MBA1572 Productive Meeting Hacks + Free Ride Friday

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Alright, let's jump into today's episode. Heyo. Welcome to the $100 RMBA show where business is pleasure 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 episode you will learn my productive meeting hacks. Meetings are part of running a business but no one said they have to be boring or unproductive. How do you get the most out of yourself and your team every time you meet with them? I'm going to give you my top tips to make sure your meetings are tight, productive and efficient every single time. These are actual things I do every single day when I meet with somebody on my team. This is going to save you time, energy and heartache. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. If you don't plan for a productive meeting, you're asking for trouble. You're Asking for a lot of wasted time, frustration, and a team that feels demoralized. They don't feel like they're really using their time effectively. I want to start by saying the reason why you want your meetings to be productive is because meetings are a necessary thing you have to do in your business, but it's not the reason why you hired your team members. You hired them to do their area of expertise, their job, whether they're a writer or they're a marketer, or they are a developer or a manager. They should be doing that, okay? But they need to meet from time to time. So let's make sure that they're rock solid and productive. So today I'm going to share four must dos to have a productive meeting. The first one is you need to plan for the meeting beforehand. Now, when I say plan for the meeting, I'm not only talking about everybody adding to the agenda. And I believe in a collective agenda, meaning that's not one person's job to make an agenda. No, that's a burden nobody should have. Everybody will produce their ideas, what they want to bring to the meeting. The everybody who's involved in the meeting's job is to contribute and to add to the agenda. So wherever you're going to put this agenda in your, you know, your team collaboration software, whether it's Basecamp or Trello or whatever, or even in just the meeting notes on Google, like Google Calendar. But the point here is that everybody's job is to contribute to the agenda. Number two, there should be no ambiguity or any kind of questions about when, where you're meeting. Okay? So this should be a regular meeting. It should be on everybody's calendar. Everybody should have a calendar invite. That should be organized in advance. Okay? If you're doing a video call, the link should be clear on every single time where it's going to be. So no one's scrambling, you're not wasting time, no one's late, there's no excuses. The admin of the meeting is just as important as the meeting itself. So make sure everybody knows what time where they're supposed to show up, all that kind of stuff in advance. And it should be consistent. It should be the same thing every single time you meet, okay? You shouldn't change things left and right all the time. You want the organization of the meeting to lower the stress levels, not increase it. Okay? The next thing. So that's tip one, preparation for the meeting. Make sure that everything's ready before the meeting. So when you show up to the meeting, everything's ready, the agenda's ready. Everybody's there on time. Everybody's ready to go. First thing, I like to start every meeting. I mentioned this in a previous episode. I think it was yesterday's episode. I like to start with wins. Everybody share their wins from last time they met. What are your wins for this week? And you quickly go around. So say, for example, there's four people in this meeting. Everybody takes one minute or 30 seconds to say, this is my win for the week. And this allows people to celebrate wins, feel like a sense of accomplishment, and also start on a positive note. This is really good. It keeps the meeting really fresh and very positive and keeps the momentum going at the start. Tip number three, we're in the meat and potatoes of the meeting. We're discussing all the agenda items. We're making decisions. Somebody has to be responsible for taking minutes. Whether you have an executive assistant that does this for you in every meeting or you take turns amongst yourselves in the meeting, this is totally fine. Where you have a round robin where, like, last time, I took the minutes. Next time it's you. And. And this is important because we want to refer to these notes every single time. So the first thing we do after wins is we look at last week's notes. We look at some of the to dos that were assigned, what we're supposed to focus on. Did we accomplish our goals? All that kind of stuff. We want to have some continuity. We want to make sure that, hey, we said something last week. Did we get it done? Did we accomplish things? If not, why not? How can we accomplish them? So we want to make sure that is going on. So somebody's got to take notes. Somebody's got to take minutes, decide that have a cadence, and make sure those notes are completed. And people are notified shortly after the meeting so people can look at, okay, this is what I got to do. This is what I got to focus on. Let's get going. This is super important. A lot of people skip this step, and it really, really can hinder your progress because you can't really see how much you're progressing if you don't see what happened last week. Okay, so you want to make sure that, hey, we set this out. Did we accomplish it? Do we make sure we did it? So notes are important. It