79. How to Escape Inessential Meetings

Episode Transcript

Verbs: Welcome to another episode of Focus on This, the most productive podcast on the Internet, so you can banish distractions, get the right stuff done, and finally start loving Mondays. I’m Verbs, here with Blake Stratton and our special guest Deidra Romero.

Blake: What’s up? What’s up?

Deidra: Hello. Wow! Thanks for having me, guys. I’m super excited to be here.

Blake: I’m excited to have you, Deidra. For those of you who have worked with us in the past in our BusinessAccelerator program, you know Deidra as the client success specialist (which is really fun to say five times fast)/genius/maker of everything happening/hero to clients, but in the Stratton household, we know Deidra as two things: really fun follow on IG, and a tremendous baker of sourdough. So, Deidra, welcome.

Deidra: This is true. Thank you for having me. Honestly, out of all of those accolades, I’m probably the most proud of the sourdough award you gave me, because that was a hard-fought one, honestly. It was one of my goals for 2020, and I crushed it. Yeah, it has become a lifelong skill of mine now. So, thanks for having me, Blake.

Blake: Since we’re live on a podcast, I figured now would be the best time to ask: Could it make it to your Big 3 to drop off another loaf sometime?

Verbs: I knew that was coming.

Deidra: I just baked a loaf on Sunday, so I’m not due. And no, because you don’t live near me anymore, so you don’t get bread deliveries in your mailbox.

Blake: That’s what it was about for you?

Deidra: Yeah! Literally.

Blake: Okay. Whatever.

Deidra: It was like, “I baked too much bread. Who can I take this to so it doesn’t go to waste?” So, you will have to relocate if you want to be in my bread circle now.

Blake: Awesome. I feel super special. On that note, let’s talk about what everyone loves, which is meetings. Don’t you love meetings, Deidra? Let’s have a meeting after this, actually.

Deidra: I love meetings. Yeah, we’re going to meet after this. You know, I love it when I wake up and look at my schedule for the day and it’s just bumper-to-bumper meetings. That’s really exciting.

Verbs: There are different kinds of meetings, though, guys. There’s your meeting about the meeting. Once you have the meeting, you need to have a meeting to debrief the meeting you just had and then figure out how you can have a better meeting and not have so many debriefing meetings.

Blake: Meetings are brilliant. They are really the cause of and solution to most of your problems at work.

Deidra: The cause and the solution. That’s right. I hear this a lot from incoming clients when they join BusinessAccelerator. I like to ask this magic wand question when I’m onboarding clients. I say, “If I had a magic wand and I could solve one problem for you, what problem would you want me to solve?” A lot of times, they say, “My calendar is just too crowded with meetings.”

Blake: So, do you bring out a magic wand? What happens next?

Deidra: Yeah, I do. I have a magic wand. I pull it out, and I do that whole thing right there on the first call.

Blake: Wow!

Verbs: It’s actually made of sourdough.

Blake: It’s kind of a floppy wand. It has softness to it.

Deidra: My sourdough is very crisp. Okay, Blake? Take it back.

Verbs: I was about to say…floppy sourdough? Is that a thing?

Blake: I guess I was just thinking if it’s a wand… I just assumed. Maybe it’s a really wide wand, like a loaf.

Deidra: It’s really just a breadstick. That’s all it is. It’s an Olive Garden breadstick. I just keep them under my desk and I just pull it out.

Blake: Okay, okay. If you do not have a magic breadstick to make your bad meetings go away, though… Let’s just assume maybe 20 or 30 percent of our audience don’t have that breadstick currently in their possession. For those people, what should we do if we’re feeling stressed because there are too many meetings and we don’t have time to do our real work? What should we do if, like our clients so often feel, our meetings are devouring our necessary productive time and are not producing the value we need them to produce? What do we do? Deidra, just sum it up for us.

Deidra: It’s a relationship with your calendar, honestly. Your calendar really needs to reflect your priorities.

Blake: Exactly. Your calendar needs to reflect your priorities. Well said. I would say, if you feel like you are the servant of your calendar, if you wake up and it’s, “Man, I wish I could do X, Y, and Z, but my calendar is crazy,” that’s a sign you need to make a change. You need to get to a place where your calendar is serving you and not the other way around, which means you have to start owning, or maybe a better term would be auditing, the meetings you are committing to on a regular basis.

