Last week, we talked about the power of reframing. That was really amazing. And by using that tool,
we learned that every single problem can actually be converted into a possibility.
So Dion, you had some incredible examples like the soggy sandwich saga and elevator bypass.
And all of those were meant to help us learn how to flip our perspectives about challenges
and turn those seeming mishaps into silver lining. So the more we learn how to reframe,
the more we actually open ourselves up and our teams to creative problem solving and innovation.
So today is a fun topic. We're going to be talking about upgrading your meeting culture,
because I'm sure we've all been in lots of meetings and spent lots of time there.
So we're going to upgrade our meeting culture with fire. We want it to be focused,
informative, respectful, and effective. And just before we dive in today, we do have a pro tip,
and it's about cultivating a culture of trust. So way back when in season one, episode four,
we learned about the power of safety and belonging in teams and how when our teams feel safe,
our brain chemistry actually changes. So it helps to release more creativity, collaboration,
problem solving, and actually helps improve our ability to think when we're not stressed.
And so a few of those trust based culture habits are things like we always speak about others as
though they're in the room. We learn to show appreciation with precision. And even with
negative feedback, we receive that with a sincere thank you. I appreciate that. And so this week,
I encourage you to pick at least one of those trust habits to actively exercise within your
teams. And now just as a quick reminder, we would love for you to add your questions,
your comments, thoughts, reactions to the chat as DM's going through the material.
And if everyone's ready to dive in, Dion, I will go ahead and hand it to you.
Thank you, Jalen. I'm really excited about this. You know, we set the this course up so we don't
try to hit you every week with a major needle moving idea, because nobody can implement that
speed, right? I mean, even the pace you're going, and we try to do a lot of repetition to help you
process. So what we do, and the way we've set it up, the architecture of it is we introduce
a big idea, and then we spend some time massaging that idea in with other things that make it feel
more effortless, make it feel attainable, practical strategies, and so on. So some of the,
you know, some of the top ones that Jalen already asked you was, you know, the whole idea of
figuring out what are we doing? Why are we doing it? And how do I fit in? And we came up with the
one line job descriptions, right? One line job descriptions is one of the coolest ideas,
because now we all know what everybody does. And if you suddenly under pressure, you've got time,
you think, well, what's my one line job description? If I do that one thing, you know, I've made my
contribution to the organization. Jalen hit on the culture of trust. We talked about cue books,
we talked about deep work, we talked about six hats, the six ways of thinking about any problem.
Then we did thin slices, and how to shape up work that matters. And you know, of course,
recently, we did playbooks, and capturing playbooks so that you can offload your work,
that's a fastest way to promote yourself internally in the organization. Because what
you're doing is you're capturing your work, and you're pushing it on and handing it off to somebody
in a very controlled way. And now today is another biggie. So today, we're talking about the culture
of meetings. So where does this fit into our whole plan? It fits in. So let's, let's just go through
when we've said there's three types of work, there's deep work, that's four hours uninterrupted,
and you're working on something new. Focused work is typically about an hour or two uninterrupted,
but that's existing work, but you're just pushing through it. And what you're doing is you're
batching some tasks together to save on switching costs. Remember mental fatigue, at the end of the
day, that cognitive fatigue comes from switching too many times in the day. So that switching cost,
so if you're getting tired, then at the end of your day, that's almost always the reason, even if you've
had a little lack of sleep or haven't exercised and so forth. Actually, one of the bigger drivers is
that that drain on your brain. So we said be kind to your mind, lots of rhyming phrases today. And
so as we go through that, we know this whole way, we're going to talk about today's general work. So
this section fits on how to be better at general work. And of course, I'm going to refer to meetings.
So we always like to quote some leaders. So today we're working and quoting from Mark Cuban, for
many of you may know Mark Cuban, a billionaire, Shark Tank fans will know immediately what I'm
talking about. So, you know, Mark Cuban says the problem with meetings is that people over-meet
and over-call, over-meet and over-call.
kills so much time. So what happens is we end up with less
and less time to do more and more work. And you see where
that plan's going? Not in a great direction. And so he says
meetings are the number one obstacle for somebody to own
their own schedule. Meetings are the number one obstacle to own
your own schedule. Because if other people are driving you
into meetings, that takes away the cognitive control, that
sense of, I am an owner of my own time. So our concept of team
of leaders can be very quickly threatened, when you feel like,
I don't lead anything, I don't even lead my contribution,
because I'm being pulled from that meeting to this meeting to
that thing to this meeting. So, you know, at one point, he's
tried so many experiments, ones that he tried, but hasn't kept
going. But one time, he took all the conference chairs out of the
conference room. And they had stand up meetings, man, the
meetings got really short when there were no chairs to sit on.
