Reset Your Expectations for Meetings

24:39When you're talking about recurring meetings that happen frequently, these are the most dangerous things on our calendar, right? Because they just clog up the calendar. And before you know it, there's not any time to, you know, get the real work done, quote unquote, or to have space for new conversations that need to have. And so this is something that I'm always thinking about personally. What if I just didn't attend that meeting anymore? Or what if I came less often? Or what if instead of meeting on a weekly basis, we met every other week? Or instead of every other week, what if we met every once of every month?

25:17You know, and so when you start thinking about that, it really can be effective. And, you know, we were talking earlier about this phenomenon that happens where you kind of defer or postpone thinking to a later date in the context of a meeting. One of the things that happens is that the more meetings we have, the more often we do that. And the more often we do that, the more meetings we have. And so it just becomes this vicious cycle. and when you reduce the frequency of your meetings and all of a sudden you're giving your team time back, what you may find is that they actually, and you too, actually have time to think in your workday instead of constantly needing to make mental notes about things you need to think about later when your calendar opens up, which of course it never will.

26:00And so part of what you can actually do is eliminate meetings by eliminating meetings, if that makes sense, because this is feeding on itself. Right. If you stop the impulse to set a meeting, you're actually possibly saving yourself three or four meetings. Yep, exactly. Speaking of excusing yourself from meetings, I had a client ask me about this this morning on the Business Accelerator weekly phone call. And he mentioned feeling troubled about leaving a meeting that he had set up about excusing himself. And I wonder how you might coach someone who is wondering how they could gracefully exit a meeting?

26:41Well, first of all, I love this question because I think the answer is kind of counterintuitive. And so my answer would be that in a strange way, staying in the meeting might actually be holding your team back. I'm thinking of one of the meetings that I'm involved with regularly. We have a weekly sales pace meeting with a number of different members of our revenue team. So that includes marketing, sales, and then we also have some product folks in there. And this has been an incredibly valuable meeting. It's where we're basically looking at what are our sales month to date and what do we project?

27:19We have predictive models through year in, or not year in, month in. How are things going? How are we pacing with the quarter, with the year, all of that, right? So we're just looking at primarily new sales for all of our products and then answering the question if things are not where we want them to be, what could we do to bridge that gap? Now, at the beginning of that meeting, there was a lot of kind of financial engineering and data engineering that was going on. Our business intelligence team was working on getting the data formatted correctly and really kind of getting it all in the way that would be the most insightful for us.

27:54And so I was necessary in kind of shaping the early part of that meeting, sort of framing up what questions I wanted to have answered, giving people assignments and so forth. However, at the end of the day, I actually want our revenue team and our product teams to be able to collaborate to solve those problems. And then if things are escalated, they can be brought to me. But I don't really need to lead that conversation anymore. We have a very capable team. The groundwork has been established. And actually, I think I'm holding my team back from them being empowered to lead at the level I know that they're capable of by continuing to be in that meeting.

28:32Because, of course, everybody's going to defer to me to be the leader of the meeting if I'm there. Right. And so I think in answer to this client, I would say that sometimes the most honoring, you know, kind of confidence inspiring thing you can do is to tell the team that you know that they've got it and you're going to excuse yourself from the meeting. Now, I wouldn't do that in an all or nothing binary way. I would ask for updates, you know, like probably what I'll do is just have the team record a quick update for me on a weekly basis and then probably on a monthly basis, you know, like we'll just kind of wean me out of that.

29:07But I think you can do that responsibly and I think you can develop your leaders and your other talent within the organization by not being in those meetings and you're actually holding people back by continuing to go in some cases.

29:25So that's how to optimize our time when it comes to meetings. But as you'll notice, we're still going to have some of those meetings. So they ought to be great meetings. They ought to be what we at Full Focus call no-fail meetings. And to get a sense of that, I've invited Aaron Perry, our chief experience officer, to come on the show and talk to us about the five steps for no-fail meetings. More on that after the break.

