653: Team Meetings vs. Project Meetings

Let's be honest. As business owners, we can often be the creator of our own chaos, which means we create chaos for other people. Hey, it's Scott Beebe with the Business On Purpose platform. Make sure to go to mybusinessonpurpose.com/healthy and you can take a Healthy Assessment of the backend health of your business and see if you're one of those that stirs up chaos. You know, one of the biggest reasons of chaos stirring in a business is, lack of communication, which means a lack of clarity. And you go, Well, Scott, we talk all the time. Well, if Ashley, my wife, and I just talked, quote, all the time, that meant we're texting, phone calling, that sort of thing. But we never sat down to have intentional conversation on a walk, a bike ride, the back porch without distraction being our constant companion, then that's not really talking. That might be communicating back and forth, but we're not actually growing. We're not developing. And so we've got to do something different. The reason I'm doing this podcast is I just got asked about the difference between meetings. See, there's a variety of meetings that we have when we talk about the five foundational cornerstones of any business vision, story, mission statement, unique core values, hiring process being the center, we've added this fifth team meetings. Now, usually we get eye rolls when we do it right. God, we hate team meetings. We don't like team meetings. They never do anything. In fact, one author wrote a book, Team Meetings Suck. Or maybe the title is just Meetings That Suck. But nonetheless, they share a lot of sentiment from a lot of people that we've got to be aware of when it goes into meetings.  Here's the truth about meetings. Too often they're just a continuation of the chaos that we've done chaotically throughout the day. So we bring that chaos into the formality of a team meeting rather than allowing that to be a hub of clarity. There's a couple of different meetings I want to share with you. Number one is the good old fashioned team meeting. Now, I'm going to give you a rundown of what that agenda should look like here in just a second. But for most of you, you should also have what's called an operations meeting or a project meeting or a production meeting or in our case, for a business coaching firm. We have a coaches meeting. That's where we spend the majority of time following up on a couple of different elements around our weekly scorecards that we have as coaches. But more importantly, we dive in to the reality of our client work. Questions that we heard last week, conundrums that we were in trying to help clients through to help liberate them from the chaos of working in their business. See, if we leverage our team meeting to do our client meeting work, then we would never get to the purpose of our team meeting, and we would never create culture. Remember, Torbjørn Ekelund of that great book "A Year in the Woods"? He said that nature is God made, but culture is man made. It's manufactured. What does that mean? That means anything related to culture in your business was directly created by you. And the people you work with don't like your culture. Guess what? It's kind of on you. Like your culture? Great job. It's on you. Part of the reason we have team meetings is to create culture. That's right. We can create culture. We generate it, we manufacture it. We're not waiting in reaction to those things. There are other times that we need to communicate in a reactive format to see what's been going on and what we need to do to change that. That's where it comes into the project meeting or the production meeting or operations meeting, depending on what kind of industry you're in. Now, the over 50% of the industry that we work with are construction, infrastructure and supporting entities around that. So we talk a lot about project meetings. So we'll talk to a client about a team meeting. They'll go, oh my gosh, ours last 3 hours. Why do they last so long? Well, it's because we had to talk about all the problems at 31 21 Maple Street. Wait a second. That's where things begin to break down. See, here's the thing we've got to remember about team meetings. Project meetings is too many of them are not agenda driven and leader led. In fact, they keep the seesaw of predictability out of balance. What in the world is that? The seesaw of predictability balances two primary elements that lead to unpredictability, which ultimately lead to micromanagement. Many of you wonder what's the difference between micromanagement and healthy leadership? Well, it's the seesaw of predictability. Imagine on one side of the seesaw you have the right questions. Imagine on the other side of the seesaw you have the right time. If you ask the right question at the right time, you have equilibrium, you have a lack of chaos, you have clarity and you have leadership. But if you ask the wrong question at the right time or the wrong time asking the right question, then you are out of balance and you're now in the realm of micromanagement. So if you want to know if you're micromanaging or not, then just ask yourself, am I asking the right questions at the right time? A right question might be, hey, do you have last week's sales numbers? The right time. At a designated agenda driven, leader-led team meeting, the wrong question might be, hey, do you have sales numbers from 2014? The wrong time? texting at 11:37 p.m. on a Friday night. The moment we