MBA1132 How Often Do You Need to Meet with Your Team? + Free Ride Friday!

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Hey, today is Free Ride Friday so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear one this week's Free Ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. This month we're giving away ezcourse, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. You can check it out at EasyCourse Co is worth $500 but somebody's gonna win it for free today and every Friday. All you gotta do is leave us an itunes rating and review and we do a weekly random draw with all the reviews. Just listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that simple. It's how we say thank you for leaving us an itunes rating and review. Let's jump into today's episode. Hey O. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. The place that knows that business is tough. So you get tougher with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn how often do you need to meet with your team. It doesn't matter if you're a team of 2, 3, 4 or 40, you need to decide how often do you actually meet with your team? Whether it's virtually on a video call or in an office, there's no simple answer. And that's why we get into it today. Do you meet daily? For how long? Or maybe daily's too much? What about for each department? What about for your whole team, all your staff? Not everything can be covered in an email or a Slack message. Some things just need to be delivered face to face, even if it's virtually over the computer and you're supposed to be a team need to get to know each other. And physical meetings or virtual ones can help do that. But we don't want to overwhelm our team with too many meetings, right? So as you can see, there's a lot to talk about and a lot to evaluate in today's episode. I want to give you a formula, I want to give you a plan of action to, to know how often you should meet with your team. There's no one right answer, like I mentioned before, but I'm gonna show you how to figure out your answer. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I wanna start with some simple facts. Every time you meet with somebody on your team, whether you're having a department meeting or an all hands meeting, everybody on your team meeting, every minute that you are spent in a meeting, it's a minute away from their actual work, what they were hired to do. Now I'm not saying this to say that meetings are a waste of time. I don't believe that. I believe that some meetings can be, but not all meetings are a waste of time. But we have to come to terms with reality and we have to understand that when we have them in a meeting, when we have our team in a meeting, they're not actually doing the work you've hired them to do, whether it's customer service or they're a developer, or they're a marketer or they're a salesperson. And I want to start with that because you want to keep that in mind when it comes to the frequency of your meetings. You want to be as efficient as possible. You want to strike the perfect balance for your team. The other thing I want to mention is it's just not that simple. Some people on your team are going to require more meetings than others. Some people are just go getters. They're self sufficient and they actually don't need to be checked up on so much. Or maybe they don't need the feedback. They can actually just go ahead and get things done and they're perfectly fine communicating via text, via Slack or Basecamp or whatever project management tool you're using. But even with those low maintenance type of people, a meeting is helpful from time to time. And I'll explain why in a moment. But I do want to say, don't use a blanket solution for everybody. You might have a department meeting once a week, but maybe somebody in that department, you'll need to meet with them, you know, more than once a week, maybe twice or three times a week, just even if it's a five minute meeting. And when I say you may need to meet with them more than once a week, it may not be you, it could be their manager. So don't always feel like you're responsible for running these meetings. You, you should always try to find people on your team that can take that responsibility. Now, if you're a small team and you're not there yet, totally fine. But understand that some people on our team are going to need more contact than others. Now, after mentioning those two points, I want to mention that there are two sides of this argument. There are two sides of the spectrum. There are some people that believe you need to meet every single day with your team. This is very popular in the tech world. They're called daily standups and they're short, they're about 10 minutes, but they meet every day at the start of the day. Now there are other teams and other companies that don't believe this. They think meetings are really unnecessary and that everything can be done on texts, whether it's Slack or whether it's in their own project management tool. I actually met a company recently that's highly successful in the tech world that never meets with their team, even via voice or via a video chat. Everything's done in text and they never meet. So why am I telling you these two sides of the story? Well, it's to say that there is no right or wrong answer. Both extremes actually work in some cases. And you might find yourself somewhere along that spectrum, and that's your job as a leader of the company, as a CEO of the company, to find your place on that spectrum for your team. Now, mind you, it could change over the years. When you're starting off small, you might have more frequent meetings, and as you're growing, maybe you just can't do that. It's just harder to meet that frequently, or maybe just the culture changes in your company. So what I want to do today is kind of give you some guidelines so you can find your place on the spectrum. And this Advice I'm giving you today is purely advice take with a grain of salt. And it's just based on my own experience and what I think works. So let's just start with a minimum. I believe that you should meet with everybody on your team at least once a month. You should actually speak to them, even if it's just a informal talk. If it's just like, hey, what's going on? How are you doing? How was your weekend? How's it going in your department? Whatever it is? With our team at Webinar Ninja, we actually have an all hands. Everybody that works in every department meets on a video call. We run a remote team, so we have people from around the world and we all meet at the same time once a month. This is a semi informal kind of meeting where we just talk about, you know, some updates, some highlights, maybe some announcements that we want to announce that affect the whole team. Most of the time we just share stories and just get to know each other a little bit. Maybe some, you know, water cooler time. These are moments that are shared often in a physical office that don't get to be shared when you're working virtually, you know, in a remote team. So keep that in mind. If your team is physical, you're probably going to talk and get to know each other and not have to meet as often for that camaraderie reason. So I like to start with the minimum of just at least meeting once a month to touch base with everybody. But for us, we want to make sure that each department is on point, that everybody knows what they're supposed to