Everything you need to know about running an effective meeting...in 22 minutes

What is up guys? Today we are going to talk about the world's most exciting subject in management, which is company cadence. And as you guys know, I did the management series and this is number 5 in the series. So if you haven't watched the other 4, I would suggest you go do that. However, this one actually, if you notice, I was delayed on it. It's only because a couple things happened. One is I had Alex look at my framework for meetings and he was basically like, you need to write 3 books on meetings. And I was like, I'm gonna shoot myself. So then I went back to the drawing board and then ultimately came down to, uh, there is validity versus usefulness, right? And so something can be valid but it might not be useful. And so I realized that I made an entire, um, essentially course on running meetings, and though that it's like absolutely 100% correct, it's not useful because y'all aren't going to go through 5 hours of that, um, and it's a ton to implement. And so I actually broke it down into much smaller, more useful Now, is this 110% correct? No, this is 95% correct, but 100% useful. And so that was my goal with this presentation. And so I'll stop rambling and kind of just get straight to it to explain what we're going to talk about today. What is a company meeting cadence? Okay. And notice I say company meeting cadence. I'm not saying company cadence. Today we're only talking about meetings. We're not talking about Slack. We're not talking about email. We're not talking about any other things, just meetings. Okay. A company meeting cadence. Is how often regularly scheduled meetings happen in your business. That is it. How often are we having regularly scheduled meetings? Okay, so what is the actual cadence of the company? And the goal of this is to hopefully, if your business is in a spot where you feel like there's a lot of chaos and reactivity and it's just like this big ball on the left here, what I envision when I think of like getting the right meetings in place is that you kind of just go into this nice little yarn ball. And that's how it feels every time for me that I rework a cadence in my company, or I implement cadence in one of our portfolio companies, specifically when things are going on and people feel like they're treading water, it's often that they don't have the right cadence or the quality of those meetings is just shit. And so that's what we're going to talk about today so that you can, you know, if that's you as well, you can fix it. So that being said, what I want you to think about is the cadence is basically like the heartbeat of your team, right? Without it, you don't really know how healthy the team is. If you don't have a predictable set schedule for your team, it's hard to really know what's going on. And I already know what you're thinking because I said the word predictable and I've said the word meetings. It's just like two red flags, which is, Leila, these are meetings, I hate meetings, and you're like predictable, you know, it sounds like a commitment, sounds like things I have to have on my calendar, it sounds like I have things I have to go to and I have to commit to. You're fucking right. Yes. And the reason that I'm an advocate of this, what people don't want is an unpredictable CEO. What people don't want is unpredictability in their job. What creates predictability is certainty. Certainty comes from having things like this scheduled. It comes from knowing what the future holds somewhat. Does it mean 110%? No, you can't predict the future in your business, but they can know somewhat what their day-to-day and week-to-week is going to look like. So there can be chaos going on in the business, but you know, I've still got the weekly meeting, I've still got these 3 huddles, we're still going to talk about my performance on our one-on-ones, And that's something they can always rely on. And because of that, it creates a place of security. And when people feel secure and feel safe, they can create in your company. And if people are not able to feel that way, they don't— you do not unleash the creativity of other people, and therefore you're never able to innovate without yourself. So I hope that that makes sense because this is more important than people understand. It's not about the meetings, it's about what the meetings do for the company. Okay? So the question really is, because I'm sure you're thinking this, like, could you function without a cadence? Can you function without that? Absolutely. There are companies that can definitely function without meetings. I have a few friends that they're like, dude, we only use Slack and we only use ClickUp and I hate meetings and I'm not doing it. I totally get it. I also have to know, and they admit that their teams are like, I wish that we had more time to see each other. I feel like we can't communicate as well over Slack. You know, there's some things that get missed. I don't think going to one extreme and doing all Slack or all meetings or all this is ever the right answer. Okay, so this is my personal opinion. This is what I have found works for me because I have tried not doing meetings. In the very beginning of General Launch, we had no fucking meetings. I've also tried having a ton of meetings and doing all the communication meetings. I don't like either of them. Extremism is easy. Moderation is hard. Okay? And so what this is, is that I'm trying to teach you how to add the right amount of meetings into your company. Not so many that it's crippling, but like enough that you're like, these are productive and they are moving the company forward. That is the goal. The goal is not to have meetings for the sake of saying we checked the box, we had a fucking meeting. Nobody cares about that. It's to move the company