcome and agenda. And any of the attendees that are coming to a meeting, their role is to be a part of every agenda item or they can leave for that part of the agenda. So the assumption should be if you're in the room and you're at the meeting, unless your role is to be taking notes or to be purely a timekeeper, your role is to participate equally with everyone else in the room. The CEO has no more power than any other attendee and any other attendee shouldn't be speaking less than anyone else. That's why you use the post it note exercise. That's why I recommend that people get the CEO speaking last. It's also why you want to tell people on every agenda item what the communication style is. So that when you're attending, you know, your role is to either contribute or just to listen. If it's a top down info sharer, I'm telling you all this information. Your job is just to listen. Maybe you ask a clarifying question, but there's no discussion, no debate, no decision being made. If it's a creative discussion meeting, it means everybody gets to contribute ideas. There's no bad ones and the ideas get thrown up against the wall. But there's no vote, there's no decision. It's purely creative discussion. So everyone knows their role is to discuss and share ideas. If it's consensus decision, that means we're going to share all that stuff and as a group we will decide or Someone will decide, and it'll say that in the notes. I'll make the decision, but we will all leave the room agreeing that we have left our debate at the table. Gotcha.

Okay, so how do we creatively belittle people that have ideas we don't agree with?

You do it really well. What is it? There's no bad ideas. There's just two stupid people in the room.

I swear, if you're a public speaker listening to this, you got to try this line. But you should give me credit later. Just, although I don't think I invented this.

I like everyone in the room except two of you.

Yeah, yeah, I say that all the time. Yeah, there's some great people in the room except two of you. What I'll start with is I'll say something like, if we have enough time for Q and A later, we'll do it. And just remember, there's no such thing as a stupid question. There's only stupid people that ask questions. And I've said that in front of rooms of, like, you know, a thousand people, and it's just hysterical. And it makes me feel so good to be. In all seriousness, you have someone that goes off on tangents that are idiotic tangents. I mean, once in a while, someone will, you know, they'll start going down the stream of consciousness, but they're really on to something or they're in a flow state. Other times, some people just want to be heard or they're dominating. I mean, how do you eloquently shut them the hell up or not go down rabbit hole?

The toughest role in any meeting is the moderator, and that's the person who has to keep the group kind of bobbing and weaving towards the agenda and staying on time. And they have to be able to trust the pulse of the group and to know the players a little bit. They also have to trust their own confidence to cut people off when it's time to cut them off. So that's why you give them a tool like the parking lot where you say, hey, that's a great idea. Let's throw it up on the parking lot. Or, hey, that's a great idea. Can we take it offline? The other thing you have to do with the agenda is when you go to the next module is you clearly tell people, okay, group, we have 10 minutes. I'm setting my alarm for nine minutes to call you all back in. So you let people know the container of time that you're giving them for each section of the agenda. So then you can go back to the agenda. It's not like you're saying, Bob, you're a dumb guy or you're going off track, Bob, what you have to say is, bob, we're over on the agenda. So now it's about the agenda. It's not about Bob, you take it away from the person and back to the agenda.

Okay, great. Well, so let's go through a slew of different types of meetings. And you know part three of your book, you talk about quarterly and yearly retreats.

Yeah. So I always start with it with beginning the end in mind. Right. Like Stephen Covey. So if you think about your vivid vision as a three year vision to where you're going, you need an annual plan or an annual strategic planning meeting to help you get towards that three year vision. So I like every company, let's assume that we're all running from January through December 30th. First is our fiscal year. We're running on a calendar year. You would want to have your annual retreat in September or October to plan your next calendar year. Three months out, four months out. You want to plan out your following year in that two day off site meeting. You don't run it at your office. You go off site somewhere. I like going to a cool old chalet or an old estate, a place that you can rent off Airbnb that can sleep eight people. You just hang out there and you make your meals together as a team and you play, plan and work in the living room and dining room and you literally just crank out on your business for two days. No hotels. The meeting is a combination of planning your goals, so your revenue, profit, customer engagement, employee engagement, your strategic initiatives for the year. Then it's a component of coming up with the core 10 projects to make your goals happen and getting everyone on the leadership team on that same page. And then it's actually a little bit of skill development. So you have one or two areas over the two days of some leadership skills that are being given to the team. It might be situational leadership, problem solving, time management, delegation, coaching, whatever. You're giving skill development to the leadership team on a regular pulse. And then lastly the team building. But it's not team building with all the hokey like, hey, let's go to a room where everybody gets locked in or let's go do a ropes course together. Like all that is hokey for leadership skills. It's fun, but it's not leadership team building. The team building that you're really going to have is by waking up in the morning and you're in your boxer shorts and your T shirt and you're making breakfast together and at lunch you're all whipping together soup and sandwiches together as a team. And at dinner you're barbecuing and making healthy food and sitting around having a glass of wine and everybody's decompressing and you're living in the space with other people for two days and two nights. That's where the team building really happens. You don't need to plan anything crazy.