So he didn't want people to get comfortable. Now that, I mean,
he joked a bit about that. But what he was saying is that that
wasn't sustainable, there's a deep, there must be a deeper
way to solve. And that's what we're going to do today. So we're
going to look at the best practices for solving that
problem. Because it's interesting that some just some
quick research. In 2019, there was a huge survey, and over half
the employee survey said that meetings were just distractions
from getting their work done. So this isn't, this isn't like,
well, sometimes meetings are useful. No, no, half the people
outright said, almost all the meetings they attended were
doing just keeping them away from their work. That's, that's,
think of the potential as a business, think of the loss of
human capital, and just how, you know, demoralizing. And so, you
know, in the old days, we used to just run over to someone's
desk, ask them a question, knock on their door, walk into their
office. But now that's turned into huddles on Microsoft Teams,
quickly jumping on to on to Zoom or Slack. And so now there's so
many more ways to host meetings, technology has made it a click
away, and you can literally call anyone. So it's no longer just
phone calls, texts, email, Slack, you know, all these
mechanisms for having online meetings is just extraordinary.
You can FaceTime, all these technologies have made meetings,
you know, much more accessible. So, you know, according to
research that Microsoft did, people are, are having three
times more meetings today, compared to February of 2020. So
just three and a bit years ago, three times more meetings. So if
you were in five meetings a week, you're now in 15 meetings
a week. So one of the things COVID did is not only taught us
we can work at home, we can work remotely, but it gave us what
happened is we all ended up with a pile of new tools that allowed
us to facilitate these very quick meetings. So here's the
problem we're facing. It literally is corporate death by
meeting. You know, so did was, was he stabbed? Did he commit
suicide? No, he just died in a meeting. You know, I think that's
how it's gonna be one day. Died by meeting. And that's not a
thing, by the way, unless you think I was serious. So here's
what too many meetings indicate. So when I first go into a
company, and I see a lot of that when I see a lot of meetings
with a lot of people in all the meetings that are going too
long, that's usually a sign that people don't know what they
own. They don't know I own this piece. So what they're doing is
it's a shared ownership. So let's build consensus. Let's all
get everybody on the ball on board here. Because we don't
know who owns this. We don't know who leads this. Or we're
so overwhelmed that when we hit with now that I'm three big
projects behind and the fourth one just landed on my desk this
morning, then what I do is I just call a meeting with anyone
who can help me solve it. And it's a way of like kindly
delegating by getting everybody else to weigh in on the meeting.
And that's where you get through your through your deal. We've
all seen this, right. And what's interesting is you can do it
quickly, you can work out the true cost of a meeting. So it's
the time is the bigger issue, but there's also a financial
element. So if you take your your monthly cost to run your
company, so let's say, if you want to do the calculation very
quickly, the math is very simple, you just take the
say $100,000 a month to run your business as an example. And
let's say you have 10 employees, and you have 168 hours in a
week. So in a month rather, everybody has 168 hours in a
month. So if you just take the $100,000, so if you want to do
the math, you're very welcome to do it very quickly. It's very
easy. So you just take the $100,000. What does it cost to
run your company?
per month, divide that by the number 168. So you and then divide that by the number
of employees. So you should be at about $59. So 59, call it $60 per person per hour in
a meeting. So if you have five people or 10 people in a meeting, that meeting just cost
$600. Now that meeting happens every week. That means so if you have a meeting with everybody
in it for an hour, every week, that's costing you $600 an hour times four is $2,400. Literally
2.4% of your overhead was spent in a meeting one meeting that happened every week for an
hour. You realize very quickly, we burn through so much money. All right, but we're not going
to focus too much more on the money. But I did. We did we have talked about that before.
So I'm going to leave that because I want to get to the core of this. How do you fix
this meeting issue? So death by meeting is a problem because it's it's death of obviously
not the person, but it's death of our productivity, death of our energy, you know, death of our
focus, because we're constantly switching in meetings. And so you know, what's the saddest
part about meetings is if you look, you take a typical meeting with 10 people in it, very often,
it's two or three people doing most of the talking, maybe a fourth person chimes in. So in other words,
we've got six people watching four people work, or seven people watching three people work. Now that
is a terrible way to do anything. So quickly in the chat, because I want to get your input on this,
because I'm always interested when when we do this topic, what do you think? So give answer
this question for me, if you would, the team can help me track the answers.