forward. So I believe that there's a healthy mix of communication in a company that's usually a mix of written and, you know, verbal over Zoom. If you're a remote company, which you might be if you're watching this, maybe not, maybe it's in person. But especially if you're a remote company, I think it is important to have meetings because like working at your desk all day on Slack and never seeing people, it is a little bit isolating. And so can you function without them and be successful? Absolutely. There are some fantastic companies that have. 95% of people cannot. So that being said, we're going to talk to the 95% today. Okay, so if you feel like, one, you're constantly in reactive mode and you're not able to get ahead, you're frustrated because you and your team are not on the same page, like you feel like every week when you're asking them what they're working on, you're like, what the fuck? Like, I just, I feel like you should be working on these 3 things, but instead you're working on these things over here and you're just like, I have no idea where this person's getting this from, right? You're just like, mind boggled. You feel in the dark about the real problems in your own company. So you feel like there's stuff going on and like it continues to like seep out and kind of like you're hearing around the sidelines and gossip and someone tells you a one-off, but you're like, I don't understand, like how are these things happening? And like you, you're trying to pull the string, but you just feel like you can't pull it and you can't see what's happening. You feel confused. You actually don't know what people do with their time. And this is typically much more rampant in virtual companies is that you feel like you have no idea what everybody's doing. And it feels like you're out of control. Like, you're like, I don't know what everyone's doing. Why am I paying you? What are you doing with your time? And lastly, you probably feel anxious that things aren't moving fast enough. How ironic. You think, oh, meetings, not having them will move faster. But in reality, most of the time meetings move things faster if done correctly. So if you feel like this, this presentation is for you. And I have been here before, guys, because when we first started Gym Launch, for the first 8 months, I think we had like one meeting every 2 weeks. And we got up to about 10 people. And I remember thinking to myself, like, I don't want meetings. I don't want to do it. I hate having shit on my calendar. Like, especially because, you know, you get into business and a lot of the times you do it because you want freedom. And so it's like, fuck, my calendar's filling up. Like, I don't want— I don't want to add more to it voluntarily, you know? Like, if you need something, let me know. That's kind of how I went. And I'll never forget the first meeting that I ran when I scheduled it and I told our team. And at that time, our operations manager, um, who was more like a project manager, EA, And she messaged me and was like, I am so freaking happy that we're having meetings. And I was like, what? And we did the first one and everyone was ecstatic. And at the end everyone was like, I feel so much better. I have so much clarity. I feel like I need to know what I need to work on. And I was like, ah, fuck. It's like, this is good for the company. So like, was it my personal preference? No, I don't want meetings. I didn't want things on my calendar. I didn't want like commitments. I like having flexibility in my day. Is it what's best for the business? Yes, it was. And that's honestly propelled us forward when we started doing that. And so if that kind of sounds like you, I totally relate and I understand. And that's probably why I actually really like teaching about meetings is because I'm like, I don't like most meetings either because most people do them incorrectly and they follow some preset cookie-cutter cadence from some fucking waterfall bullshit cookie something system. And it's like, you need to have 17 meetings every week. And you're like, well, I've got to follow the system, so I need my 17 meetings. And I'm like, yeah, are they necessary for your business? That's like telling somebody who weighs 150 pounds and then telling someone who weighs 200 pounds and then some— somebody who weighs 100 pounds, they need 2,000 calories. It doesn't work that way. You can customize anything to yourself, and you should for your own business. And so that's what I want to give you, is the frameworks to work on that for yourself. And so the question is, how can you know if your meetings are good or if you are just not good at running them? This used to be me. I would sit through our company meetings and Yes, I put them into place and my team would like them and this and that, but I was like, these are so fucking boring. And I just like hated them. I realized that especially on Mondays when we had the most meetings, I disliked those days the most. I started realizing I didn't look forward to Mondays. Over time, I actually dreaded Mondays because of all the meetings we had. And then one day I came to this realization. I was like, I spend so much time in meetings. Like I looked at my calendar and it was like, you know, I don't remember, like 37 hours in meetings or something ridiculous, right? Right? And the company is bigger at this point. I was doing like almost like $4.5 million a month. And I realized, looking at that, I was like, I run meetings all day, every day, every day of the week, right? If the meetings suck in the company that I own, it's because I fucking suck at running them. It's not because meetings suck. It's because I don't know how to run a meeting. And then I realized, I was like, I spend 90% of the time hosting meetings, and I've never read one book on meetings. That's bananas. Like, I heard people say