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30:46I wanted to talk to Erin Perry about running meetings because she knows how to do it. I've seen her run meetings. I've seen the way she thinks about meetings. And given the framework that we're going to discuss, I know there's going to be some big benefit for you as business owners in learning how to conduct a meeting, really the whole methodology behind running a meeting in such a way that you are almost guaranteed to get the results that you need out of those meetings that you do have. Erin, meetings. Meetings. Tell me about one of the worst ones you've ever had. Oh, goodness. I think I've been a part of a lot of really bad meetings over the course of my career.

31:29But I can think of one that just stands out. Yeah, you can, by the way, protect the guilty by changing names, change all the details you need to in order to get this past the censors. Yeah, yeah, that's good. I was a part of a small leadership team at a company, and we would get in and have a weekly leadership team meeting where we would talk about everything in the business. Sure. And a lot of it focused around our goals. Okay. However, at this organization, we were missing a strategic plan. And that really meant ultimately that we're missing a purpose and we were missing the vision and we were missing where we were going.

32:14So what that meeting ended up becoming over time was a long series of conversations around tasks. And I'm an Enneagram 8 and I like to move fast. And conversations about down in the weeds, tasks are not my favorite thing to have. Especially when you don't know what they add up to. Yeah. I mean, they added up to something. I just had no idea if I was winning or losing or helping or not. And the struggle became that the leadership team itself was not united. Yeah. I really, really struggled in that environment because for me, I care about are we working towards the vision and are we making the decisions that we need to make now that are going to impact us three months from now, six months from now?

33:11And I like proactive leading. Yeah. And so not having that vision piece was a huge, huge problem. And it meant that every meeting every week was just a struggle. Yeah. You know, there was no common goal, really, that we were working towards other than what was on the agenda this week. And that meant that we spent a lot of time closing loops for the boss's head. And what was important to this person was not necessarily aligned to the vision of where the company probably needed to go to grow. Right. Right. At Full Focus, we want to help people avoid such awful meetings, dreadful, time-wasting meetings.

34:02Instead, we want meetings to be helpful, useful, productive. So if you're going to have a meeting, it might as well be what we would call a no-fail meeting. And we have five steps to help you get there. And I thought I'd ask you to kind of walk us through those. So the first step for a no-fail meeting is to decide. What do you mean by that? Yeah. So first you want to decide if the meeting is even necessary. And if so, really look at what type of meeting you need and what format that it should be. So I think that question of, is this meeting even necessary is a really good question to ask. And it's one that most leaders, especially when you get into recurring meetings that have kind of always been there and always on the calendar.

34:50It's really hard to let those go. So that's really, really important because what that question forces is for you to take a look at the purpose, is for you to consider the why and what you're trying to accomplish and really see if it matters. Is it worth your time? It may be, you know, that you don't need to be the one in the meeting, that it might be the meeting for somebody else. So you could excuse yourself. But, you know, really, I find that teams sometimes overmeet because there's a lack of process or a lack of clarity around something. And you're, by continuing to meet about it and meet to solve the problem, you're not actually getting down to the root issue and where something's broken.

35:46And it becomes a really inefficient use of your time. So you need to go further upstream before that meeting and just ask, what are we even doing here? Do we need to solve this problem this way? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And a lot of times you find you can solve it in other ways. You know, instead of having a meeting, can you just provide an update via email or Slack or something else? You know, whatever other internal communication or a project management system. Do you need to provide this update? It's a great question to ask. Or could you just make the decision that you need to make? and I think asking all of those questions, I know with my EA, we go through on a quarterly basis and look at our meeting schedule and just go, what could we get rid of?

36:37What no longer is serving the purpose that we need it to serve? So you can undecide in that first step. You can always go back and re-decide. You can make a different call. Yeah. So step two is schedule. A second ago, you mentioned, you know, like maybe you don't need to go into the meeting. Obviously, when you're scheduling, you're talking about also inviting people. So give us a little bit more color on on step two. Yeah. Well, step two really involves scheduling the right people at the right time and making sure that it's the right length and the right location. So I think a good practice to do is to question who are the stakeholders that need to be involved?

