Effective Meeting Mastery

[00:00:34:03 - 00:00:44:03]

Hello, Jeremy. How are you? Hello, Terri. I'm fine. You know, I like to say I'm great, but it's just a personal opinion. Nobody else shares it. Yes, I know the line.

[00:00:46:03 - 00:00:56:14]

Today, we're going to talk about something that, well, I have a question for you. What is the thing in business that is universally despised?

[00:00:57:20 - 00:01:15:02]

The answer is meetings. People hate meetings. They do. They hate meetings for very good reasons, in our opinion. They don't work very well. They're a huge time sink, and they don't move the ball forward the vast majority of the time.

[00:01:16:08 - 00:01:23:16]

So, do you want to kick off with one of the suggestions we have for actually making meetings productive?

[00:01:24:23 - 00:01:25:17]

I would like to.

[00:01:27:03 - 00:01:29:05]

Then please do.

[00:01:30:22 - 00:01:44:00]

So, almost every meeting we've gone to, there's some form of agenda, and people feel like an agenda kind of organizes the meeting so it'll be effective, and it doesn't. Agendas.

[00:01:45:01 - 00:02:04:02]

I think it's a stretch to say that every meeting has an agenda. Every meeting has a topic. I think a whole lot of them don't even have an agenda, let alone what you're going to recommend. That's right. They think the topic is the agenda. We're going to have marketing give us an update. That's the agenda.

[00:02:06:08 - 00:02:58:10]

But even agendas that have, marketing is going to give us an update, and finance is going to talk about where we are in earnings, and human resources is going to tell us about the new policy. Even those agendas are a complete disservice to collecting a group of people and spending a huge amount of time together in a meeting. What they should be replaced by are game plans, because if you think of an agenda, like if you think of a party, a wedding, well, the agenda is the music is going to play, the person's going to, people are going to come in, they're going to say their vows, but to make a successful wedding, there's been a huge amount of pre-work, and there's usually a lot of after work that together makes a fantastic party. It's the same thing with making progress in a business setting,

[00:02:59:11 - 00:03:14:12]

be it decision making, be it learning about what's going on. There needs to be very specific pre-work, very specific organization of what happens during the meeting, and then very specific follow-up to make that meeting worthwhile.

[00:03:15:15 - 00:03:22:01]

Yeah, so much so that we almost named Harvest Earnings Playbook,

[00:03:23:04 - 00:04:10:16]

because we understand the importance of this, not just for meetings, but for other things. Okay, so I want to talk about one of the other things, which is just absolutely making us a little bit insane, and it's gotten so much worse because of COVID, and that is meeting tourists, people who attend meetings who have no business there, they don't speak, they don't contribute in any way. It's just, oh, this might be good for them to know, and maybe there's two things in an hour-long meeting that they could benefit from knowing, but they spend an hour and probably more because meetings often run over, sitting there listening. Now, in the old days, it was at least, well, there's only six seats in the conference room,

[00:04:11:18 - 00:04:23:03]

but now on Zoom or Teams or whatever you use, unlimited, basically, and we have been in meetings with 30 people and three people talk,

[00:04:24:08 - 00:06:16:03]

and everybody else and a whole lot of people aren't even on camera, so what are they doing? Are they even really listening? So, ban the meeting tourists, make it the smallest group of people that really need to be in this meeting. Yeah, and part of the hard part of doing that, I think, is people have this fear of missing out, and so it's like you don't want to tell your subordinate they can't come to the meeting because you sort of feel bad because they'd kind of like to come to the meeting, but then that same support will say, oh my God, I waste my whole week in meetings. Yeah, but there definitely is FOMO, but to be completely truthful, some people do, I think, enjoy going to meetings because it lets them then avoid whatever else is on their to-do list that they really are trying to avoid. So meetings are good at that. That's a good deal. So the next thing is, why is it that every meeting is either 30 minutes or 60 minutes? Now, I'd like to say it's Bill Gates' fault because Outlook comes in these, well, 15-minute increments, but everyone generally does 30 or 60 minutes. I'm guessing if we were to look in the history of the daily planner, somewhere back in 1842, it was already being divided into these neat segments. And the weird thing is people sort of feel the need to fill up all that time. Now, we travel all the time, planes, trains, and automobiles. You don't, like, well, I was gonna say, you don't land at 421, and then they keep you on the tarmac till five because it's on the hour. Of course, at O'Hare, they keep you on the tarmac just because it's fun to mess with your mind. Especially if you land at that far away runway.