So much for the jumping out of airplanes.

And that's all fun stuff. But it's not team building, you know, it's just a fun activity or it can be team building, but you don't need to do it, I guess is my point. You don't need to go and have those other activities. You can have just as much team building by staying in a chalet or in a big old home and breaking bread together and working together and hanging out together as you will by spending time doing it, doing an activity.

How do you handle this is maybe a little off topic, but I'm thinking about it in the context of someone who just had a really bad night or someone who's really burnt out. And when you notice that within your team, how do you, you see someone at a meeting and they're just not all that functional, do you?

I mean, you give them a pass. You just like, this is called life. I was actually coaching the CEO this morning and I said, when you run your one on one meetings, which we can get into, you start your one on one meetings with any of your direct reports with just your opening head check, like how are they doing? I said one out of ten times that you meet with them for your weekly one on one meeting. They might be having a shitty day. So tell them, you know what, why don't you go back and just deal with it or take the day off or go and fight that fire you're working on right now. If your head isn't ready to be in this space, it's okay. You would never let again a SEAL team guy go into a fight or a battle. If their head was all messed up, you wouldn't want them to because they're going to make up that something's going to happen. It's going to go bad either for them or for the rest of the team. So give them the opt out. The reality is if they're that important, it can wait a couple hours. Do something else.

What if they're not that important?

I'M kidding. So we talked about the annual retreat. The quarterly retreat is the same type of a format, but it's a half day or a full day. It doesn't necessarily have to be staying overnight somewhere, but it should be out of your office. I've had people that will literally have it at other friends offices just to mix it up. So they'll go and use David Berg's boardroom instead of having it at Joe Polish's boardroom. They'll just kind of mix up the locations. Or you'll rent an Airbnb place, like a cool condo in the city and you'll go and work on the 20th floor of a building. And you don't even stay there overnight. You just have lunch there and you bring in catered food and you go for dinner, but it's getting off site out of the office. Oh, and by the way, at both of these meetings, cell phones are stacked from 8 o' clock until 5 o'.

Clock.

They're literally stacked in the center of the table and nobody touches them so that you can stay completely in your zone. If people could run companies 100 years ago without cell phones, surely we can do it for one day or two days when we're actually doing the strategic thinking component to our business.

Yeah, you know, and you're dealing with the addictive nature of some people who just go batshit crazy without their electronics.

Well, give them something else, then we'll let him do coffee.

Yeah, let's substitute another addiction. Okay, so board of advisors meetings. Wow, this is an interesting one, because I get asked to be on boards a lot, which I.

You're not born boards yet.

I mean, I don't even really know what that means other than I know there's a lot of people that have board of advisor meetings.

And so there's a difference between a board of advisors and a board of directors. A board of directors can fire the CEO, and they're typically there for compliance and regulatory measures. The board of advisors are there as a group of people that you really respect who are going to give you unbiased opinions to help you grow your company. If you're structuring a board of advisors, you never put a lawyer on it or an accountant on it because you can hire that advice separately. And those are two types of people that tend to and need to say no more often than. And then they say yes. Your board of advisors should be very strong operations, marketing strategy people who either run companies or lead companies in those functional areas. But they're good kind of well rounded in business. They're not just so geeked out in marketing that they can't think outside that box. They're not so operationally that they can't think about strategy or operate. They need to be well rounded but very deep in one area. I tend to have five people on the board of advisors, and we meet four or five times a year. They get sent a board package which is about 10 pages a week in advance. And the board package is your current financial statements, your balance sheet, your P and L, and your cash flow statement. And then it's also your updates on the company. What's going well, what's not going well, what are you working on for the next quarter and where are you stuck? And then you give them the two core areas that you'd like to talk about in the board meeting. So they show up, having prepped with their questions. You start off the meeting by revisiting the vivid vision again. So you reread it all at the board meeting. And then they give you their questions from their updates, which takes about an hour. And then you get into talking about the two core areas. Board meeting should run about three or four hours. Great.

Three or four hours. Well, okay.