37:25Who are the important people that might need to be consulted before I make this decision? And making sure that you've really put thought behind who those people are. Oftentimes when meetings become inefficient, it's because you're having to have a second meeting because you left out two of the most important people that needed to be there the first time. Right. And I think after you do that, just going through and saying, what's the right length is a good question. I think sometimes we spend time in meetings to spend. It's too long of a time that we're spending in meetings and the constraints can actually force the focus in the meeting.

38:10So making sure that you dial that in and try to set up those constraints appropriately, I think, is good. And then just considering the location is so, so important. We're in a post-COVID world, and certainly Zoom is something that's popular and a right thing for a lot of companies. But there's always that benefit of an in-person meeting and, you know, coming together in a room and brainstorming and solving problems, too. And so what is going to drive the results for your meeting, I think, is a really important consideration when you're planning out those meetings. Yeah. When we get to the next step, I think this will become even clearer.

38:53But I love a whiteboard. And I can solve any problem that faces humanity if I have the right people in a room and a whiteboard. Um, so I, well, I really value that point. I think a lot of times we end up not giving enough consideration to how the meeting will be conducted in terms of location. So you have some people hybrid, you have some people in person, they maybe, maybe the meeting room is not set up properly. So even if there is a whiteboard, the people who are hybrid can't see it, the people who are virtual. So that there needs to be enough planning in advance of that in order to help produce the right outcome.

39:31Sure. And to your point, Joel, I think it's such a good one, making sure that you equal the playing field. So we want to be considerate of, hey, if we really need the collaboration and we really need everybody to participate, maybe we put everybody on Zoom, even if half the people are in the office together, you know, so that we can get everybody on that equal playing field or we'll send out an invite beforehand and say, hey, guys, it's really important for you to be here and be in person. We're trying to equal the playing field. So come on into the office and let's all get on the whiteboard together.

40:10And I find that's helpful in just considering what's going to produce the results and how important is the meeting is a part of that consideration. Yeah. Well, that leads us to step three, which is prepare, and we mean specifically an agenda, which does relate directly back to your point just then about the kind of location or who would be there or whatever. This is about the result that you're after. Tell us more about that. Yeah. I think too often people don't have their eyes on what's the result and what's the outcome I'm after. And so you got to consider, Are you trying to make a decision here?

40:48Are you trying to, you know, hopefully you've already gathered your data beforehand and you can actually do that in the meeting. But that agenda can serve as a way to keep you on track, to keep you focused and honest. It also includes things like naming a facilitator. Maybe some, you know, you as an executive are leading a meeting, but you want a facilitator to come in and help keep things moving in the meeting, keep you on track with your time. Usually EAs can fill that space and it allows for there to be real focus and for that parking lot idea of what's not on the agenda doesn't need to be talked about right now.

41:31A lot of squirrels show up in meetings. Oh my goodness. All the chasing that sometimes happens. And honestly, keeping that agenda helps keep you honest in terms of your use of your time. Your time's valuable as a business owner. And sitting in a meeting where people talk about things that are way off topic is not a good use of anybody's time. And so keeping an eye on those results and the outcomes that you're after and using that agenda to keep everybody on focus, It also helps to send out that agenda ahead of time. I love that because it allows people to prepare for the meeting, to come with an idea of what's going to be discussed.

42:19You can outline expectations and responsibilities for things like reporting and things that need to go into the meeting. And it's just a simple but powerful tool to organize your thoughts. And when you're trying to accomplish big goals and big results, keeping that focus for your team on here's the outcome that we're after, I think helps to create alignment. It also potentially helps solve the problem that you talked about at the beginning, which is the vision problem, because this is not just an agenda. This is a results driven agenda. This is something connected back to the overarching plan that you're trying to execute.