[00:06:17:07 - 00:07:55:11]

Yeah. Yeah. But we like to say, why does it take 60 minutes to have a 22-minute meeting? So certainly when we schedule these series of meetings that we need for our projects, we'll do 20-minute meetings, 30-minute meetings, 40-minute meetings, 10-minute meetings. It's the least amount of time, and then force people to use that time effectively. Don't just fill in 60 minutes because Bill Gates made it so. Yeah. Somebody was very proudly announcing on LinkedIn recently that some meeting actually ended on time, and they commented on it that, but maybe it should have ended early, and a whole lot of people liked that comment. So this is universal. It's like the airlines that are now extending the arrival time so that they can claim they're on time. Oh yeah, not now. I remember flying back from Portland, Maine when we were doing project, and this was in 2002, and so much extra time built into the schedule, and we would land at O'Hare, and the pilot would come on and very proudly announce, we've arrived early, and then 30 seconds later, but the bad news is there's no gate for us. And I remember, I mean, this happened week after week after week, and I was sitting next to somebody, and they came on with the, we've landed early, we've arrived early, yay, and I said, in 10 seconds, it's gonna be there's no gate. And the guy was like, whoa, when it happened, because it did happen, in fact.

[00:07:56:18 - 00:08:28:01]

Okay, so one of our next suggestions is, we call it watch the clock, but we mean this quite literally, have a countdown clock. Now, we do this not in every meeting, but in important meetings that we hold with clients. So if a team has 30 minutes to present their ideas, they walk in, the countdown clock starts ticking down from 30 minutes to zero. So there's no blathering, there's no,

[00:08:29:04 - 00:09:01:20]

oh, let's get off track for a while, because everybody in the room knows they've got this stuff to cover, they also know what they're gonna cover, they've highlighted some ideas they're gonna talk about, and they've got that time to do it, and once that time is up, it's over, because we've told the exec team that if everybody goes over by five, 10 minutes, you're here until midnight, and nobody wants that. So we like to say, think about a basketball game. Can you imagine it ending on time if they didn't have the countdown clock?

[00:09:03:00 - 00:09:08:05]

Yeah. No. I'll just hold that ball for 15, 20 minutes,

[00:09:09:14 - 00:09:23:15]

show off my dribbling technique, no need to actually shoot the thing. No, it's not important. Yes, this is particularly, we use this particularly when we have the executive team, the CEO and the direct reports, the CEO,

[00:09:24:19 - 00:09:44:07]

and these folks are used to being able to ask whatever questions they want, to pontificate, to use it as a platform for other things, and no one really wants to restrain them, and as much as they enjoy that personal freedom in that setting, they usually roll their eyes when one of their peers is doing exactly the same thing,

[00:09:45:13 - 00:09:55:13]

and this gives a way for everyone to say, yep, we will sit, we will listen, and we will only talk when there's real value to add.

[00:09:57:11 - 00:10:29:13]

It does kind of shock people though initially as they see the clock ticking down. It does, but then everybody loves it. They do. I've been asked so many times for the countdown timer that we use, and it's just some basic, there's a million free apps out there, not important, but it does also give a little ding, I mean, you can make it, of course, it's customizable, you can have whatever sound you want when time is up, but that's important as well. It's gotta be this audio reminder that, oops, okay.