And by the way, most board members will do an advisory role for free. They'll do it because they like you, because they want to help, because it's their turn to give back. You can give them some kind of a stipend, like here's 1,000 bucks. But they're not doing it for the money. They already make money. More money than you should be paying them. They're doing it as a way to help you. Right. Then you know you have the right advisors. That's great.

That's great. Well, so let's talk about one on one meetings, because there are. I actually am less comfortable one on one than in my groups. There's something about it that just seems so corporate to me.

Yeah, there's actually nothing corporate about it in a lot of ways. At the end of the day, if you think that you. Your role or our role as CEOs is to grow our VPs, it's to grow them as competent, skilled leaders so they can build our company for us. And then their job is to grow the managers, and the manager's job is to grow the staff, and the staff's job is to execute for the customer. So really, if you flip the org chart upside down, we're supposed to support the VPs. So the one on one meeting is a balance of three coaching, which is direction, Development and support. The direction is making sure that they're working on the right things. Because you only have three people, time and money. And you need your direct reports to be putting your people, time and money onto the right areas. The next thing is development. So you give them the skill development if they need it on a project by project basis. Because sometimes they need different skills. You may not have the skills, but maybe you can plug them into a mentor. So imagine in that one on one meeting, if you can help one of your team and support them better by giving them a mentor to work with them even for an hour. And then the last one is support and it's the emotional support in their lives and in their jobs. It's funny, I just actually landed a genius network member that I'm going to start coaching. He just literally signed up yesterday and he's got a CFO who's very skilled, very competent, but his business is going to the next level and he wants a CFO to get some additional coaching. And the CFO is not going to feel like a weak cfo. He's super excited about it. So I've connected him with an interim CFO who's going to mentor this genius network members cfo. So when you have strong, skilled executives, they all want skill development because they know that when they're green, they're growing and when they're ripe, they're dead. So your job as the entrepreneur in those one on one meetings isn't to follow up on tasks. You'll notice I never talked about that. It's to make sure that they're working on the right stuff to help remove obstacles and give them skill development and emotional support. So that shouldn't feel uncomfortable at all. That's your whole nature, your whole world is making sure that people are doing the right stuff and that you're helping them. You're wired that way.

To me, it's more like environments are so important to me. I mean, there are certain places where I just feel more, I don't know, capable, more confident. And when there's a certain level of formality, like an employee review.

Oh yeah, and by the way, throw employees revealers at the window. Every employee hates reviews. So you don't have kids. But anybody who's listening that has kids, know that you don't have an annual review for your children. If the kid does something wrong, you tell them right away. If the kid does something well, you praise them right away. So what I do with employees is I praise them and I give them constant critiques. On the stuff on a day to day basis. So you don't need annual reviews. The coaching meeting is more of a support meeting. It's them helping. When I was the COO for 1-800-got-Junk, the most important hour of my week was when I had a one on one meeting with Brian the CEO. Just so we could bounce ideas off each other, just so I could brainstorm, so I could think, so I could get some feedback. But it wasn't anything formal at all. We did some of them at Starbucks. We did some of them out for runs. We did some of them sitting like you and I are. Hell, I'm sitting here in bare feet and shorts right now. Why does this have to be uncomfortable? Right?

Yeah, well, I mean, things like this are totally fine. It's all how I guess I, I frame it.

So. No, I would do your one on one meetings in exactly this kind of environment. For listeners, we're sitting in a couple of nice leather chairs with a plant between us. Joe keeps winking at me and flirting with me, which is really uncomfortable. But like, outside of that, this is a pretty normal environment. But you like it.

You enjoy it so. Well, I mean, you said employee reviews are silly. How do you follow up and give feedback to team members, be it one on one? I mean, you said do it daily or as it arises, but give me a little more depth.

Yeah. So I use what I call race to the Conflict. So if there's a problem with somebody, I use the One Minute Manager. Ken Blanchard and Dr. Paul Hersey created situational leadership 50 years ago, and it's still the number one system on leading people today. It's how the book the One Minute Manager came about. So if somebody does something wrong, I'll pull them aside and say, hey, you know Eunice, when you did this?

Yeah.