Deidra: Yeah. Once you make that stance…you draw that boundary and say, “I’m not going to participate in meetings that aren’t serving me anymore”…that means you’re going to have more time to do the work that’s really important, and that’s what it’s all about. Right?

Verbs: The question still remains…How do you know which meetings to get out of? Well, we have a couple of clues for you today that are going to bring some clarity to that. So, what is the first clue that the time has come to get out of a meeting and excuse yourself?

Deidra: I’ve got this one. I know it right away. If your meeting is actually just a one-way conversation, if it’s just a monologue and not an actual conversation, that means that meeting is not necessary.

Blake: What do you mean a monologue, Deidra? Could you monologue on that for us?

Deidra: Let me just give you a monologue here. Sometimes you’re going into a meeting and you’re not contributing to the conversation. Someone is just downloading information to you. They’re giving you an update on something. They’re telling you how this deal played out or how this project went down, and you’re not really contributing to the conversation. You’re just downloading information. That’s a one-way meeting. Instead of that being a meeting on your calendar, it needs to be something else. I know you have some ideas, Blake, on other options.

Blake: Yeah, for sure. Making a video works really well. Let’s say you’re the person calling the meeting. Oh, well, there’s this update to this software or there’s a way we’re going to change the client delivery process. Maybe you lead a team, and you go, “You know what? I ought to have a meeting so everyone knows this is a serious thing.” Or maybe that’s just the culture. “Oh, well, I ought to have a meeting.”

Consider what the outcome is you actually want. Is the outcome “I want to get people’s opinions. I want to hear people’s reaction in real time”? Well, yeah. That’s not a monologue. That’s a conversation. But if it’s just, “I want people to know what’s what so they can take appropriate action this week or this month…”

In that case, consider sending just a message in your messaging service, like Slack. We use that a lot. Even companywide updates will be done through Slack. There’s no need to call a huge company meeting. Just send the message. Broadcast it to everyone. Or if you feel like you do want a more personal feel, create a video. I use this software called Loom. It’s free to use.

Deidra: Love it.

Blake: You just create a video, or you can even, if you want to explain something, do a screenshare of a process. You’ve done this for me before, Deidra, where you just go through a process in HubSpot or some software we need, and you say, “Blake, here’s how you do this,” and click, click, click, and then you send it to me. You’ve just saved each of us time in our calendar by avoiding that meeting.

Deidra: When there’s no back and forth happening, when there’s not input happening both ways, then that does not need to be a meeting. Now, can I put a caveat here? Am I allowed?

Verbs: Caveat away.

Deidra: Sometimes when you’re sharing really delicate or sensitive information, it should still be a meeting. That’s the one caveat I’ll put there. If you’re downloading information… Let’s say you had to let a team member go. Horrible situation. Very unfortunate. I don’t think that’s something you want to send a text message or a Slack message about. Even though you’re just downloading information, I still think it should be in person. Do you agree or disagree, Blake?

Blake: I think that’s a good caveat. I would accept that. In that example you have, I think part of the reason is that in sensitive situations you want to give some space, because you want to see people’s reactions in real time, or if people feel a certain way… A lot of times, when those meetings have been called it’s “I’m not planning on a conversation, but if it feels like one needs to happen, I want to make space for that.” Then, yeah. It may be a monologue, but you can schedule a meeting to deliver that for sure.

Verbs: Deidra, I’d be interested to hear input from you on this. It seems like during the pandemic, it has kind of forced us into more of that scenario to where things are getting recorded versus “Hey, let’s call a meeting,” just because meetings, unless they’re happening on Zoom, are just not going to happen. As you work with business leaders who are the ones who may be calling those types of meetings, have you seen a shift away from “Everything has to be a meeting” to more or less what we’re talking about here? Just kind of record it, send it in a Slack message, something like that?

Deidra: Absolutely. Especially with people working from home with young kids. They can’t always hop on a meeting. For a lot of our business owners, it’s just easier for them to get information to their team members and let them watch the video on their own time when the kids are outside playing or when they’re working on schoolwork. So, that gives greater flexibility to your team, you know, doing the Loom videos.