[00:10:30:18 - 00:10:51:09]

And then some of them will start counting up, so you've now taken three minutes of the next team's time. Yeah, yeah, and I love it when they'll say to us, okay, has the clock started? Yes, we're like, well, look at it. Is the break over, has the clock started, am I?

[00:10:52:11 - 00:11:23:16]

We also count down breaks, because, you know, I like to say sometimes, and we build them into schedules, because the mind can absorb only what the-- What the bottom can endure. Exactly, but so we will count down the breaks, because otherwise, as I like to say, there's no such thing as a five minute break, so I will not schedule a five minute break. It breaks for at least 10 minutes, but you still have to have incentive, because otherwise people walk in 15 minutes, 20 minutes.

[00:11:24:18 - 00:11:28:19]

Yep, and this actually nicely leads into the next thing.

[00:11:30:00 - 00:11:33:04]

Everybody likes to say, well, I have a hard stop at 11.

[00:11:34:10 - 00:11:39:03]

I have a hard stop, gotta go. But what about hard starts?

[00:11:40:05 - 00:11:56:21]

It's amazing how often meetings don't start on time, because either someone who's critical of the meeting isn't there yet, or there's chatting going on, or people, this is, you know, we all tend to book back to back to back to back,

[00:11:58:03 - 00:12:08:19]

and it's bad enough with Teams and Zoom, but in the old days, when you had to get from, you know, the 12th floor to the third floor, and use the restroom on the way, and there was zero time,

[00:12:10:08 - 00:12:53:20]

gee, so it's very important that there be hard starts, and one thing about using these countdown clocks to say when you're done, the next one starts, and there are a number of ways to nudge people to have hard starts, and there's also things you can do to prevent yourself from being the person who's preventing the hard start. Like, I used to always ask my assistant to book 10 minutes between meetings, so I wouldn't be in this jam. Yeah, that's become much more popular now. I think we see that now, not regularly, but often.

[00:12:55:09 - 00:12:57:05]

And who popularized that?

[00:12:59:11 - 00:13:30:03]

It's a profession, I'm looking for a profession. Professions who populate this for 500-- Oh, doctors? Yeah, psychiatrists, the 50-minute hour. Yeah, well, and because they need to take notes. You know, you're not taking notes entirely, maybe you're jotting a few things down. As you know, my sister is a psychologist, but you know, you need time, and she worked for the Veterans Administration for a while, and they're not, I know this'll be shocking, they're not good at this scheduling thing.

[00:13:31:17 - 00:13:45:15]

So, you know, pack in all these people, and then don't have the time to, you know, not only jot down and take notes so you remember what was said for the next session, but have any moment to think about

[00:13:46:17 - 00:14:00:21]

what the therapy plan might be. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. Or, you know, catch up to see if there's been an important email. Well, no, I'll just do it in the meeting, because I don't have a couple minutes between meetings. Yeah.

[00:14:02:00 - 00:14:26:23]

And it's very disrespectful, though, because if you're the person preventing the heart start, it doesn't feel that way to you, but if you're the person sitting around waiting for the meeting, it can often feel that way. And of course, I like to use a little humor, but it's not very effective, when particularly if the most senior person walks in late, I like to say, and in conclusion. Yes, you do.

[00:14:29:01 - 00:14:36:01]

(Both Laughing) No, no, no, no, no, no. When the most senior person comes in, you like to say, and another great thing about Bob. Oh, that's true, yes.

[00:14:37:14 - 00:15:10:16]

(Both Laughing) That always gives a good laugh. Yeah, yes, yes, yes. It's one more junior people, in conclusion. Yeah. Just to make the point that they may have missed something. Yeah, and I'm gonna digress just a second, but I'm reminded of, because you talked about the person being late, you will remember that ages ago, we brought Herb Cohen to a retreat to talk, he talks about negotiation, but I think he's probably long retired, but if you ever get a chance to hear him, he's fantastic. Such good information, and so funny.