She was like never right. When she does something wrong, if it ever happens, you say, when you did this specific thing, this is how it made me feel. Right. So when you. I feel and then I need. What I need from you in the future is to do it this way. And then you ask them how they feel about it. So you're giving them very specific feedback on the specific instance it happened. And then you're asking them if they need help or are they good. The same thing with praise. When somebody does something, well, you grab them right away and you like either publicly or privately. By the way, there's that old adage of private criticism, public praise, that's often very accurate. But I had one guy come up to me one Time. And he said, it embarrasses me when you praise me in public. And I was like, wow, I thought it was good. He goes, no, it really shuts me down. He said, the biggest thing you can do to praise me is give me a big project to run. This guy's name was David Christopher. So I gave David the entire company conference to run, which is 500 attendees. He crushed it. And he was so proud that his name was running the project. That was the biggest praise I ever could have given him. So we often have to be careful that some of these outages that are. You have to really know your employees and know what they need to lead them successfully.

Yeah, you know, it's almost like love languages and business.

Totally. Exactly that.

What similarities do you see with your children, with your spouse, with family members as it relates to running meetings? Because I think most people's meetings, although they probably don't think of it in a business context, are not necessarily happening at work.

I think you're bang on. And it is very similar to our personal relationship. So I have four kids and I think about my two boys that are the oldest at 13 and 15 right now. I know that I often talk over them. I often don't give them a chance to be heard. I often don't understand their position or their side of the situation. And when I don't listen to them, when it's not heard, it comes out in the wrong way completely. Either they shut down or it doesn't truly get thought through. But when we actually talk about a situation and when we understand it all. So that's the. When you. I feel I need. How do you feel you can really get to a resolve much faster. And by the way, I always say that the reason that the annual reviews don't work, any system that the government uses, I refuse to use inside my business. Governments use annual reviews all the time. Time. Which means they've got to be crap.

That's funny. That's so funny. So I'm going to ask you some questions that you've already talked about to a degree, but we'll go a little bit more depth and then some other ones that I think maybe we haven't addressed. So what should people do to ensure that meetings are both really focused and that you can create accountability? Because you did mention the great question, which is, you know, who's doing what by when? Which I think is great. How do you. What else can one do to make sure that there is focus and that people don't leave with you wondering Being in the dark, because I think one of the most painful things for, like, a guy like me, a business owner, the entrepreneur, especially if you have a lot of moving parts where, you know, I kind of borrow this from Dan's Sullivan. He doesn't want to be. He doesn't want to be in control. He just wants to be in charge. And I feel the same way. I don't need to know everything that's going on. However, I don't want to be in the dark either.

So what you try to do again is set up the meeting for success right at the beginning. So everyone who's attending the meeting knows what the purpose is, what the outcomes are, what the agenda is, and they know what we're covering, in what order, and how many minutes I need. So everyone's showing up with that in mind. Second thing is you're including everyone in the meeting. So everyone's voice is being heard. They're all kind of participating, contributing. Right. When you wrap up the meeting with who's doing what by when, it's not to hold people accountable so much as to give the accountable people a forum to say what they all heard. It's validating the communication. So I was asked by Fortune magazine back in 2004, how do you hold your people accountable? And I said, I don't. I hire accountable people. But you need to give accountable people a format to make sure that they validate the communication. You know, I heard this. This is what I'm doing by when. Oh, okay. Now we're all back on the same page again. So it's kind of that plan, brief, execute debrief. But at the end of the meeting, you're briefing on what the plan is. Then we all go off and do it, and then the next week or the next month, we're back for that same meeting format again, is when the debrief might happen. Okay.

Okay, great. What about difficult people or people for reasons that some people may not even be able to explain? And I'm saying this because I encountered this myself, where there's, like, you just don't have chemistry with them, or, you know, they're bright people, but you wouldn't hang out with them beyond work or they annoy you or whatever.

I mean, there's all different styles.

You have to collaborate with them. Not by force, but, you know, it's. It's just. You're just not. Everyone's always gonna, you know, listen to the same music, like the same things, have the same sort of style, have the same political beliefs. How do you most effectively work with, you know, in situations or stuff where there's, you know, you're the character in the Star wars bar.

The post it note exercise is as I found, the single most powerful way to take people away from their style as humans and get everyone on the same level playing field, regardless of how long they've even been with the company or the role that they're in. Everyone writes down their ideas, one idea per post it note, and then they get to stand up and share their ideas. By the way, I talk in the book about a system called Monkeys looking Sideways, which is my in person 360review. And it's done where everybody reviews each person, but you do it verbally and you use the post it notes to write your ideas down. So it's all in the book as to how to do it, but. But it's a very powerful process. It's the same way. We had a guy who I used to work with years ago who we didn't click. He was Russian. He was very analytical. There was usually communication styles. I was intimidated by him because he was so smart in the technology world and he was probably intimidated by me because I was such a driver on the operations side. And we never really gelled, but we really respected each other as leaders. So when the ideas came out, I didn't worry about who was saying it or how it was being said. I just listened to into the idea itself. And that post it note exercise really facilitates that.