start asking the wrong question at the right time or at the wrong time, we ask the right question. That's when we know definitively we've moved into micromanagement. So instead, let's take the time and make the time and take the effort to build an agenda driven, leader-led team meeting. Give you the outline in just a second. And also an agenda driven, leader led project or production or operations meeting to talk about the actual work being fulfilled. So what's the difference between the two agendas? A team meeting should go something like this. We always start with BIG wins- Begin In Gratitude. We ripped that off from Dan Sullivan years ago. And so we start every team meeting, every coach's meeting, every director's meeting, and every client meeting that we do. Hundreds a week, starting with big wins. Why? Is because we can definitively begin in gratitude. We can set the tone of the call. This isn't some Tony Robbins, pie in the sky, toxic positivity sort of thing. This is really setting a tone so that we begin to work through our agenda at that point. Now, once we're done with big wins, shouldn't take any more than 3 or 5 minutes. We then move to our first agenda item that is walking through our culture calendar. The top side of the culture calendar is the date of the first day of each week. Take Monday of this week, and then Monday of next week, and then Monday of the following week. And then the left side of the graph, which would be the vertical side of the graph, are all of the ingredients that you want to insert into your business to build great culture. Do you want monthly team days? Do you want a weekly team lunch? Do you want regular team meetings, regular project meetings? Do you want individual one on one check ins, vision days every other month? Do you want unicorn rides for the kids every quarter? Whatever it might be for you? There should be 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 elements that you see that you want to build into great culture that goes on the vertical element. We call that the culture calendar. And then every week in the team meeting, after big wins, the leader of that meeting checks the agenda, which tells them to go look at the culture calendar. They review it, everybody stacks hands, and we move on to the next line item, which is 12-week plans. Now, if you're a client of ours, you know what those are. If you're not, it's essentially our goal setting tool. Every team member, owner, key leader has a 12-week plan. Goals with multiple tactics per goal. And so during that time on the weekly team meeting, no more than 1 hour, the leader goes around to each person after big wins, after checking the culture calendar, and says, all right, Tim, give us an update on your 12-week plans. All right, Hannah, give us an update on your 12-week plans. And so we're holding each other accountable to the business goals. These are not project goals. Sometimes projects might creep in, but ultimately they're our business goals. For the next 12 weeks to make sure that we have alignment in our accountability. Then there's also a line item at the very end just to go back and make sure everybody's got their action items for the next meeting and then we leave that's it. No longer than 1 hour. And if it bumps up to an hour, you cut it off and you learn for the next time try to keep it within an hour. Then the project meeting is where you can deep dive into projects. I would still start it with BIG wins because project meetings you're usually talking nothing but problems. So let's set the tone for something different. And then within each project, I would highly encourage you to set a timer. Too many of us owners get on our high horse and we start pontificating about what we see rather than really using that time to encourage, to leverage, to understand, to offer feedback and to gain insight. And so we get on our high horse because dang it, we're the ones who started the business and we start telling people what to do rather than active listening, offering feedback and then maneuvering through the real issues that you're dealing with. Each project ought to have an allotted amount of time. A project meeting really shouldn't be no longer than 1 hour. If you have to go 90 minutes then that's it. But absolutely zero minutes longer than that. Why? Is because you're going to exasperate your team and eventually they'll either leave physically or they will leave mentally and emotionally and you as the leader cannot afford that. So team meetings, project meetings should be agenda driven, leader-led, really no more than 1 hour. Always start with BIG wins, should have an agenda so they follow a method of predictability so people don't get exasperated with what's going on. And by the way, each of these to start with should happen every single week. And if the owner's not there, they should happen anyway. Just because the owner is gone doesn't mean we don't meet. What is that communicating when we do that? So that's the difference between those two meetings. And every business should have a version of a team meeting, which talks about the macro-level culture and goal thing and then from there should also have some sort of project meeting to talk about the in the weeds element and they should be absolutely separate. Why? Clarity. Remember the RPMs of great leadership, Repetition, Predictability and Meaning. All those together equal clarity so that you can be liberated from the chaos of working in your business.