[00:15:11:16 - 00:15:33:23]

But he talks about what he does, and I have imparted this to so many people. If you are late, if you are late by a minute, two minutes, the natural tendency is to go, well, traffic was terrible, and the elevator wouldn't come, and you didn't tell me that the room was over here, and so you sort of excuse away while you're late.

[00:15:35:04 - 00:15:42:00]

His advice is to go the absolute opposite direction and say, I'm so sorry that I'm late, that was so disrespectful,

[00:15:43:17 - 00:16:23:07]

it was horrible, I should have planned better, it won't happen again, and then people's response is, oh, that's okay, we understand, but if it's blame, then you're like, eh. (Groans) Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was a good, he was good. He was really good. He of the care, but not too much. Oh yeah, I mean, there's multiple things that lasted, I mean, this was a very long time ago, I heard him talk twice, but it was a very long time ago, and yeah, things really stuck, and one of the things, again, very much digressing from meetings, but it was a meeting where I learned this, so that's a connection.

[00:16:24:18 - 00:16:31:02]

That you should care, but not that much, which is why he says you don't negotiate,

[00:16:32:07 - 00:16:52:13]

it's much easier to negotiate for other people than for yourself, because you're negotiating to buy your house, and you care too much, and so you're too close to it to be rational sometimes. For people not familiar with him, he was a world-class negotiator, negotiated, many conflicts around the globe.

[00:16:54:07 - 00:17:32:20]

Okay. Okay, so the next thing about meetings, and this is about the content, and we have talked about this before, but the obligation to dissent. There are so many times we sit in meetings and somebody throws out a decision or a recommendation, and everybody just sits there quietly, maybe one person says, okay, yeah, let's do that, and then you walk out of the room, and everybody says, oh my God, can you believe we're gonna do that? We tried that last year, it didn't work, he's got all his facts wrong,

[00:17:34:01 - 00:17:54:13]

and it's like, well, what happened in the meeting? You didn't speak up. Now, you don't have to speak up in that way, but how do you know that's true? I mean, you have an obligation to question things. Just sitting there and nodding your head, either because you don't want to embarrass a peer or you don't want to challenge your boss,

[00:17:55:17 - 00:17:59:20]

you're not doing your job, and you almost become a meeting tourist

[00:18:01:11 - 00:18:05:22]

by not questioning things that are discussed in the meeting.

[00:18:07:02 - 00:18:47:20]

And the obligation isn't created by you, it's created by those in power, it's created by the culture, because it's very hard to get people to dissent, unless you build a culture in which people are actually obligated to. And we've heard of all sorts of great examples that may seem obvious, but when surgery is being done, the most junior person has the obligation to say, the machine's unplugged or something. That's the wrong arm you're operating at. Yeah, well, that's right, which has happened.

[00:18:49:02 - 00:18:51:02]

Or on aircraft carriers,

[00:18:53:07 - 00:19:06:18]

when lives are at stake. So there are cultures where this happens, but the general business culture, it doesn't. And people need to be aware that they need to create the obligation for others to dissent.

[00:19:09:12 - 00:19:11:15]

So the next one is,

[00:19:12:18 - 00:19:14:11]

we like to call PowerPoint kills.

[00:19:15:12 - 00:19:16:21]

Once again, Bill Gates.

[00:19:17:22 - 00:19:19:14]

I don't know, there's a pattern here.

[00:19:21:11 - 00:20:32:20]

He's giving all his money away though. Although in 20 years, I'm not sure that I totally am into this, but anyway. I think it's Steve Jobs wife who got a huge amount, gave away a huge amount, and ended up having a huge amount, than she started with, because the stock market kept going up. Anyway. Well, yes, and I mean, is it better to then have that ongoing, I don't know, so you can continue to help, but yes, Emerson collective, I believe, is her organization. Steve Jobs, white, pray continue. So PowerPoint kills. PowerPoint is a good example of the way in which meetings, this goes back to the game plan, waste enormous amounts of time, before the meeting even ever happens, in the creation of PowerPoints. Then they actually obscure what's important during the meeting, and usually lead to extra useless work after the meeting, when the PowerPoint has to be rewritten or edited or changed for some purpose.