Okay, is there any way to make things that say you like, I'm a marketing person and some people that aren't marketing people hate marketing meetings because they're super creative, this and that. And then there's like, I don't really like financial meetings. I mean, meeting with my CPA and my bookkeepers and my financial advisor and I, you know, I'll do meetings because it's obviously really important to the profitability of the company and the direction. Those meetings are way more difficult for me than ones that are per se, talking about creative ideas and stuff.

So I think we get stuck in saying I have to go to a meeting. No, the meeting needs to happen and someone needs to be there to play specific roles. So as an example, your accountant and your finance people need to have a meeting to brief you on the finances. But if you're the wrong person for them to brief, maybe they can give you a feedback or something in a slightly different way. Or maybe you can have someone stand in to receive that information for you so that you don't need to play that. Just like if you are a marketing person, you don't want to go to a finance meeting, then opt out of the meeting. Just because you've been invited doesn't mean you need to attend. You can say, you know what, thank you for inviting me. I'm actually going to work on our marketing calendar and our marketing budget instead because I think my time and my resources are better spent over here. And I know you guys have got it, I trust that you guys have got it without me because I don't feel I've been to able to add. So it's okay. People have never been given the ability to opt out and we feel bad for opting out where we should be giving credit to it. We should be saying, wow, like six people opted out of this meeting not because the meeting was shitty, not because they thought they'd be bored, but because they have their unique ability areas and they would rather work in those. I used to also show up for the front part of a meeting, the purpose and outcome, to make sure people are on the same page still. I would leave for the 40 or 50, 70% in the middle that they'd have all the discussion and debate and I would let them brief me on what they were doing at the end because I didn't need to be in the middle. That was what I wanted them to do.

No, that's great. That is great. So you know, that speaks to this line that I heard years ago when.

I.

Interviewed a guy on hiring and fire and he said this line, he goes, you don't buy a dog in the bark for it. Some people have a real fear of letting go and there are legitimate reasons to not let go. You may not have the right people in place, things like that. However, tips, suggestions as it relates to delegating versus abdicating and any thoughts you have.

Yeah, delegating versus advocating goes back to situational leadership. So I'll give you, the listeners, a very simplified version of situational leadership that's really powerful. So for any specific project that one of your direct reports has on their plate, ask yourself what's their skill level on that project? Do they have no skill, some skill or high skill and give them a point value. 0. 1 or 2 points. 0 for no skill. 1 point for high skill. 2 point. Sorry, 1 point for some skill, 2 for high skill. And then ask what's their commitment level? Are they not into it? Kind of into it or really into it? 0. One or two points and then add up the points. So on any project they could have a total of 0 points, total of 1, total of 2, total of 3, or a total of 4 points. If they have a total of 0 points on the project, give the project to somebody else. It's just easier to give it to somebody else. Even if it's on the CEO's plate, delegate it to somebody else. You're not into it, you're not good at it, Pass it. If you have a total of one point, tell them what to do, how to do it, step by step, almost micromanage, but that's exactly what they need. They need to be told exactly what to do and lay it out for them step by step. If they have a total of 2 points, give them every step to do. But explain why you think it should be done that way and ask if they think it could be tweaked in any given way. But you guide the process and give your involvement as to why you're saying to do it that way. If they have a total of 3 points, ask them to go away and develop the plan. Ask them to come back and present you what the plan is, and you'll just quickly sign off on it and let them know that if they need help with the plan, you'll be there. And also cheer them on as they're developing it or as they're executing on the plan. If they have a total of four points, that's the laissez faire mode. That's where you just let them run with it. You don't even get involved. The reason people talk about abdicating is because you've given a level four style to somebody who needs more involvement from you. The reason people talk about being micromanaged is because you're giving them an S1 style when they already have the skill or the commitment level. They don't need that level of direction. So we tend to mismanage people because we don't stop and think about the style to manage them with and. Or the subordinate doesn't tell us the style they'd like to be led with on that project.

Okay, so what about things that you have in the book? You have the daily huddle and the adrenaline meeting. You have the ad hoc debrief meetings and then virtual meetings. So let's talk about like just quick meetings. You know, the daily huddle, the adrenaline, you know, how do you. How do you go in and just made great impact because I think if done right, this could be a total game changer.

