Lesson Thirteen: Meetings are about the team and what they need
Meetings are more than a practical alternative to work if you keep the mission in mind
I, like many in the tech world, thrive on being a sarcastic jackhole. One of my favorite sarcastic mantras that I have heard in many, many companies and use with alarming frequency is “Meetings: the practical alternative to work!” We all have stories about meetings that could have been an email, I get it. But at a fast pace start up meetings are essential.
My favorite sarcastic mantra is hitting on a real problem with meetings, however. Like all good bits of humor there is a bit of truth in there. In a more professional tone I would say that there is an opportunity cost associated with meetings and that cost is that you are taking time away from actually producing the work that you talk about in the meeting. So, it stands to reason that all teams should have a strategy for how to manage the time that is used in meetings.
The best run teams of which I have been lucky enough to be a member, we have had two types of team meetings that happened regularly from the start. Eventually, a third type of meeting should be added because open and consistent communication is an ingredient in all of the successful game changing companies I have worked for. These meetings were designed to help push the work forward, addressing the opportunity cost.
From the start there is a need for what we call the Weekly Staff Meeting and the Daily Stand Up. It is also a good idea, as small teams grow into a larger and multifaceted organization to have Quarterly Organizational Reviews.These meetings were critical to the success of the teams I worked on that changed the world.
Thinking back on the things I wrote in Chapter 4 about Leadership, a lot of those lessons came from terribly run staff meetings. If you lead a team and spend most of the team meeting doing the talking, you are wasting your team’s time. You need your team to be engaged in these meetings and spending half an hour listening to the Team Lead talk about stuff is really a lot like listening to Charlie Brown’s parents in old Peanuts cartoons.This is the opposite of engaging and there is an easy way to make sure that this doesn’t happen.
A good staff meeting is one that has a flow and direction that doesn’t require any specific team member to be in the room, or on the video conference, for it to run without a hitch. One of the best ways to make this happen is to set up three predefined roles: Facilitator, Time Keeper and Scribe. The Team Lead should be willing to do any of the three roles, but these roles should live in a rotation where all team members eventually do each of them. Think of it like a way less painful On Call Rotation!
The Facilitator is the person who ensures there is an agenda for the week and leads the discussion. Whenever I think of the most effective people in this role I think of something like a game show host. They aren’t there to dominate the conversation, they are there to make sure the conversation flows. They don’t talk as much as an actual game show host, and they may spend most of the meeting sitting at the whiteboard illustrating things that other people are saying, but they serve essentially the same purpose. They are there to make the contestants, meeting participants in this context, interesting.
The Time Keeper probably has the hardest job because everyone hates being the jerk who cuts off debate in mid stream. But, as I said earlier the opportunity cost associated with team meetings is that folks in the meeting are not at their desks producing the work that the company needs done to push things forward. This means someone has to make sure that the time in the meeting is used effectively. If you have a good agenda that helps the discussion, it should also include an allotted time for each of the discussion points.
The best Time Keepers I have ever participated in meetings with are the folks who cut into the discussion every so often and say things like “We have 2 minutes left on this topic, let us wrap it up!” rather than “TIME IS UP!” right at the end. You will find folks react to the warnings so much better than just calling time when it is up. One feels collaborative, the other feels like you are telling folks to shut up.
Being the Scribe in a meeting is a bit of an undertaking. If you are the person who is assigned with taking notes you have only two things you can do. Write the gist of what folks are saying into a shareable document and edit that sucker at the end of the meeting to email a link to the notes in whatever collaboration tool you are using. Don’t expect to participate much because there will be all kinds of talking. If there is a topic you need to give input on, be judicious with your talking time. You are the one who has to write down everything you say anyway.
These roles go all the way back to my days at Pac-West and they have never let me down. They are timeless and always needed. Obviously, some things have changed since then. Collaboration tools have made it simple and easy to share the notes, assign action items and follow up on the things discussed in team meetings. If you are still writing notes from team meetings in a notebook you are making things really hard on everyone, come into this century.
These meetings are generally structured in a way that starts with the Team Lead giving a broad update of initiatives across the larger company and organization. A guest speaker from another team is always a nice idea. Leaving time at the end for an open discussion of anything not on the agenda but urgent is also helpful. These meetings should be booked to last an hour and the company update, guest speaker and open discussion should take no more than 25 of those minutes, leaving 35 minutes of targeted discussion based on a predetermined agenda.
Iterations of this approach have helped guide the teams I supported and worked on from Facebook to Square and into Dropbox. We mapped out and drove successful growth of our infrastructure at each of these companies using some parts of this approach, if not the entire thing.