[00:20:34:01 - 00:20:35:19]

And in our book, "Low Hanging Fruit",

[00:20:37:00 - 00:20:40:23]

we actually use a PowerPoint page that the New York Times published,

[00:20:42:05 - 00:20:56:06]

about the Iraqi war, in Iraq in the 90s. It was super, super complicated, this PowerPoint. And General McChrystal, when he was shown this PowerPoint, said at one point,

[00:20:57:08 - 00:21:18:11]

"The war will be over, before we ever understand what this chart means." And we, in our projects, where thousands of decisions get made and tens or hundreds of millions of dollars get added to the bottom line, we actually don't permit PowerPoint at any point after the kickoff.

[00:21:19:14 - 00:21:21:22]

Yeah, and we do that, because when,

[00:21:23:04 - 00:21:27:16]

not just because there's thousands of ideas getting reviewed, but the poor,

[00:21:29:00 - 00:21:37:09]

this is gonna be a little ironic, but the poor executive teams, (Laughs) who are being asked to make decisions and choices,

[00:21:38:10 - 00:22:07:16]

they can't do it when things aren't apples to oranges. So we have reports, where everybody, the ideas are presented in the same way. So here are the risks, here's the value, here's the timeline, here's who's gonna do it, as opposed to here's 20 pages of a PowerPoint that is often just shocked filled with words, words, words, words, words, bullets, bullets, bullets, bullets.

[00:22:08:18 - 00:22:25:00]

And trying to make heads or tails of them is often very, very difficult. And the executive team might not fess up to not even understanding it. So PowerPoint can result in,

[00:22:26:14 - 00:22:29:23]

death by PowerPoint, but also very bad decisions.

[00:22:31:12 - 00:22:42:00]

And this use of PowerPoint is so deeply ingrained. In fact, I remember in 19, I forget what it was, 1993 or four,

[00:22:43:05 - 00:23:06:22]

going into a bank and they were incredibly proud of their new system that would project PowerPoints onto a screen. And it was called the PowerPoint Room. And it was like shown off to us that, oh, we've got this PowerPoint Room, but your other clients don't have that. And we said, that's true, but we don't use PowerPoint. Anyway, and of course you will remember,

[00:23:08:03 - 00:23:31:03]

we were at a client and we told all the executives that had been managers that were gonna be working on this that no PowerPoints were allowed. They had to use the following format. We showed them the format. And there was a little revolution because they told us, well, the CEO absolutely insists not just on PowerPoint, but a very specific format. And they were not gonna listen to us.

[00:23:33:03 - 00:23:49:07]

And during the meeting, we ran up, CEO was out of the buildings. We got the CFO and the CFO came down and said, nope, what Terri and Jeremy are saying is what the CEO has agreed to. Okay, it was in fact just me alone in a room full of angry people.

[00:23:50:12 - 00:23:51:14]

Terri and Jeremy.

[00:23:53:07 - 00:23:57:09]

Yeah, it was me getting attacked. There's no way.

[00:23:58:18 - 00:24:21:05]

But I think they would all agree after they saw how the meetings ran with our standardized reports and no PowerPoint, that it was hugely beneficial. Yeah, they loved it. So I think maybe the last point we're gonna make on meetings, at least for this podcast, is that too often it's a missed opportunity

[00:24:22:12 - 00:24:26:02]

to motivate people, to make people feel good

[00:24:27:02 - 00:24:29:05]

about what they're doing.

[00:24:31:01 - 00:24:38:08]

I think we may have talked about this before, but we have a wonderful client whose name is Jim Smith, who was the CEO of Webster Bank.

[00:24:39:16 - 00:24:55:02]

And after meeting, so part of the bank would come in and present their ideas. First of all, he got up at the end of every session and shook everybody's hand and thanked them personally, which I mean, just goes so far.