Sure. So the quick ad hoc meetings or the quick debrief meetings Are literally, hey, can we grab you for three minutes? I just need to cover something off. But don't book it for half an hour and don't sit down. It can be done as a walk and talk on the way to a car. It can be done in an office, but let the people person know or people know very quickly. What's the purpose, outcome and agenda? Like hey, can I grab you for three minutes? I just need to go through xyz. I need to brainstorm with you so I know what to do decide. Okay, so that's a creative discussion meeting. I'm making the decision. Or hey, can I just grab you for a quick sec? I want to brainstorm with you so we can make a decision on this together. Okay. That's a consensus decision making. Or hey, can I grab you on the way to the car? I just need to tell you what's going on. That's a top down infoshare. Those are very specific ad hoc meetings. Right. They're not boring, but they're also not two days or one hour or three hour meetings. So the debrief is one of the most powerful ones. That's after any real event or anything new project that you're doing, you sit down for five or 10 minutes and talk about what went well, what didn't go well. So the next time we do this, what do we continue doing and what can we improve on? And that five or ten minute debrief is very powerful. When you run the Genius network at the end of every two day event, I'm sure you guys probably do a quick debrief because the system keeps getting tighter.

Yeah, we do. I mean that's just something we've been doing for years and it is incredibly helpful.

It's not a full day debrief. It's probably 10 or 15 minutes.

Right. Some days we're just like, let's just cover what we need to cover and set the stage for the next time being great. And also what worked, what didn't work. And we do use a positive focus, which is something we learned from Strategic Coach where everyone gives a positive focus on what happened for the day and it, it leaves everyone in a really good place.

And that's a meeting.

Yeah, excellent. So what about virtual meetings?

Virtual meetings are certainly becoming easier now that you can actually have people on video. Things like Google Hangouts or Zoom where you can get multiple people on a video chat. I like virtual when you can see people much more than the typical conference call where you have no idea if the people are Are there or even paying attention. So I really, really encourage people to do the virtual meetings, but do it via video. It's way more impactful. I have another genius network member who I've been coaching for about a year now, and she was notorious for showing up to a meeting. But she'd be in the car, she'd be getting ready in the morning, and she was present, but not always quite present. And I called her on it. I'm like, you can keep paying me, but you'd get more value if you were actually looking at us and completely present. And that was it. Every other meeting since then, she's been completely present and literally paying attention the whole time. And you can tell you can do the meetings in less time if people are on video and paying attention versus these meetings that go nowhere and you don't get anything done because nobody's really there.

There's so much truth to that too, because how many just millions of hours are spent in this country alone on conference calls of people? And they'll have, you know, 10 or 15 or 20 people call in and someone just is talking and like, I.

Mean, what the hell is going on? You'd never have sex with somebody if they weren't in the same bed with you. So don't have a go. Don't have a virtual meeting if they're not on the same video with you. That's.

Yeah. Or you're at least talking one on one over the phone. And there's not like, you know, multiple people. But even then, even one on one.

Over the phone, we tend to have. We're creatures of habit and we tend to give you these distraction periods. And I can tell you that a quick facetime with somebody is much more powerful than a quick phone call with somebody. Yeah, right. And kids these days will never actually know a phone call to exist without video. It's becoming completely ubiquitous now, so we may as well get with the future. Yeah.

That is funny. What's the worst meeting you've personally been a part of? And what's the best meeting that you've ever been a part of? And what was the result of each?

If you can remember, it's actually the same meeting. So years ago we had a town hall meeting. And the town hall meeting was 150 employees showing up to talk to the leadership team. And the leadership team sat up front on five stools and we listened to the team. Well, at the end of the one hour meeting, one of the new employees came up to us and said, you know what? That was the worst meeting I've ever been to. We didn't discuss anything, we didn't debate anything. We sat around and drank beer. You guys barely even spoke. It was just us talking the whole damn time. And Brian and I kind of chuckled and went, did you not get the agenda? And the kid goes, no, I just started like four hours ago. But you told us in the interviews you wanted us to speak up and this meeting sucked. Brian pulls out the agenda and he goes, the purpose of the agenda is a bottom up info share. The outcomes were we would listen to the team talk about these three areas. We would start at 6 o', clock, finish at 7 o' clock and have a couple beer along the way to enjoy ourselves. No discussion, no debate. And the kid looked at both of us and went, wow, that was the best meeting I've ever been to. Because his perception of the meeting completely changed once he knew why he was going, what the outcomes were going to be. We started on time, stopped on time, we controlled the container and everyone who was there knew why they were there. Now the mistake that we'd made was not starting the meeting by going through the agenda with those outcomes right away. If we'd started it that way, even that kid who thought it was shitty would have known it was perfect. So.