A lot of the barrier there was technology. We just didn’t have a better way. Back in the olden days, you had to call a meeting in order to show everybody the visuals and get everybody aligned. We just don’t have to do that anymore. There are a lot of great tools. I know you mentioned Loom. A lot of people like to use Vidyard. There are a few other tools like that that do screensharing, screencasting.

Verbs: All right. That was the first clue: it’s a monologue, not a conversation. The second clue: it has outlived its usefulness. Some meetings we just don’t need anymore. Help us understand how we get to that point.

Deidra: I have a confession, Blake. You know that meeting we have every Friday morning at 9:30?

Verbs: This is real talk, folks. Real talk.

Blake: You mean the one I ejected myself from?

Deidra: Yeah. You stopped coming.

Blake: No joke. I referenced that in the last podcast.

Deidra: You did?

Verbs: That is hilarious.

Blake: We were talking about “Can we delete a task or eliminate a task?” and I said, “Sometimes you need to eliminate a meeting. Like, this one time Deidra wanted to meet with me on Fridays…”

Deidra: Did you seriously call me out like that?

Blake: I didn’t name drop you. No, I didn’t.

Deidra: You put me on blast? Yeah. We have this meeting at 9:30 on Friday mornings, and the last three meetings have felt really useless. I read the information in Slack previous. I’d already received the information. I’m going to go ahead and just call it and put it in the grave, because it doesn’t need to happen anymore.

Blake: It’s one of those things where when you acknowledge that, I think it creates a positive culture of… We want our time and our calendar to serve our goals, not the other way around. By saying, “Hey, let’s default to not having the meeting…” In that instance, you’re meeting with two of our sales team, and if that meeting is not on their calendar, guess what gets to be on their calendar: sales calls, the stuff they’re actually paid to do that produces results.

I love that, because the worst-case scenario is you go a couple of weeks without that meeting and you go, “You know what? Maybe we were too aggressive. Let’s bring it back.” But if you never ask the question or if there’s not a culture of usefulness as the hallmark of a good meeting, then pretty soon, everyone is just sort of in the meeting, and it’s low energy, and it’s like, “All right. Now we’re going to do this. I guess we’ll do that. I don’t ever have enough time.”

Deidra: My meetings are never like that. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Rude. No, I totally agree with you. Officially, my feelings will no longer be hurt when you don’t attend that Friday morning meeting, because it’s not going to exist.

Blake: Okay, great. Again, does this affect a bread delivery in any way, shape, or form?

Deidra: Still no.

Blake: Okay, cool. Great. So, if a meeting has outlived its usefulness… One thing I would recommend everyone do is look at your calendar right now, unless you’re on the road. Just look through the last week or two and look at those meetings that are recurring, the ones that are “Oh, I always have this meeting at such-and-such time every week.”

One thing you want to look for is…Has it outlived its usefulness? Meaning, could you outright delete it? Or maybe it’s just, “We said we needed to have this meeting every day. We said we needed to have this meeting every week. Maybe we could actually get away with biweekly. Maybe we could get away with once a week.” Or maybe… And this has happened on our team, Deidra.

We used to have a standing meeting that was 90 minutes long, and we recognized “Guess what? When we create 90 minutes, it always takes 90 minutes.” We said, “What if we tried shortening this to 60 minutes?” On occasion, have we gone over and said, “Hey, if everyone has time let’s stick around”? Yeah, but 80 percent of the time, we’ve just saved everybody a half hour. So, that’s another way to think through that process. Has it outlived its usefulness? Could you just outright get rid of it or limit the frequency or shorten the time of the meeting?

Deidra: I actually have another confession to make. Is this a confession podcast?

Blake: “These are my confessions!” I can’t sing any more of that song. Otherwise we have to pay for it, but you know what I’m talking about.

Deidra: I found myself on a meeting just a couple of weeks ago, and I literally got on the meeting… I don’t even know this person who asked me to meet with them. I tried before the meeting… Okay. Somebody requested a meeting with me. I tried to be like, “Hey, what’s this meeting about?” without being rude, and then I got on the meeting and I still didn’t know what the meeting was about. And guess what, Blake. The other person who requested the meeting with me also didn’t know what the meeting was about.

Verbs: How does that happen?

Deidra: There’s nothing I hate more than showing up to a meeting that doesn’t have a clear objective. That’s our third clue that your meeting has a problem.