What is the purpose of having a meeting? Why have meetings? Let's just start the first principles.
What is the purpose of a meeting? Let's just get some answers.
How are we doing? Purpose of a meeting? Anyone? Collaboration? Bring clarity?
More? Feeling part of something bigger? Not working on an island on your own? Make decisions?
Okay, some of these are good answers.
Okay, very good. Basically, it's all around be on the same page, and feel like you're part of a team
and produce clarity on some decision or another. Is that more or less where we've landed on this?
That looks pretty good. Good answers, by the way. So many of these things we're talking about,
well, we just want everyone to know what's going on. Well, often you can do that with
a Slack message or an email. There are other elements you can do. So a meeting needs to be
the action of last resort. That's the big idea. A meeting needs to be the action of last resort.
Now, before we say, wow, that sounds intense. Let me explain what a meeting is first,
and then it'll make more sense. So there are three types of gatherings, if you like,
three types of times we get together. There's the one-to-one relationship, you and somebody else,
and that is not a meeting. That is work. Usually, you're doing something effective,
and it's very effective when both people know how to do deep work or focused work.
They know how to cut out the instruct. Have you ever had to share one of those sessions,
and then the other person's on their phone all the time, or they're quickly answering an email,
and they're distracted, and they're not paying any attention, right? If you've ever had that
going on, that's very annoying. But once you both know to shut down the distractions, and it's a
one-on-one, that's not a meeting. For the purpose of this discussion, that's not a meeting, right?
Then there's the one-to-many. The one-to-many is where one person, like what we're doing right now,
mostly coming from me to you. That's training. I'm not talking that about a meeting. Yes, it might
happen on Zoom. I might be in a room, or it's a webinar, but it's training. It's effectively
a communication where one person is sharing information with everyone. Hey, everybody,
we need to meet on Thursday, because I need to tell you all about what all the different benefits
you have in our new benefits package, and whatever it is. That affects everyone, so it's
very effective if we just do that, you know, one-to-many, and we solve that. So that's not
a meeting either. That's a training type scenario. What I'm talking about is the many-to-many
situation, where many people are involved, and many people have stuff to say.
These are the least effective, least respectful, and usually the
default of many teams, they just go straight there. Let's run a
meeting, let's get a meeting, let's get a meeting should be
now it makes more sense. Leading should be the action of last
resort. And it's the number one problem that every business
leader struggles with is to get rid of the meetings. And I was
speaking to a business leader recently, and he said, my team
have so many meetings, we can't, not only can we not get things
done. But if you take the meetings away, then they seem
paralyzed. And I said, Well, that's very straightforward. And
why? Because they don't own anything. And they don't have
authority to make decisions. So if you see intense amount of
meetings, we have to go back to the first training of, hey,
what's my one line job description, create a culture of
trust and a sense of ownership. We're a team of leaders, what do
you need to lead? So if you're the leader, the main leader, and
you're listening and seeing your team doing a lot of that meeting
stuff, you may want to be digging into why does the person
who owns it not own it? And why is it they feel they can't make
a decision? Do they don't want to take the risk? Sometimes
people just want to share the risk. Let's all get together.
Hey, no, no, you know, CEO, don't beat up on me. All nine
of us decided together. And so a lot of times it's that. So
here's what I want to suggest. If you're going to make meetings
work, and they are the action of last resort, what again, they
are not work with, you know, where you're doing deep work or
whatever, I'm not talking about work, where you're actually
producing something and solving problems and making decisions.