There's obviously a lot more that we can discuss. But I wanted to ask you, what did I not ask you or what did we not cover that is critical for us to wrap up this topic and then send people off to read the book and get a deep need? Because everything we've discussed you cover in detail in the book and it's a very short book. So I mean everyone really, if you got value out of listening to this, which I can't imagine you would not have, then obviously go and pick up Cameron's book. But what should I have asked you that I did not?

I think there's kind of the regular pulse of meetings and it's, do you schedule these meetings ad hoc or do you put them into your calendar in advance? And you absolutely have to put these meetings into your calendar for the full year in advance. So you know when your four quarterly planning meetings are and they're booked in your calendar 12 months out. You know when your monthly strategy meetings are on the third Thursday of a month and you block them out. You know when your finance meeting is and you block those out. You know when your one on one meetings and your leadership team meetings, you'll realize it's a lot less meetings than it sounds like. But they're in your calendar and you put all of your other work around it. So your meetings are some of the rocks. Right. And you plan your busy work around those rocks. That's probably a core concept that I cover in the book that we hadn't touched on yet.

Great. All right, so any other things related to meanings that you can think of other than.

No, I wrote a book on it, so it's all in there. I could go first. I could probably keep talking forever. So of course they read the book.

Well, so where did they get the book? Obviously there's simple things like Amazon.

Yeah, it's right now it's available in hard copy on Amazon and also in Kindle format on Amazon. And they can also get bulk copies of the book as well if they want to buy 100, 300, 750 or 1700 copies. There's different offers as well. Well, so I can show you those later.

Okay, well, let's talk about if people want to work with you because you do have your CEO alliance. You do some great stuff. I mean, I refer a lot of people to you. And let me ask you this question, because we just got it today and this is maybe a little off, but Rochelle came and she goes, you know, I'm getting quite a few people asking, where do they hire a one on one coach? Because you people hear me in Genius Network talk about I have a person that I pay $75,000 a year to meet with one on one. I go to strategic coach. I hire lots of talent and capabilities, and I don't look at any of that as being a waste of money because I do my due diligence. Luckily, I'm in a position, having ran a company for over 20 something years, that I know who's smart and who isn't. What I need and what I think will be a multiplier personally and professionally. I even, you know, I have a coach that helps me with. With relationship stuff. So I'm all for hiring talent. And the question was, you know, where does someone hire a coach? So do you have any advice on that? And then who are the type of people you work with and how do people work with you? So there's kind of two questions there.

So the first part, like, where do you hire a coach? You don't start with where do you hire a coach? You first start with, what do I want to get coached in? Because if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. There's lots of coaches. There's coaches like you said there's coaches on behavior, there's coaches on leadership skills, there's coaches on holding you accountable. So make a list of what are the top 10 things that you would like to learn or benefit from over the next year or two. Start with that. Second thing I would do is take five minutes and do a SWOT analysis on your company. What are your company's top three strengths that you'd like to capitalize on? What are your company's top three weaknesses that you need to buffer? What are the top three opportunities that you think you'd like to discuss strategically? And what are the top three threats that you got to get figured out that you're blocked on and then do the same for you personally as a leader? What are your top three personal strengths, Weaknesses, businesses, opportunities, threats as a leader that will give you a framework to then turn to your network, your tribe to find a coach. Then it comes down to what kind of a format are you looking for? Are you looking for somebody to really hold you accountable? Are you looking for somebody to help you make plans? Are you looking for someone to brainstorm with you? What is it you're looking for? My coaching fee is more than you're paying. My smallest client is 6,500amonth, which is 78,000 a year. That the mid level client is $9,500 a month, which is $110,000 a year. My bigger clients are paying $12,500 a month and there's up from that. You can hire Marshall Goldsmith who is $200,000 or $250,000 a year. So it really depends on what you're looking for. I don't think you have to go out and pay a lot of money. You have to decide what it is you're looking for and find someone who matches that. There's very good coaches from Traction who will give you some very good basic operational skills to put in your business. I actually coach a lot of people that are coached by Traction coaches because what they learn from me is different. You've got Vern Harnish with his Rockefeller habits and his scaling up stuff. Great systems, more for mid level companies. But again, I coach people that are coached by Gazelle's coaches because what they learn from me is completely different.

Yeah, you've spoken to a boatload of EO people, which Vern's one of the founders.