Blake: Exactly. Third clue: your meeting has no clear purpose, no clear objective for “What are we trying to accomplish in this meeting? What’s the agenda?” If there’s no agenda set, that’s a recipe for disaster. That’s a recipe for the first 10 minutes is just small talk, and then you kind of get into something, and then you end up with hazy, unclear outcomes. It’s the worst.

Deidra: It’s the worst. She was like, “What do you know about this?” and I was like, “I know nothing about this.” I was like, “What do you know about this?” and she was like, “I know nothing about this.” So, we both had to go back and do homework, and then guess what? We had to meet again, because we didn’t have a clear objective. That hasn’t happened to me in years. I was kind of slapping my wrists after I got off the call, like, “Gosh! Don’t ever go into a meeting again without a really clear purpose and objective.”

Blake: I’ll give an example from my own world. I’ll be on calls sometimes with prospective clients of ours. Someone maybe has watched a webinar, or something like that, and they schedule time. I have an intake form, so I typically have a sense for what they want to talk about, but what I’ve made a part of my process is…

This books 45 minutes on my calendar, so I made it a part of my process at the start of the meeting to sync up expectations, to say, “Hey, before we dive in, let’s sync up our expectations for this call. Here’s what I am planning on doing in terms of an agenda. Does that sound right to you? Is that okay?” I’ve been on calls before, and I’ll state this agenda, and I’ll be like, “Cool. So, what do you need help with?” and they’re like, “Nothing.”

I kind of consider my role almost like coming to the doctor’s office. Obviously, I’m not treating physical ailments, but business ailments, people struggling to get a double win in their life or their business, you know, identifying those problems and then prescribing a solution, whether it be us or another resource. So, if someone comes to me, like coming to the doctor’s office, and nothing is wrong, I’m like, “Hey, great. That’s awesome that nothing is wrong.” I’ve literally just said, “It has been great talking to you.” I’m looking for people with problems.

Deidra: And you end the meeting?

Blake: Oh yeah. I’ve ended meetings after 10 or 15 minutes, because it’s clear… I’m like, “What made you want to schedule the call?” “Oh, well, I just really like what you guys do.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s awesome. Well, thank you so much. I’m sure you have important stuff to do today, so, congratulations. You get 30 minutes back.”

Deidra: I hate feeling like I’m being held hostage on a meeting. It’s so much worse on Zoom, too, because you have no control. So, I’m glad you do that and give people that time back.

Blake: Absolutely. That’s maybe a tip: be clear before the meeting. This is one of the reasons we recommend in the Weekly Preview to look at the landscape, to do a weekly overview to see what meetings are on your calendar. At that point, consider “Is the objective for each of these meetings I have on my calendar clear, and if not, let me…”

If you have an assistant, maybe they can do this for you, but if you don’t, go ahead and send an email. Just say, “Hey, just checking in about that meeting on Wednesday. I’m not clear on what exactly we want to accomplish. Could you send me an agenda?” That saves you a ton of time before you get into your week.

Then, if you’re on the call and it’s still not clear… Maybe it’s because I’m an introvert, Deidra. There is nothing so sweet… It’s almost like, if you can imagine, a perfectly crusty, warm, “soft on the inside” slice of bread with some butter on it. That’s the sweetness. That’s what it’s like when someone cancels a meeting for me. They’re like, “Oh, you know what? We’ve got to cancel this.” I’m like, “Oh, this is amazing.” Am I the only one?

Deidra: No. It’s real.

Blake: When someone cancels a meeting, I’m almost always like, “This is awesome.” So, you’re not the bad guy if you say, “Hey, you know, I really want to respect your time. It feels like maybe we’re not ready to have this meeting yet. Could we go ahead and just press pause on this, and if we feel like we need to have it next week, we can reach out?” You’d be surprised. You’re not the bad guy. You’re probably the hero.

Verbs: In middle school, we used to call that recess. Everybody runs out of the door screaming. All right. That was the third clue: it has no clear objective. Let’s talk about this fourth clue: it doesn’t require your contribution. What do you do in that sense? I imagine this kind of goes back to feeling like it’s more of a monologue, at least from your end, if you’re not actually bringing anything to the table or nothing is really required of you to bring to the table.