The other team meeting that is extremely vital is the Daily Standup. This is the exact opposite of this well structured meeting described as the Weekly Team Meeting. I have seen these work well without anyone taking notes or tracking action items. The Team Lead should always be the facilitator and there is no need for a timekeeper.
This is a 15 minute meeting where everyone gathers around and in three bullet points or less tells the rest of their teammates what is on their plate for the day. If one of the team members has a bunch of stuff and can’t get it done, this is the time to readjust workloads and call in the cavalry. If no one can act as the cavalry, this is where the Team Lead shifts priorities for the crew to get it done.
These meetings are more like an outline to the Weekly Team Meetings novel. Fast paced and furious, these are about getting stuff done. They are also essential to building a culture on individual teams of mutual support. We did this everyday at Square when I first joined and it helped us course correct to meet challenges like integrating Starbucks into our ecosystem while also planning our first global expansion market in Tokyo.
Another side effect of the Daily Stand Up is that as the team grows, it gives you an idea of when you need to start bifurcating into sub teams. The first year that I was at Square we had a team of no more than 10 people and the Daily Stand Up could go as long as 30 minutes on some mornings. This is okay, I mean like I said we had massive projects that a small team was stretching to pull together. But most days these should only be 15 minutes. If you start to see these things stretching to 30 minutes regularly, it is probably time to start thinking about how you reallocate resources so that you can tackle things in a better way.
Quarterly Organizational Reviews are A LOT of work. I say this right up front to emphasize that these kinds of meetings are only really valuable when you have an organization that is made up of a handful of smaller teams. Otherwise, you will have some folks working really hard to build a big presentation that no one has any time to absorb. So don’t even think about doing this kind of thing until you have reached a place where there is a group of teams that need to depend on one another but don’t need to check up with each other everyday.
These meetings usually have a little bit of pomp and circumstance to them. I hate PowerPoint slide decks as much as anyone, but these meetings require them in order to make sense. There should be a lot of charts and graphs to display. There should be long chats about success metrics. Most Silicon valley companies use the “OKR” methodology for delivering results. That stands for Objectives and Key Results.
The Organization Quarterly Review should focus on the various team’s OKRs. An Objective could be something like “Grow International Markets served by 3.” The Key Results associated with this could be 1. Complete business registration in 5 potential justidictions 2. Contract with International Freight Forwarder 3. Complete contracts to govern deployments in 5 International Markets 4. Complete service order for Colocation Space and Power in top three markets.
These Objectives should be time bound, so if you want to complete delivery of these markets by the end of the current year, you will need to make sure that the Key Results are wired to be completed in a time frame that matches that timeframe. These should be a stretch, you want to have your team push and grow. Constraints bring creativity and if you set a high bar, and hire the right people they will see that as a challenge. You don’t want to make them so much of a stretch that they are demotivating and you don’t want to use them as a hammer. OKRs should pull the entire Organization in the right direction even if the whole team isn’t nailing all of them all the time.
If you want to build a culture of ownership, and you do, you should also make sure that the people doing the work are the people who come up and chat about that work that has been done and how it measures against the OKRs in front of their peers. This is not for everyone and you shouldn’t force people who are not interested in public speaking to get up in front of the room and talk. No need to force people into a traumatic experience, but you should be using this as an opportunity to let people who do want to grow their skill set to utilize it as an opportunity.
The format of these meetings will vary as the size of the team grows. For the first few times this type of meeting happens it will be an opportunity for every team in the organization to give an update. Eventually, if you are building something like we built at Facebook and Square, these meetings will morph into an opportunity to make sure that every team gives their peers a meaningful update every six months.
These meetings should be engaging. Make them fun. Bring in snacks and make sure you have the proper AV equipment on hand. There will be a lot of first time public speakers and a handheld microphone is a tool they can use. You will also want to have microphones available for the audience to use when they want to ask questions. Not only because it will help everyone in the room hear the questions asked, but these days there are always remote workers and it will allow them to hear the question and answer.
Lastly, the week before the meeting you should have a system to allow members of the broader organization to ask questions anonymously. While they can put their name on it if they so choose, and you want to encourage transparency, folks aren’t always comfortable asking questions in an open forum. That doesn’t mean those questions shouldn’t be asked or are unimportant.
So, in summary… I agree that meetings can really be a time suck and a waste of resources. I have also seen that well run meetings with agendas based on their purpose are essential to keeping fast moving teams chugging along on the same path. If you think about meetings from both an efficiency and culture building perspective you will have useful meetings that further the mission of the team. This isn’t rocket science, but it is also really easy to get wrong so make sure you keep these things clear and explain why the meetings are happening so that there is no confusion. Remember that meetings are about the team and everything will be fine.