Yeah. Yeah. So I coach EO members, Vistage members, YPO members, Genius Network members. I've got people that are in strategic coach. So like Dave asprey just hired me to coach him. He's in Strategic Coach and his Genius Network. He runs a very solid company. He's got his shit together, he knows what he's doing, but he also knows where I could specifically help him. And we kept talking over the last few months and then he finally saw exactly where I could fit into the gaps for him. So he knows exactly where I can help him. But in some areas, I won't talk to him. I won't talk to him about his work products, I won't talk to him about his service, I won't talk to him about his marketing. But on the operations side, people, execution, operations, culture, hell yeah, I can play a big role.

That's awesome.

The COO alliance is the second part. I think too often we're trying to get coaching for the wrong person. We're really looking to coach the entrepreneur on how to grow the company, but really it's the person's COO or vp, operations or General manager that needs to learn all the systems to grow the company. More often than not, the entrepreneur can't execute on all those ideas in the first place. So it's good to give them some insights. But I think the entrepreneur needs more work around vision and culture and planning. And then the COO needs all the operational depth on how to actually build a company. And you could have the best COO on the planet, but they still, like a high level athlete, want to continue their growth. So that's actually what why I started the COO alliance, modeled right after the Genius Network.

Yeah. And why is the Genius Network like the greatest group in the world? I mean, what's your opinion?

Is it like the greatest group in the world? Because we're both in it, we're both here. And I think that you have to continue your learning. You know, we're both members of Strategic Coach. We're both a member of the Genius Network. We both read lots of books. You know, I think if you're the smartest guy in the room, you're in the wrong room. So that's why I'm a part of the Genius Network is I'm inspired every day. I learn every day. Day. I network every day. And I also know that I don't have to be the one who has all the answers to the problems. What you've put together is this network of individuals who can virtually solve any problem I'll ever encounter or help me capitalize on any opportunity in front of me.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. The thing is, both of us are always looking to improve in all kinds of areas of our life. Not because we are seminar junkies. It's because, because we know the value of direction and having your attention, which is the most important thing to protect as an entrepreneur. And what gets your energy, what gets your attention and anything that's going to help direct it to produce a multiplier result effect is fantastic. How do you help people to stop working when working is no longer working? You know, it's a line I heard from Kathy Colby. She's like, the time to quit working is when working is no longer working. And you know, one of the things that's the best thing about being your own boss is you're your own boss. One of the worst things about being your own boss is you're your own boss. And so it's great to have a sounding board, a smart person that can call you on your ship and say, hey, pay attention.

I just called the CEO recently that I coached out on this and I called somebody out on it at time, the same COO alliance as well, we have to stop lying to ourselves that we're just going to work tonight to try to catch up. Too many people are working too many nights and too many weekends trying to catch up and they'll never catch up. You know, Dan Sullivan talks about getting caught in the gap and that you're only going to be happy when you get to the horizon. Well, you're never going to get to the horizon. You can't sneak up on it, right? It's going to keep moving. You're never going to get your to do list done. If you wrote down or any of your listeners that wrote down every single thing on their to do list today and they worked like crazy to get everything on that list done, by the time they got it done, they'd have a new list. So you're never going to get caught up. You're only going to do more work faster and you're going to burn out. The only reason why I think a lot of people work so hard is they've forgotten about all the other passions in life they should have or could have, and they've slid into this addiction of just work. And that's where they get their only satisfaction, because they're lonely in every other aspect of their life. So I would tell everybody to contain your work into a maximum of an eight hour day, or hell, contain it into a five hour day and delegate everything except genius and get some fucking hobbies and go have fun again. None of us are getting out of this alive. We are all going to die at the end of this, so we may as well have fun along the way.

That's great, great advice. Love it. So what's your website? What's the best place to find you?

CameronHerold.com It's H E R O L D. So CameronHerold.com Wonderful.

Well, it's always a pleasure to talk with you and I'm really withholding, like being serious right now. I'm just going to be serious. But really, really great advice. What I recommend go get a copy immediately of Cameron Herald's book Meetings Suck. Also, pick up his book Double Double and read Vivid Vision. You'll hear more. I will continue to do it. Me and Cameron are probably going to sit down at some point in time and knock out some videos related to Vivid Vision. I will also on the geniusx.com platform, which is coming soon, you will see videos of Cameron that's in the making right now. At the time that I'm actually recording this episode and from this point forward, I hope that you have a hell of a lot more effective meetings and you are more productive and you have leveraged yourself simply by the advice that you've gotten listening to this. And until next time, we'll talk to you on the next episode of our podcast. So thank you, Cameron. Thanks Joe.

I appreciate it.