you should have these, these 6 kinds of meetings. I did it, and then that was it, right? But I never spent time trying to learn, like, is there a skill behind hosting a meeting? Is there a skill to understanding what kind of company cadence we need and how we adjust that for our company? I spent no time on that. And so I realized it wasn't my company, it was me. And so I really dove in. These are 4 books that I read, but I read, I think, what, 6 or 7 books on meetings. And then I found the commonalities between all those books, and that's kind of like the principles that I've applied and I'm sharing in this presentation today because I realized, you know, I suck. And so that being said, what I want to share with you guys, if you feel like this is something that is useful in your company and something that you're struggling with, is I want to share the 3 elements of really having a successful company meeting cadence. Okay, so I'm breaking this down to what I have found is the most useful to me. Am I saying that this is 110% correct? No, there are nuances. What is that? What I mean by that is that this is not going to be the 110% correct for every company, but I think this is going to be more useful for 100% of the companies. Okay, so that being said, let's get jiggy with it. The 3 elements really when you're thinking about the meeting cadence, okay, there's pulse, there's purpose, and there's preparation. And yes, I chose those because they all have a P and you can remember it easily. So what I want to start with is pulse. Okay, what is the pulse? The pulse of your cadence determines if the meetings are productive or pointless. Okay, so what is a pulse? It's the, uh, activity times size. So you can think of pulse as how frequently you're having meetings. How frequently you're having meetings is dependent on the amount of activity in the company and the size of the company. Okay, so think about like this: if we are rolling out a new product, if we've hired 3 new people, And if we are doing a quarterly launch of a new something, we have a lot of activity. Size. If we have a lot of humans, if we have 100 humans, if we have 200 humans, if we have 300 humans, naturally there will be more meetings. And this is what I have found is that typically when there's more activity and more size, you have more meetings. Now if there's more activity and it's a smaller company, there will be less than if there were more activity and it's a bigger company. And that's because what happens is there have to be more levels involved in the decision-making process and in the meetings typically. So to make one decision in a small company might take 1 or 2 meetings. In a large company, it might take 7 or 8 meetings. And so that's why I kind of came down to activity times size. So if you're thinking like, uh, and this is why you should be adjusting your cadence with the company. If you are, if you have a cadence that you start out with when your company is new, you might have more in the beginning because there's a ton of activity and new shit that you're doing all the time. And you need like really fast feedback loops. Well, as that activity starts to fade, the size of your company may stay the same, but the activity goes down. You may not need all the meetings you had when there was high activity. Same, say, the other way, which is you might have a neutral amount of activity, but you continue to add more and more people and more levels, and so maybe you have a new level of management in place. You might have to add a meeting because you have to disseminate the information down to somebody who then disseminates the information down. Now, does that mean you're attending all those meetings? No, and we'll talk about that later. But that is typically what happens. So pulse is activity times size, right? So on one side, if you don't have enough meetings, right? If you have a ton of activity and you have a lot of people and not enough meetings, typically what it feels like is chaos. There's disorganization. People are not following through. I'm telling you, this is number one, is there are unfinished projects everywhere. Nobody follows anything through. This is like the number one. Now the number two is that you have a weak culture. People say that they have a strong culture, but then their team spends 20 hours a week on meetings and face-to-face time with other people on the team, and it's shit every time. And if that's the case, then that is your culture. Your culture is typically derived from the interaction with your team. And so if every time you're interacting with your team, it's a shit meeting, then do you think you have a good culture? And then lastly, it's just really low innovation because if people are not clear and they don't feel secure and safe, then it's hard to innovate. And then silos appear. People start to kind of like congregate with the people they're comfortable with. They only talk to those in close proximity. They don't venture out into the other departments or to talk to people that they don't normally see every day. And that's what happens if you don't have enough meetings for the activity and size. Now, on the other side, if you have too many meetings for your activity and size, say you have lower activity and less people, then what that might look like is you have really low productivity. There are long hours spent, but not much move forward. You have a lot of duplicity, meaning like you have one meeting and you feel like you have another meeting and you feel like you're talking about the same thing and you're like, what the hell? Speed is low. Morale is also low because people feel like they're having their time wasted. Okay. This, when people think of meetings, they typically think of this because what most companies do is they adopt the meeting cadence of a company that is a