Mike Andes (Mike Minute podcast) gives concise operational advice for landscaping team morning meetings: hold short, twice-weekly stand-up meetings; owners should speak less and enable team-led feedback; keep meetings brief and active (standing) to maintain engagement, especially under pay-for-performance (P4P); use clear agendas (PowerPoint slides or cue cards) to stay focused and efficient.
Questions this episode answers
Twice a week.
December 17, 2019.
Chapters
Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. You're listening to Mike Minute. Another episode from Landscape Business Course. Today we're talking about shut up and stand up for your meetings. Number one is shut up during your team meetings in the mornings. I highly recommend that you have them twice a week, but you want to make sure that you do as little talking as possible. It's easy as the owner to be the one that is trying to motivate people, trying to lead, and that's great, that's fantastic. But it's another form of leadership when you get your team to actually start leading each other, when you get them to start talking about the things they could improve on, when you start getting them to talk about the ways that they could make the lawn better, make sure that their trucks are set up and cleaned out at the end of the day. All of those things are very important and you might want to talk about them yourself. But if you can get your team to actually start telling each other those things, I promise you it's going to be accepted much better when those within the ranks are starting to give the commands instead of just always from the top, you saying things time and time again. So number one is shut up. Number two is stand up. And that is you don't want to be slouching around sitting down. Especially if you're in the landscaping industry. It's early in the morning, a lot of your guys are tired. Most of them just rolled out of bed. Some of them are just trying to get the coffee caffeine kick still early in the morning. The last thing they should be doing, last thing they should be doing is sitting down early in the morning. And when they aren't active, they want to get going, they want to be working hard. And especially if you're on P4P pay for performance, the last thing they wanted to be doing is sitting, doing absolutely no work because they're not getting paid for it. So regardless of whether or not you're in P4P or even hourly, you don't want long, drawn out meetings. You want them to stay standing up, stay engaged, stay alert, and make sure those meetings are efficient. Even if you're paying your guys hourly, you don't want to be paying them to be sitting and having a meeting. You want to be paying them to get the information they need and then go out and produce work. If they're on P4P, they're going to be doing that themselves. They do not want to be sitting around doing nothing. They want to be out working. But even if they're on hourly. You want them to be quick, efficient meetings where you give the agenda for the meeting and you know exactly what bullet points you want to hit. I highly recommend giving agendas during these meetings on a PowerPoint or even on a cue card, so that they know exactly what points are going to be talked about and they know exactly when they're going to be getting out the door. So, number one, stand up. Number two, shut up. And I promise you, your team meetings will be much more successful in the morning at the shop, morning routine.