Deidra: I don’t know that that requires my contribution.

Verbs: I see what you did there.

Deidra: It doesn’t mean the meeting doesn’t need to happen. It just means maybe you don’t need to be there for it and you could just get notes afterward on what was decided. Leaders, I think, especially… If you’re in a director or manager role, you feel like you need to be in all of these meetings. That’s just not true. You’re kidding yourself. Nobody needs you that much. We always overinflate our own importance. They don’t need us. People just need to meet, share the information, figure out the solution, and then give us action items and maybe an overview of what was decided at the meeting.

Blake: Deidra, you just said something interesting. Maybe the meeting needs to happen, but you don’t necessarily need to be there. Let’s drift for a second here. What does it mean for a meeting to have to happen? What are some meeting examples or objectives where, yeah, that meeting does need to happen?

Deidra: Well, personally, I think a good meeting is any meeting where you’re doing some kind of singing or performing in general, Blake.

Blake: Oh, sure. Absolutely.

Deidra: And if you’re there and you’re in your performance mode, I also need to be there.

Blake: Exactly. The accounting team invites me to all of these meetings, and I thought, “You know what? I don’t know if this needs my contribution,” and they say, “Blake, we heard you sprinkle in some Usher into that last podcast. Our meetings are a little bit of a snooze fest, talking spreadsheets. Can you bring some of that flavor?” The answer is you’ll have to talk to my EA, Chad Cannon, about that.

Deidra: Yeah, right.

Blake: I’m just kidding. So, a meeting that needs to happen. I have my own thoughts on this. Deidra, I don’t want to step on… Or Verbs, you can weigh in on this too. What are some examples of meetings, maybe even recurring meetings, that feel like, “No, that is really necessary”?

Deidra: Absolutely meetings with your direct reports. That needs to happen at some frequency. It probably doesn’t need to happen at the frequency you have it set at. A lot of people think they need to meet with their direct reports twice a week. Goodness! You do not need to meet that much.

Verbs: I’ll say, from our side, because we’re working cross-collaboratively with events and getting those up and going, sometimes it’s necessary to establish a decent frequency of those meetings to where everybody feels like they’re being informed, and if something has changed on the whim or we needed to pivot somewhere… I think those types of meetings are necessary just so we all stay on the same page as we approach the event, and that way everybody is in alignment there.

Deidra: I think when things are changing quickly like that, Verbs, when you’re working toward an aggressive deadline and it’s imminent, you always want to err on the side of overcommunication, but that doesn’t mean over-meetings. Overcommunication can still happen without a ton of meetings. So, I love that you pointed that out, and I think it’s crucial to understand, “Okay. I’m overcommunicating, because this is a quickly moving target, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to have a ton of extra meetings.”

Blake: Yeah. There are a couple of things that come to my mind. One is creativity. A meeting, by definition, requires multiple people, and there are some things that can’t happen in a silo.

Deidra: I totally agree.

Blake: You know, can’t happen just working on your own, trying harder, or whatever else. One of those things is the creativity that comes up when you’re developing strategy for a project or strategy to hit a goal. There is something in that collaborative environment that is just not possible if we’re not meeting together for a period of time. You know, getting out a whiteboard, brainstorming ideas… You don’t want to do this too frequently. You basically just want to do this when you’re trying to set course for achieving a goal or achieving a project.

So, that’s one: when you need creative strategy or development of something. The other thing that comes to mind is connection. I’m bringing this up because we’ve really leaned all of these clues to be, “Hey, make these meetings really useful. Make them productive.” The assumption is this is something that’s going to be task-oriented, project-oriented, goal-oriented, but I think it’s worth noting that sometimes, particularly nowadays when a lot of us can’t meet all together as a team…there’s not a lot of in-office connection that happens because we’re all around each other…I think it’s helpful to have…

You can’t really get the type of connection you need to develop the culture that maybe you want without some meeting time for connection. Here’s the trick, though. I know we’re a little off topic here, but I just think this is important to say, because this is a personal frustration of mine. Going back to the clear objective, if connection is… Sometimes we have unproductive meetings, and we say, “Oh, well, it’s good to just connect.”