I'm talking about, and it's not training, I'm talking about the
many to many meetings, where we're sitting around, and you
know how that goes, especially when we're tired. So let's talk
about the way to fix this problem is called FIRE
meetings, F-I-R-E, FIRE meetings, and it's an acronym,
and it's hopefully easy to remember. And it stands for
these meetings, if you want them to be super effective, here's
what I have learned after over 30 years of trying to solve this
problem. One, what does F stand for? Focused. Number two, is
informative. So focused, informative, respectful,
effective, focused, informative, respectful, effective. Let me
run through that very, very quickly with you. So by focused,
I mean, we've picked the right mode, we know this is a many to
many meeting. And the best way to manage a many to many
meeting, which is what we've now defined as a meeting, is to
start every meeting with this meeting will be successful if
dot, dot, dot. If you start every meeting with this meeting
will be successful if, what that does immediately is it
focus everybody on the point why you're there. Now, here comes
the more cultural one and the harder one. It's called five
star permission. And five star permission has been starting to
catch on in corporations. I don't know if Tesla started
this, they may have, others have caught on to this five star
permission is, you have permission to leave this
meeting, if you feel you have nothing to contribute. Now that
we have to make that culturally acceptable in our culture. And
the way we do that, so it doesn't feel rude, is we say,
right up front, hey, if you got to this meeting, and now that
I've said this meeting will be successful, if you think you
don't really have much to contribute to that, you can
leave and nobody thinks the worst, you know, there's no
negative consequences to that. And we allow five star
permission for up to 10 minutes off, because some say, well, I
don't know if I'm going to, let me just see how it's going. They
feel it out. It's not so nice if they leave halfway through the
meeting, that gets a bit annoying and disruptive. So we
call five star permission is after 10 minutes, the first 10
minutes, you can leave or you can leave up front. And so in
fact, that happened to us today, right? So we jumped on a call
with a vendor. And it was, you know, Jenny and Bridget and Matt
and myself, that's, that's four resources from Brilliant. And
there was one or I suppose later on two or three people on their
end. And when I heard what the topic was, and I heard what we
were going to do, once she said what the meeting was about, I
excused myself. So, you know, but, but, you know, sometimes
you have to really explain that if it's an external group. And
so obviously do it with grace. But it should be normal in your
company to let people out of the meetings to walk out of a
meeting you don't have any, any contribution to. Next thing to
keep it focused, do not over invite. A lot of people was
like, well, let's invite them just in case. No, let's do just
in time, not just in case. Just in time is tell them when they
need to know or a little bit before they need to know. But we
shouldn't be doing this thing. Well, just in case, just in
case, you know, we're going to
that they may, might possibly need this information.
Don't do that.
Don't invite people for the just-in-case plan, right?
There are other ways.
You can send them a note, a summary.
They can see whatever.
The other ideas, and this one is a little tricky,
but set a time shorter than you think you need.
Why?
Because all meetings fill up.
All the time you give it plus five minutes, right?
You can set the meeting for one hour
and it'll take one hour and five minutes.
You can set the meeting for 30 minutes.
It'll take 35 minutes.
Okay, and then the last thing is
when you give the shorter time than you think you need,
it gets everybody focused.
Like, wow, we have to discuss all that in 30 minutes.
Let's go, let's go, let's go, right?
And it also raises the energy level of the meeting.
Keeps it focused.
And, you know, one of the other things is
if you have an opinion leader, this is just a help.
If you're the one who calls a lot of meetings
or has to call meetings,
if you have an opinion lead in the group,
it doesn't matter where they are in the org chart.
If they're the ones who get in a meeting
and can derail the whole meeting,
you may want to give them a heads up beforehand.
Hey, we're going to be talking about this.
I just want you to be aware.
Any input thoughts?
Okay, good.
And then you get into the meeting
because sometimes you have to get people,
you know, some people are, you know,
naturally black hat thinkers, right?
Okay, so that's just how you'd really focus it down.
Again, you know, start every meeting with,
this meeting will be successful.
Give everybody's five-star permission.
You can leave up to 10 minutes into the meeting.
Don't over-invite.
Use just-in-time, not just-in-case.
Set shorter time for big PowerPoints around that.
Right, next one's make it informative.
Get to the point.
What must the team know?
What decision needs to be made?
Get to the key point.
And watch for the rabbit trails
because the rabbit trails sometimes can be conversational,
but it takes a little experience to say,
even if you're not quite sure
and you're new at leading a meeting,
you can say things like,
I know we can discuss that.
I just want to know,
does everybody think that will help us
get to the main point?
Remember when we said this meeting will be successful if?
Right, so let's keep it informative
and keep it very to the point.
Next one is respectful.
Okay, now this gets a little tricky.
So, but if you pull this off,
which we have at Brilliant and at other organizations,
if you pull this off,
it will change a lot of other things.
This is one of those keystone habits,
corporate habits that if you do this thing,
it fixes a whole lot of other things
without you having to put the effort in.