also holds people accountable, Also is a reference for people to look back on during the week so they know what they should be focusing on. They shouldn't be doing other things. This is really the focus for the week. My fourth tip is huge, and it's called score the meeting. I talked about this before, but scoring the meeting at the end of the meeting is a little tactic I learned from my business coach and advisor, Dan Martell. And this is really quick and snappy. It's the last thing we do. In the meeting where everybody scores the meeting, they say they give it a score from 0 to 10, and they explain why they gave that score. If it's a 10, you gotta say why it's a 10. If it's a 9, why not a 10? Why was it a 9? What happened? The reason why we do this is because we need to evaluate how productive our meetings are every single meeting. So we can say, hey, you know, this meeting, I'm giving it 8.5. You know, we started late, or we went over time, so. And we also had a bit of confusion about where we were supposed to go for that file. Whatever. The point is, is that you need to really elaborate where you can improve so that the next meeting is better. Okay? We all have to evaluate this like a self evaluation because this actually throws all the ownership on everybody in the meeting. Rather than one person or the manager or whatever, everybody is responsible for making sure the meeting is productive. So score the meeting is something we do. When we say score the meeting, it basically means the meeting is over. Let's give it a score. Let's evaluate ourselves. And it's great because if it gives people an understanding, it makes them reflect on what they did today, and it gives them a chance to say not only is my job to do my job and the skills I'm hired for, but also to be efficient in what I do. And that includes these meetings.

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My four top hacks for a productive meeting. Number one, get prepared before the meeting agenda, time and place, all that stuff. We want to make sure we show up and don't waste any time. Number two, we start with wins. Everybody goes around and shares their wins for the week. Number three, take minutes, take turns taking minutes, take notes, make sure we hold each other accountable so we can refer to them the next week. So next week we look at last week and what we committed to doing, and it gives us that cadence, it gives us that accountability. And number four, we score the meeting. We make sure that we are always improving our meetings. We're staying productive, we're staying on top of things, and we take ownership of how productive these meetings are. Bonus tip. Sometimes at the start of a meeting, we want to kind of chit chat, build some rapport, have some fun, right? And that's totally cool. We all want to do that. But we have a meeting to run. We want to keep it tight, we want to keep it efficient, right? So just make it clear to everybody, hey, for those who love to chit chat, to catch up, to have a little banter, show up to the meeting a little early. So the first five minutes is banter. So five minutes before the meeting is scheduled to start, and those who love that can jump in and have some fun. And at the top of the meeting time, we just start right in and we start the meeting. But for those, you know, who are maybe not into that or are introverted or whatever, they don't have to go to that all the time. They just show up to the meeting on time and they're good to go. Now, having said that, I have to say this one piece of advice I heard from my father over and over as a young kid is that it's very, very almost impossible to, to be exactly on time. You're either early or you're late, right? So it's very hard for anybody to show up to a meeting exactly at, let's say, for example, 9 o', clock, 9 00, at zero seconds, to be exactly on time, that's very hard, okay? It's easier to be early. And the other option is to be late. So just be early. So this is kind of the culture you want to build by having people show up early to have a bit of fun. And that way no one ever shows up late. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. Today's episode not over though. It's Free Ride Friday. I get to give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away easy course. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is. Grusha. Grusha says awesome content. 5 stars. Kudos. Looking forward to your upcoming shows. Grusha, thank you so much for your review. You are a Free Ride Friday winner. Your mission is to email me over at omar@100mba.net so I can hook you up with the lifetime membership to easy our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday just like today to see if you won. It's that simple. You can win it just like Grisha just did. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on itunes. Before I go, I want to leave you with this as much as possible. You want to allow meetings to be collaborative and a chance for your team to build its culture, to feel proud of itself, to feel like they're making progress, progress and momentum. It's not a chore, shouldn't be a chore, shouldn't be like let's get through this meeting and all these agenda items and da da da. It should be a chance for us to explore ideas, to discuss things to dos can be assigned offline on, you know, without a meeting. Tasks can be done offline. Agenda items should always be discussion items, things that we need to hash out face to face on a video call or in person. Everything else can be relegated to when we're not meeting. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.