42:59And so if you're forcing somebody to think back, like, what is the point of this meeting? It's not just merely instrumental. It is helping drive to a larger goal. And if it's helping drive to a larger goal or, more importantly, a larger vision, then you've helped close that loop. And instead of sitting there in that meeting and just playing whack-a-mole with the problems that happen to be showing up in a business, you're there organizing people's thinking, organizing people's problem-solving capabilities, organizing the brainstorming towards the vision. Mm hmm. Well, and and it keeps you from diverting from that vision, Joel.

43:39I mean, really what what I find is sometimes what's important or feels urgent or feels like it's the fire of the moment is not always connected to the vision. and it helps you stay focused on what are the big things that I really need to care about. And it really guides it in that way. And I think it's powerful. It's simple, but it's powerful if you use it in the correct way. Well, that leads to step four, which is the actual meeting. So step four, meet. And while you're meeting, we're looking here at how do you use that agenda? You talked a few minutes ago about the facilitator, about using a parking lot or something like that.

44:27Talk to us about how you actually use an agenda properly in a meeting. This is like one of those things that might strike some listeners as as riveting as possibly watching paint dry. However, if you do this well, you can make a meeting go from being not that useful to being like maybe the most useful use of your time, investment of your time that day. Yeah. I always start meetings by looking at the agenda as a group and uniting around the purpose. I think that part is really, really important for the alignment. that 30 seconds at the top of the meeting can save you from going off into one of those squirrels and chasing it around the tree, right?

45:12So this is just like identifying the purpose. So the result that you're after in the meeting, you're going to underscore it and make sure everyone's on the same page before you get going. Yeah, absolutely. And then I think it's making sure that you're also building an understanding at the same time of here are our time constraints. So let's say that we've broken apart that agenda and there's three major things that we want to talk about. You want to kind of set aside and create time blocks for that conversation. Again, those constraints can help you force decision making in a faster way. And ultimately, hopefully, you've prepared your team ahead of time.

45:53But you put in those constraints and make sure that everybody knows, hey, here's what we're going to talk about. If you have a short amount of time, we only have 10 minutes to talk about this. So I'm going to need everybody to be really focused. Even that helps to tame people from going off. I think having that facilitator identified and empowering them to be able to take control of the meeting. For us, commonly a facilitator is one of our EAs. And they come into that meeting and they say, hey, okay, you've got five more minutes to discuss this. And then we have to move on to the next topic. So they're constantly checking in, they're constantly keeping the conversation moving.

46:35And then they're also really using that agenda as a place to capture notes, comments, takeaways from the meeting and action items so that when you get into decision-making mode, you can track that decision And you can keep people honest, you know, when they're walking out of a meeting. You want a measure to hold them accountable to. And having something written that everyone can see, that everyone knows, it becomes a powerful tool even after the meeting. There's nothing worse than meeting on something important, arriving at a critical decision, and then nothing happening afterwards. So that leads us directly to step five, which is to follow up.

47:25Following up is probably the most important part. And really, you want to do a couple of things. You want to review those meeting notes. You want to have enough follow through to complete those assigned tasks. And you want to be able to hold other people accountable to what they committed to in a meeting. And so one of the tricks that we use, whether you're on email or Slack, is to send out that agenda after the fact and say, okay, here are the commitments and action steps that we made in this meeting. Here are the due dates that you need to be aware of. and then we're likely going to put it into a project management system so that we can keep track of the progress of those.

48:11In the very least, we're going to address things and follow up on them in our one-on-ones with those delegates so that they know, hey, we're still expecting that and building in the expectation of, I want you to follow up with me and let me know your progress. Maybe let me know where you're hitting barriers and really use kind of that follow the follow up activities as a check in on performance. You know, meetings are one of the most expensive things a company does, because for every meeting you have the salary of one person, two persons, three persons, four persons, five persons, possibly six, seven, eight people around a table.