different size and has different factors involved. And then they never adjust it. They never customize it. They never play with it. They just follow a cookie cutter. System. And I'm telling you guys, I've seen this time and time again. You don't need to follow a cookie-cutter system. You can fucking think for yourself. And that's what I want to teach you in this video. And so what's the sweet spot? When you have the right amount of meetings, you have high productivity, you have increased morale, you have fast innovation, peer collaboration, and high accountability. That's what we want. That's the goal of having meetings and having the right pulse. And what you have to remember is this is in constant flux. There's not always a right cadence for a right time. And there's no standard prescription, and anyone who tells you it is full of shit. There are meetings that you can recommend, but there— guys, I've seen people do it so many ways and still get the job done. Like, they managed to not have a quarterly meeting and still be successful. Oh my God, you know what I mean? Like, it's just like anyone who tells you anything else is trying to probably sell you a fucking meeting system. So anyways, sorry, it gets me going. Anyways, so this is what it looks like, right? I think this is from— this is from one of the books. I don't remember which book, but either way, I took a screenshot. So it's basically talking about the example of a cadence in a company, which is Example 1 is there's too much distance, kind of like we talked about, there's all that disorganization, chaos. Example 2 is it's too close, there's all that, look how much they overlap, there's so much duplicity. And then example 3 is they're in sync, right? There's always gonna be a tiny, tiny bit of overlap, but for the most part, they're in sync with each other moving forward in the same direction. That's what we wanna aim for. And what you have to remember is that every time the rider forgets to regulate the cadence, the horse takes control. And so you as the CEO, as the operator, as the leader, in whatever position that you're in of authority are the one that's responsible for regulating that cadence. You cannot— what typically happens is we become blind to the way we do things. Something I have put into practice is every month I look back at the last month and I look at all the meetings that we've had and I decide what I need to change for the following month because it changes that frequently. And there's nothing wrong with change in that aspect. If the company doesn't need this one meeting for the next 4 weeks, I'm going to take it out. It's useless. It's a waste, right? And so you have to remember that you have to take control of this. The second piece when you're considering meetings and how many you should have and what it should look like is the purpose, right? The purpose of a meeting cadence is the reason for why each individual meeting exists. Okay. What is the purpose of each meeting we have on our calendar? Well, there's typically two things, right? If I were to categorize the purpose for any meeting that is held at any company, I come down to two things. It's either strategy or tactics. So tactical is when we're doing the doing. This meeting is about what we're doing. It is small scale. It's talking about how or what, and it's short term, right? So like a lot of meetings that you'll think about, like a huddle, something you're doing on a weekly basis or a daily basis, those are typically the doings, right? We're into the doings, we're into the tactical, we're quickly iterating and giving each other feedback on what we are executing on. Now on the other side, we have strategic. Strategic is typically planning, it's large-scale initiatives, it's talking about the why, and is long-term focused. And they are also more infrequent for the most part because you don't need as much strategy as you do tactics, especially in most businesses. So then the question begs, how often are we talking about the strategy? How often are we talking about this tactic, right? And so when you ask yourself, how often are we talking about this thing? Thing, you get to say, well, we talk about this thing either annually, we talk about it quarterly, we talk about it monthly, we talk about it weekly, we talk about daily, right? So think about this. In a typical company, annually we're going to talk about the vision of the company, the performance of the company, the strategy of the company, and the culture of the company in a big way, in a way that says, should we rethink this? Is this the right strategy? Is this the right culture? Do we still have everything that we need to win this marketplace. Quarterly, we're probably going to say, are we on track to hit our annual goals? And we're going to be reviewing and course adjusting and saying, do we need to do anything different this quarter based on last quarter? Still strategic. Monthly is a little bit of a mix. Monthly, we're probably going to be saying, what did we do last month? What do we need to do differently this month? Maybe does it affect the quarter? And maybe does it affect anything annually? But for the most part, we're just going to see what we need to adjust. And then weekly, we're probably talking about what do we need to do this week to move forward to hit our monthly goals? We're not talking about strategy at all at this point. We're just talking about what's getting in the way of me making this week successful. And then daily, we're probably talking much more frequently, daily, multiple times a day, et cetera, about how we're doing that day, how we're doing hour by hour, how we're doing until lunch. You know, this would be very obvious for like a sales team, for example. Because they have so much activity, they have more frequent feedback loops. Most sales teams meet twice a