And that is making the meetings respectful.
In particular, everybody gets on two minutes early.
Why?
Because you just need a little buffer.
The messaging of respect
that it says to everybody's time is fantastic.
If you have a meeting with Team Brilliant
and you get on a minute early,
you'll see the whole team's waiting for you.
We're on two, three minutes early every time.
Why?
Because we're being respectful,
but also because we want to work with margin.
The people who run meetings,
one, two minutes off.
So, hey, we have a meeting at 10 o'clock.
They, at 10 o'clock,
they're trying to wrap up the meeting.
Now it's 10.03, 10.04.
They have to quickly grab something, come back.
It's 10.05, they get on the meeting.
Hey, sorry guys, sorry I'm late.
So, when I was running a leadership company,
we had about 25 employees and this was the norm.
But it was particularly the norm
because the president of the company kept doing it.
And so I said to him, okay, here's the deal.
You can come to meetings and if you come late, that's fine.
You just can't say anything.
And that fixed it.
And it was really funny
because the next morning he arrived five minutes late
for the pre-meeting because we were a Christian group
and he arrived, so then he realizes,
well, somebody better leave this meeting
because it wasn't him.
So, what's the fuss about that?
Well, the fuss about that is that that one tiny adjustment
brings a level of respect to one another's time.
It filters down into things like not overloading people,
not shoving your work onto others.
It's being respectful.
It creates a culture of respect across the board.
So, that means you have to end the meeting
five minutes early so that everyone has two minutes early,
even you're unorganized.
Now, if you can't end it five minutes early,
at least end it exactly on time
or as close to on time as you can.
So, there are so many benefits to this.
One of them is we are not only respectful
of each other's time, but also we do what we say.
I said the meeting starts at 10.
You know, the way I learned this, though,
was really interesting because I didn't learn this in,
I learned this in Germany.
And I remember arriving at a meeting in Germany
and I arrived, it was, the meeting was for 7 a.m.
by the way.
And I arrived earlier, a huge insurance company,
big multi-billion dollar insurance company.
Myself and my team arrived and we arrived at 6.45.
We were signing in the front desk and the manager
called down and wanted to cancel the meeting
because we were late.
And I said, late, 6.45, you know?
And so he said, and so my German partner,
he started to explain to me, he said, no, no, no, no.
When Germans say the meeting starts at seven,
they mean the meeting portion.
That means you're in the room 15 minutes early.
You're doing the coffee and handing out the business cards
and saying hello and where you're from
and all that chatty, chatty stuff.
But the meeting portion,
the actual business starts at seven.
I didn't know that, you see, cultural update.
So I was like, so, okay, that might not be the way we do it,
you know, but it does have an interesting impact
that if everyone jumps on a minute or two early,
people can say hi and hey, how's it going?
And you know, are you guys okay in the hurricane
and all that good stuff?
But the meeting portion starts on time.
It makes a big difference.
Now, the cool thing about this idea
is that being respectful of creating this culture of respect
if you can build this into your meeting culture,
honestly, it's a complete game changer for your business.
And lastly, effective.
And so we talked at the beginning of the meeting
when we focused the meeting,
this meeting will be successful if,
and we said what it was.
And if you're about halfway through and it's going nowhere,
just say, by the way, we're 15 minutes in,
this is halfway through the meeting,
just want to let everybody know
we need to get to this objective.
Sometimes it's a great way to just cut all the rabbit holes
and get it back to where it needs to be,
you know, rabbit trails.
So, hey, at the end of the meeting, do this.
State whether you reached your objective or not
and thank people.
And do that like two minutes
as you're coming in for the landing,
two minutes before and just say,
okay, we said this meeting will be successful
if we had a clear action plan for the upcoming event.
Hey, thank you, team.
We really got a clear plan.
Couple of things we still need to work out,
but we've got the core plan.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Let people feel they were successful.
Let people feel they made a contribution and it mattered.
Because there's nothing worse than wasting your time
in a meeting and feel like it didn't matter
if you were there or not.
Give clear next steps.
All you need, you don't, when you take minutes,
you don't have to write everything down.
Just what did you decide?
Who's doing it?
When?
What did you decide?
Who's doing it?
When?
That's it.
So, and then you just summarize.
Hey, we reached our objective.
Now, John's going to do that.
Sally's going to do that by this day.
Just give it a simple thing.