[00:24:57:10 - 00:25:41:07]

But meetings can really motivate if somebody, oftentimes meetings are just about what disaster has occurred and this problem we're trying to fix. But problems do get fixed. And then there's sort of no recognition of that, no celebration ever. So we always recommend during implementation of our projects that yes, you have an agenda, you have a specific agenda item saying, "Let's celebrate the successes things got done early, things got done less expensively, there was added features." I remember, I think this may have also been Webster Bank.

[00:25:42:09 - 00:26:39:10]

They got a, they stood up a Spanish language website much faster than they expected to. And those things, it feels great to be recognized publicly for those things. I mean, personal notes are also wonderful, but for somebody to say, you know what, oh my gosh, you and your team did an amazing job and I really appreciate it. I mean, it takes no time at all, but meetings and meetings are a great place to do it, but it doesn't happen very often. Yeah, and another example. In a regular meeting, sorry, in a regular meeting, not, okay, we're gonna have some town hall where everybody sort of expects it and yeah, that's fine. But sometimes those feel a little false and contrived, whereas if it's just naturally part of what you do in your weekly meetings with your team, it's powerful.

[00:26:40:18 - 00:27:29:06]

Yep, and another example from the one about the CFO and CEO and the PowerPoint is the first meeting where people were expressing ideas to change and revealing problems that needed being fixed, they're often a little worried that, oh, the CEO is gonna say, well, why does this problem exist? Why haven't you fixed it already? And this CEO, a different one than you were just talking about, was fantastic at saying, not only am I delighted to hear this, but your specific role, your function is so important to the success of our company. Why are you naming names? I'll name names, it was Bill Johnson, the CEO of Heinz. And he would, and people knew he didn't kind of fake compliments.

[00:27:30:15 - 00:27:49:21]

Oh, that is for sure. I think that's a polite way of saying it. And he would go on, and it only took him like 60 seconds, this wasn't a long thing, about how important the function that was presenting to him was to the company and how much he appreciated that they were helping make that function better. And he would do that with every function that came in,

[00:27:51:01 - 00:28:13:05]

in a very intelligent, passionate way. Well, in a very specific way too. He, his specific knowledge about that company was incredible, but yes. And that makes it more powerful. So it's not just a generic, doing a great job guys, thanks. It was, holy cow, in this particular thing, that's fantastic. Yeah. But don't take the clams out of the clam chowder.

[00:28:14:19 - 00:28:24:08]

(Both Laughing) No. All right, should we wrap up? We should wrap up. Because this should not be necessarily a 30 minute meeting. No, it's just about.

[00:28:25:10 - 00:28:27:09]

Though it is in this case, just about.

[00:28:29:21 - 00:28:45:00]

So it might seem like all of these are very disparate, game plans, meeting tourists, how long the meeting should be, watching the clock, hard starts, that these are disconnected, but they're not. Because what connects them all,

[00:28:46:13 - 00:29:25:14]

and this is true of so many things beyond meetings, is the careful social engineering that's necessary to use employees' time and knowledge and creativity and passion better. And it's not just, oh, don't have no meeting Fridays or something, there's no simple thing. It's like building a factory. We want a factory that generates good decisions and good ideas. Well, you don't build a factory without some solid, thoughtful, careful engineering. So all of these elements we've talked about

[00:29:26:14 - 00:29:35:18]

are just some examples of the pieces that go into an overall way of dramatically improving how meetings are done in companies.

[00:29:37:09 - 00:30:16:16]

Sounds good. That. Until we meet again. Until we meet again. Bye bye. Bye bye. (Laughing) (Upbeat Music) Thanks for listening. To learn how Harvest Earnings helps large companies overcome the bad practices, visit our website, harvestearnings.com, or email us at info at harvestearnings.com. Also, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're feeling generous, leave us a rating and a review. It really helps others discover the show. Until next time, I'm Terri Long. And I'm Jeremy Eden. And now it's time for us to get back to work. Bye.