day. And so the question becomes, how often are we talking about this strategic or tactical thing? And then the last question that you want to ask yourself is, how much time do we need to achieve the purpose of the meeting? Right? So if I'm talking about something every day, daily, that is a very tactical thing, right? Like say it's twice a day, we meeting with the sales team. Do I think I need to do an hour twice a day? Probably not. I probably need to do it 15 minutes, right? Because we're just keeping a pulse of science happening in a short period of time, and it's very tactical. Versus, you know, if I'm doing a quarterly meeting, we might need a full day to really go through and achieve the purpose of the meeting, to find out where every department sits in accordance with their quarterly goals. And annually, we might need more than a couple days to make sure that everyone's voice is heard. We take all the information in and we all make decisions together to determine if our annual goals are still realistic.. And so what I want from asking these questions when we talk about the purpose of meeting is for you to be able to diagnose and prescribe your own meeting cadence. These are the questions that you ask yourself. It's like, there's no reason that a huddle needs to be 30 minutes or 5 minutes. It's what do you need to achieve? What's the purpose of the meeting? And then how long is it gonna take to achieve that purpose? That's all. Like, that's how you make a meeting cadence. And then lastly, we have preparation. Okay? What is preparation? Preparation is the process of making a meeting useful. Okay, preparation is really information plus people over the agenda. So what do I mean by that? The information is what information should the attendees have ahead of time in order to achieve the purpose of the meeting, right? And so if I'm having a meeting to talk about the new product launch, am I going to give zero information on the new product launch prior to the meeting? Probably not. It's probably a big fucking waste of time if I just sit there and tell people something for 20 minutes they could have read in an email in 5. So it's what information I have to transfer to the attendees ahead of time so they have the same information that I have in my head to make the decision. Now you've got information, we're going to add it— people. So we add in people, which is who should attend in order to achieve the purpose of the meeting. And people always lose their minds about this one. They don't know who to— this is like probably where people get stuck a lot and where people make the most mistakes. There's too many people or not enough people in the meeting. And what it is, is you don't have the right people most of the time. What you want is you want anyone that is involved in making a decision. Whose authority is needed to make a decision to achieve the purpose of this meeting? That person or those people should be on the meeting. And then who has information to contribute, to add context in order for us to effectively make that decision? So what that usually looks like is a combination of frontline, who's the closest to the problem, the project, the process. And then the supervisors or leaders or whomever who are the decision makers who get to take that information from the frontline and then decide on what is actually going to occur. And so if you have the right information and you have the right people, then all that you need to filter down through is the agenda. The agenda is just going to highlight what needs to be discussed or shared in order to achieve the purpose of the meeting. And the reason that an agenda is really important is because if you don't have that and you have all the information and you have all the people, What you might have is just really fucking long meeting that never achieves the purpose. But if you say the agenda is that we're going to review X, review Y, come to a decision on 1, 2, and 3, then we know that we need to follow that agenda and we need to make those decisions. If we don't and there's no one guiding the way, then how do we know what we're supposed to be discussing based on this information that's been provided? We don't. We're just like discussing the information and then like probably not making any decisions, maybe arguing, maybe not, maybe just like coming up with ideas. And that would be a different kind of meeting. So that being said, what I want you guys to do based on this information is rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 on company cadence. So 1 would be like you have none of this and what you do have is really shitty, it's not well done. And then 10 would be that it's really fantastic and it's really well done and you feel like you need no improvement. And so this was probably useless and you wasted your time. And so I would rate myself on a 1 to 10 in terms of cadence. And what I'll tell you guys is I'm going to have other videos on meetings specifically, like how to really run a great meeting, what they look like, et cetera, and more examples. But this is the overarching strategy of when I look at a company specifically, like when we have portfolio companies that come in and I'm thinking, what kind of cadence do they need? These are the questions I'm asking myself. I'm not using some spreadsheet with like, these are the 7 kinds of meetings. I'm asking myself first principle questions to come to the conclusion of what needs to happen to make their company move forward. And it's not gonna be more, it's not gonna be less than what's needed. And so that being said, I hope this was useful for you guys. I know this was a highly tactical video and probably on a boring topic, so gosh knows how many people are actually going to watch this one. But let me know in the comments what you think of it and if it was useful for you.