For me, I would much rather say, “Hey, we are going to have a happy hour Friday meeting and the purpose is just to connect.” Two things will happen. First, your actual work meetings will be way more productive if they’re not having to bear the burden of people’s connection time. Secondly, you will have deeper connection. Your team is like, “Oh, connection matters. I don’t have to wonder if we’re spending too much time in small talk right now.” So, for me, I would say, a clear objective and usefulness could be just connection, and you can’t get it over Slack.

Verbs: I will say, Blake, if I can add to what you just said, even when we were having our in-person meetings, there would be times where it was just a connection meeting, whether it was Michael or Megan explicitly saying, “Hey, this is time just to connect, so we don’t need to talk about work or anything like that. Let’s just play UNO and drink pop.”

Blake: So, we kind of drifted here naturally where we’re like, “What’s a good meeting?” Before we run down these four clues again, let’s do some quick, rapid-fire tips for how our listeners can take back time on their calendar. Let me kick off the rapid-fire tips here. The first one, coming from a sales perspective, is when you are trying to remove a meeting from your calendar, don’t worry about feeling guilty.

Instead, shift your focus to “How is me missing this meeting going to make my team’s objectives easier, better? Obviously, they’re going to miss out on the Usher references in the meeting, but how is me missing the meeting going to benefit what’s interesting or important to them?” For example, we kind of jokingly said, “Hey, I’m going to miss this meeting on Fridays.”

But what I could say is, “Hey, I want that meeting to be shorter if it can be, which means not having me speak up every five seconds with a joke. It’s going to go smoother. It’s going to go faster. But also, it’s going to help our team hit its goal, because I’m going to use that time over here doing X, Y, and Z thing.” So, think about, “What’s important to my boss? What’s important to my team?” before you request to not be a part of the meeting.

Deidra: Here’s another tip. Whenever you’re canceling a meeting, suggest another way to achieve the goal of the meeting. That means, “Hey, I’m going to follow up with a Slack message. Instead of having this meeting, I’m going to post a Slack message with all of the details and the links you need” or “I’m going to send you a Loom video.” So, the goal of the meeting is still achieved, and once again, this is one of those one-way meetings we’re talking about. When you eliminate it, you still need to acknowledge, obviously, that you’re eliminating it and help people understand, “Hey, instead of doing it, we’re going to do this.”

Verbs: Another way that will help is if it’s actually decided that the meeting is still necessary, then suggest decreasing the meeting time. If it’s not going to take a full hour, there’s no reason to schedule a full hour, but give a realistic time frame where that meeting will be finished and people can be released to do their work.

Deidra: I love doing that. I love thinking like, “Oh, this should maybe be a 30-minute meeting,” but just challenging and saying, “Can we get it done in 15, though?” It’s kind of a fun game.

Blake: And one last tip, because we’ve shared a bunch on here. The most practical book I have ever read and, in my opinion, maybe…this is going to sound wild…one of the best books, top three books, we’ve ever produced as a company is one of the shortest books we’ve ever produced. It’s called No-Fail Meetings.

All it is, people, is practical, useful, immediately applicable tips, templates, and tools for making your life better, making your calendar better, making your team’s culture better by clarifying what’s a great meeting, what’s not, and how do we only have good ones. Go to nofailmeetings.com and check it out today.

Verbs: The good news is you don’t have to keep feeling imprisoned by your calendar. You can get out of meetings that aren’t serving you by escaping meetings that are more like monologues, have outlived their usefulness, lack a clear objective, or don’t require your contribution. Deidra, again, thanks for being on the show with us today. Do you have any final thoughts for our Focus on This listeners?

Deidra: I do. Actually, I want to pose a challenge, if that’s okay. I like to do this with our clients in BusinessAccelerator. I want to challenge you. When you’re planning your week next week… So, if you’re doing your Weekly Preview, you’re looking ahead at next week, try to eliminate one meeting or cut one meeting in half. That is a gift I’m going to give you guys, and I will leave it at that.

Verbs: Thanks for joining us on Focus on This. This is the most productive podcast on the Internet, so please share it with your friends. Remember to use #focusonthispodcast. We’ll be here next week with another great episode. Until then…

Blake & Verbs: Stay focused!

Blake: Okay, Deidre.

Deidra: What happened?

Blake: I’ll give you one more chance.

Deidra: I didn’t know! Nobody told me. Thanks for having me. It was fun.