By the way, if a meeting ends early,
there's a concept called giving back their time.
Give back the time.
If a meeting, if you thought it would take an hour
and it's 40 minutes in and you realized this team
did it a whole lot faster, don't feel like,
well, I don't want them to think
I don't know what I'm doing.
So I'm going to use up the rest of the time.
So I'm going to pull and spread out the meeting.
Most people do that maybe consciously or subconsciously.
But if you can land the meeting early,
the reputation you'll build as a leader is tremendous.
So we've had fun times at Brilliant
where we've ended meetings before they started.
So we have a 10 minute standup.
Of course, being the team,
they're all on three minutes beforehand.
And then we go, okay, so what's happening?
One or two things.
We did that in a minute.
And the meeting ended
before the clock actually hit the hour.
So the meeting ended before it start.
Now, it hasn't happened too many times, but it's been fun.
All we've had meetings lasted two minutes.
Okay.
And so when you have a standup,
perhaps the focus of the meeting is like,
hey guys, we have a remote team.
Everybody's out in different cities.
Like we have a team Brilliant.
Everybody will almost,
the team is so spread out, you know,
from Santa Barbara, Michigan, Georgia,
you know, we're spread out Oregon.
We're spread out as a team.
So 10 minutes every day, cameras on,
look at each other, say hi.
That's not some,
we can talk about coordination or what we're doing,
but sometimes it's just to realize
you're still part of a team.
They're real people on the other side.
So that's the objective of the meeting.
Then enjoy that.
Hey, how's it going?
Have a kind of coffee break together.
That's fine.
If you're doing that,
because there's a very, very clear objective.
Okay.
Any questions around that?
So let's go through, summarize.
What do we talk about?
That meetings should be the action of last resort.
Try other things first.
We're not defining working together,
where we're solving problems,
making decisions and creating something.
That's work.
That's not a meeting.
When you're being taught something, that's training.
We're talking about the many to many meetings.
And what do we do with those?
We turn them into fire meetings.
Make them focused.
We make them informative, we make them respectful,
start on time, say what you wanna do,
make them effective, land them well.
Thank you, we've reached our objective,
now everyone's gonna do the following.
Robin.
Yeah, we have a daily huddle that lasts 15 minutes,
which I understand you guys do call it stand up,
which is great, because we do the same thing.
However, we have a two-hour strategy meeting every Tuesday,
and we have a inspector meeting every other Thursday,
and they're just scheduled,
but we really, we don't really, we go off course a lot.
I mean, we do have structure,
but a strategy meeting needs to do strategy,
and usually it's just talking about things
that are going on, and I mean, I hear what you're saying,
and we've been doing this ever since we started,
pretty much, so to get the team to say,
oh, we're just gonna have a meeting,
and boom, and we're done, kind of a thing.
To me, that's, I don't see that happening very easily,
but I hear what you're saying,
and I'd like to be able to implement that.
So here's, this raises an interesting point,
but let me hear from Ben first before we respond.
Hey, Ben, go.
What's happening?
I think maybe we have a similar meeting,
which I almost felt guilty saying at this point,
but the question is, how do we exchange information
so that we're all kind of on the same page
with what needs to happen today?
Okay, so we're now getting into
more of the subtleties of it.
What I think we need to do when we start and say,
sometimes a meeting is the action of,
is the last resort, action of last resort,
because there's no other way to achieve a goal.
So what you just said there, for instance,
so Mondays at Brilliant, we have a meeting,
it's not 10 minutes, it's a bit longer,
which Jenny hosts, and in that specific meeting,
it's designed for everybody shares,
what did you do last week?
What are you gonna do this week?
It's not an accountability meeting.
It's not even a meeting so much
to let everybody know what you're doing or coordination.
I mean, that's a side benefit,
but the main thing is to give everyone a voice,
because a lot of times silent work happens,
especially in a remote team,
and there are people who are doing amazing things,
but nobody knows they're doing that.
So that objective, so the reason for this meeting
is to give you a voice, to hear what you did last week
and what you're gonna do next week.
And it's a kind of a celebratory information exchange thing.
So you can have meetings like,
it doesn't have to be all business, business, business,
business, but when you do have business meetings,
define them so that if they're going to be more social,
then let them be amazingly social.
If they're gonna be all business, let them be business,
but it's when we don't define them
and they're going to this mushy,
like you were saying, Robin,
there's two hour everything happens meeting.