be doing for the week. So every department meets once a week. So even the customer service department will meet once a week with the customer service manager. This allows people to stay focused, stay on track, and know what the goals are for the department. It also gives everybody in that department an opportunity to ask questions, give feedback, and as well as get some praise. But how do you know if once a week is often enough or too often? Well, I always say that you should never call a meeting without an agenda. You should always have an agenda, even if the agenda is three bullet items. If you can't sum up an agenda and share it with the people that are going to be at that meeting before the meeting, then there's probably no need to call that meeting. I mean, this is excluding, you know, that all hands kind of camaraderie meeting. But I'm talking about, you know, to get things done, to get people on task, that kind of department meeting. So I make sure before every department meeting with our developers that there is an agenda that I actually. We talk about things, and usually they're very short, usually about 15 minutes, sometimes a little longer. If we need to hash out or solve a problem. I like to take this opportunity also to kind of discuss some potential things we want to work on to get some minds involved. It's good to get more than one mind involved and work on a problem or work on a solution. But I'll cap it at 30 minutes so people can, you know, get focused back to work. I'm very cautious of having long meetings. Why? Because people can't stay focused that long. And often there's discussions in the department, even within the department, that don't apply to every single person on the department. So people can sort of zone out or not be interested. So make sure it's focused. And if you're spending too much time on something that doesn't apply to everybody, then say, hey, let's continue this conversation offline or in another call later after this call. If you're finding yourself finding it hard to write an agenda for a weekly meeting, then it's probably not needed every week. You may want to try every two weeks. You might be such good communicators via text with Slack and your, you know, project management tool basecamp, that you gotta sort everything out before the meeting or during the week. And that's totally fine. You're working asynchronously and you're really putting in the work before the meeting. You're solving all problems, having discussions, you know, one on one or within a department. Now you're finding yourself going overtime where your meetings are going like an hour long. That means you have too much on your plate. There's too much to be discussed. Maybe you need to have more than one meeting a week. Maybe once at the start of the week, one at the end of the week or in the middle of the week. You might find that daily standup, that meeting every day for 10 minutes is the perfect fit for you. But you have to experiment. You have to kind of work your way there. And you might have to adjust. Like I said, you might find that once a week is fine. But then you're like, oh, man, I'm, you know, going over time every week. Let's add in another meeting. So that way we don't go over time. And it's not like information overload every single week.

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Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide, based on the February 2025 Nielsen report. All right, I want to summarize a little bit here to make sure you know exactly how to move forward. Number one, understand that the frequency and how long your meetings are are going to adjust from time to time. You have to experiment, but keep in mind that you're going to keep people away from their core work. If you're spending an hour plus on a meeting, try to keep it short. People really can't pay attention longer than 20 to 30 minutes. Start with your monthly meeting with everybody. That's a camaraderie meeting. And then go with weekly meetings with departments. Having smaller groups is much better than a larger group because the smaller the group, the more efficient the actual conversation will be. Less cooks in the kitchen, less conversation, or less people trying to get a word in. It's a lot faster to make a decision when there's three or four people. Opposed to having a conversation with 10 people. If each person voices their opinion for just two minutes, that's 20 minutes right there. You get the point. Start with weekly. Have an agenda. If you're going over time, add another meeting and adjust accordingly. If you want to go daily, go ahead. But take note if there's actually something to talk about every day. And I also want to highlight that if you are doing daily, standups and they're only 10 minutes. And it's a good convenient time for everybody on the team. You may want to start there because it can't hurt. But if they're long meetings, it's a different story. 10 minutes is nothing and it allows you to touch base with your team, whether it's remotely or physically, every day. Well, there you have it, guys. Thank you so much for listening. Today's lesson is over, but the episode's not. Because it's Free Ride Friday. I got to give away a free lifetime membership to ezcourse. Let's see who won this week's free ride. And the winner is. Ertl G. All the way from Belgium. Ertl says before I hustle, I listen to the $100 NBA show. Five stars. My name is Ertl and I'm all the way from Belgium. I'm a new listener follower of the $100 NBA and love it. No BS. It's to the point. In a short time, I've learned many things from the show. I'm lucky to have found the show and I keep listening, of course. Omar, you sound like you've worked as a radio host for many years. The Hunter Ombie show is my daily ritual. Thanks, Omar for putting out valuable content. Cheers. Thank you Ertl for that review. I haven't been a radio host. I picked this up, but after over a thousand plus episodes, I guess I got a bit better. And I do have to say this is a team effort. I don't do this alone. Nicole, our producer. Carl, our editor. Connor, our content creator. Together we deliver this for you. But most importantly, congrats. You are our Free Ride Friday winner. Your mission is to email me at omar100mba.net so you can get hooked up with that free ride. So I can send you access if you want to win a free ride. Just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. And once you leave us a review, you enter the draw for every week. Thank you so much for listening to the Hunter lmba show. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Remember when I said that you don't necessarily have to run the meetings, but you do need to make sure the meetings actually occur, meaning that at least organize them, put them on the calendars of your employees so they understand that if somebody else is going to chair the meeting, whether it's the department manager or somebody else, totally fine. In fact, you can attend the meeting but not chair it. But the system needs to be put in place and that's what you're responsible for. Thank you so much for listening. I hope this helped and hope to see you in Monday's episode. We have a great guest teacher lesson. Dan Schwabel will be teaching you how to create strong relationships with your team. Can't wait for that. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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