48:53And instead of those folks out on their own working on whatever projects they have, generating hopefully ultimately revenue for the organization, they are sitting there together. All that money is going into conversations. So the only thing that could be possibly worse than occupying all that company revenue, revenue generating brainpower in one space would be to waste it, to allow a meeting to happen that did not produce not only a results, but be the follow up that that ensured that those results meant something. So true, Joel. You know, I think people aren't always conscious of how time is money.

49:41And really to your business, one of the most important things that you can do is always be questioning, what's the return on my investment for these dollars? Sure. And I think, you know, while it might be fun to sit in a meeting and you might get that like dopamine hit of being with other people and getting to brainstorm and there's value in that, there's also, you know, back to that question of is this necessary? When and where does that become appropriate? And that's a really important question to ask because otherwise you end up meeting about everything and accomplishing nothing. Yeah. And if you have decided that the meeting is necessary, you know, I don't want to come off as against meetings or negative about meetings.

50:28The truth is meetings are where some of the most important work in a business happen. But if you are going to decide that this meeting is necessary, then you have to ensure that you'll get the most out of it. And that really does mean following generally these five steps. You got to make the right decision about whether the meeting is necessary, what type it should be, what format you should have it in. You need to step two, schedule it. That means scheduling the right people at the right time for the right length of time in the right location. Step three, you have to prepare a results-driven agenda, something focused on the outcome.

51:03Step four, you have to meet and then actually engage in this kind of productive conversation that moves the needle forward in your business, where you're avoiding the squirrels and the things that get you distracted that would prevent you from getting to the result that you stated at the beginning. And then finally, five, you got to follow up. You got to put this in a task manager, put it in your full focus planner. Whatever the action items are, whatever the decisions were, they need to go into a place where they can actually be acted on. And if you don't do that, you are risking the squandering of the investment of all that time, all that brainpower, all that human creativity.

51:42I love that you mentioned human creativity. By doing those steps, you actually free up your team members to not worry about the things that might trip up a meeting. And you're going to get better results in their creativity and their thinking.

52:06I want to thank Aaron for coming on the show to walk us through that methodology, those five steps. And I want to come back to what I said at the top of the show, that we ought to give meetings a chance. I think if you put these two conversations together, what you'll see is this, that not every meeting is essential. In fact, a lot of meetings are not. And so if you get out of those meetings, you can save your creative energies for the meetings that are essential. And once you know what those are and you know how to run them, you'll be able to get the results from those meetings that you need.

52:40You'll be able to have the right people around the table, whether it's virtual or not. You'll be able to have the right kinds of conversations. You won't be chasing squirrels. Instead, you'll have exactly the agenda that you need in order to get from point A to B or C or D or wherever you need to end up. And on top of that, you'll be able to follow up in a way that gets results. So no more meetings where you come through with a lot of big plans at the end, but then nothing seems to happen. A few weeks later, you lift your head up and wonder, did we decide anything? Has anything actually happened?

53:14Or worse, you're frustrated that nothing has happened because now you're equipped to follow up in such a way that you can get the results you're after.

53:29And that's it for another episode of the Business Accelerator podcast. Thank you for listening. Here's my final pitch for why you should give meetings a chance. Business Accelerator is kind of a meeting. It's group coaching, also one-on-one coaching. But in those group coaching sessions, I cannot tell you the number of people that we've gathered together that experience wild, incredible transformation in their businesses. And they wouldn't have had it if they weren't open to at least one meeting. And that one meeting can make a huge difference. If you're a business owner and you're interested in learning more about our Business Accelerator coaching program, go to businessaccelerator.com.

54:09We help successful but overwhelmed small business owners just like you scale yourself and your business so you can win at work and succeed at life. It's what we call the double win. And again, if you want to experience that for yourself, go to businessaccelerator.com. That's it. We'll be back next week with another conversation to help accelerate your business.

54:49This episode is brought to you by the Performance Business Coaching at Business Accelerator. book your free 45 minute business growth call at businessaccelerator.com slash coach. Just go do it. You can do it. It's free. And no matter what, there's value for you. Go to businessaccelerator.com slash coach.