You could, what you could do is say,
hey, we're gonna do the business part
and whatever's left, we're gonna hang out together.
What that does in the culture
is it sets a very clear expectation.
When we do business, we do it,
and then we put that aside.
And listen, this is a constant fight,
no matter how good the culture is.
Hope that's helpful.
So we're not saying,
cause there's a social element to being a team, right?
There's a certain getting to know each other,
it's certain relational components,
but then make space for that.
So if you say, hey, let's get the business portion done,
and then we wanna hang out,
hey, get your cup of coffee or your favorite drink,
let's hang out, let's do our thing.
So we can do that.
And also having set meetings to make sure
that there's a certain rhythm to what you're doing.
We've encouraged, for instance, that you have a pitch day.
So if you, you know, Tuesdays at Brilliant is pitch day,
there are no pitches, other stuff happens.
But maybe the other stuff is just hanging out.
Jenny, I know you run these meetings.
Do you wanna comment from,
I think you're the leader, you should comment on this.
Sure.
So having those meetings and the goals for each meeting,
like you're saying, Monday, we talk about
what we did last week and what our goals are for this week
to give everyone on the team a voice.
It really does create the expectation.
And so people come up really ready to participate.
And then Wednesday is more kind of like a celebration
meeting where we celebrate, we highlight someone,
or you share a weekly win from like our edge training.
And so folks will come there and they'll know
that that's a time where it's a time to celebrate as a team.
And then if we are gonna go longer in some of those,
we can ask, hey, everyone,
we look like we're gonna go a little bit longer.
Is everyone okay to be on for two to three more minutes?
And then everyone can say yes or no.
And then that's a way that they get to have a voice
if they don't have the extra time.
And that's been really helpful.
I think the respect thing is probably the most important part of all of what I just said.
And if I were to just net it out for you, I'd say, if you can get your trains running two minutes early on,
and if you are going to go over, ask respectfully to every team member that five-star permission to leave.
And just being clear at the beginning, we're going to do this, and at the end, did we do it?
And if so, what is the follow-up?
I think it's easy to fall into, especially when we're tired and we're running a meeting.
I mean, last Tuesday, I think I ran meetings back-to-back from 9 a.m. till 6 p.m.
And I think there may have been seven or ten minutes in between when I wasn't actually busy.
You know, eat at your desk and all that stuff, that's no way to live.
But if on the days that happens, there needs to be a culture to those meetings so that it makes it huge.
Now, was that effective? Hugely effective.
So, okay, any other questions?
So, by the way, I know we're going to – let's do the breakout, because we are running –
and since we've done a little bit of Q&A, let's give you right till, you know, 58 or whatever,
or we can just let it run to the hour.
We can even do that.
The reason – in the breakout questions, what I want you to do is –
exercise number one is for everybody to look at how many meetings you're attending.
Look over a two-week time period.
How many meetings did you attend?
You know, estimate how many hours those meetings took.
What percentage did you contribute to in those meetings?
And then of those meetings, you know, which could have you not attended?
And then exercise two is, like, write down the meetings you think in your organization
you should be attending versus those you would like to stop attending.
And this is where the culture of trust comes, because exercise three is as a team discuss.
So, this is to answer your question, Robin, directly, is that maybe people don't want
a two-hour strategy meeting every week.
So, let's have a talk about that.
You know, is it effective?
Am I contributing?
Could I have done something else?
So, then talk about the amount of meetings we have, the length of the meetings,
and the number of meetings.
We all agree there's one thing about meetings.
We have too many of them, they're too long, and too many people in them.
I think we all agree to that, generally speaking.
Now, if you're getting it down and that's not your case, fantastic.
Then you're in good shape.
Over to you, Jalen.
All right.
That was some great dialogue.
We will go ahead and separate out to our breakout rooms now.
And you'll have the opportunity to discuss this together with your team.
And as a reminder, the worksheet has been posted in the chat.
Thank you, Jenny.
And you can let us know if you have any issues accessing it.
Any solo leaders, you can join the room called General,
and you can interact there together.
So, we are going to go ahead and open the breakout rooms now.
And since we've done some Q&A, Dion, it sounds like we will give you all the
rest of the time in this call to discuss with your teams.
Yeah.
We won't say goodbye.
We'll just let you run to the end and we'll wait a minute or two afterwards,
and we'll shut it down in case you have to wrap up.
So, just shut yourselves down on the hour.