Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: Today I'm talking with Andrew Moore. Andrew is the principal consultant in Australia for the Table Group, where He works with CEOs and executive teams to help them apply the concepts of organisational health. His clients span a broad spectrum of organizations in fields including emergency services, construction, market research, travel, telecommunications, education and insurance. Prior to partnering with the table group in 2012, Andrew worked as CEO of Harcourt's Real Estate, Western Australia. Andrew holds a doctorate in Cultural Change Management and postgraduate degrees in Economics and Strategic Organizational Development, and lives with his wife and family in Bris Vegas. Andrew and I connected on LinkedIn in 2018 and I was lucky enough to meet him that same year when I visited my hometown of Brisbane. The focus of our conversation today is meetings, and I know you'll also be fascinated by his insight into why meetings are so important and why, as leaders, it is vital to have great meetings. Andrew, welcome to the Culture of Things podcast.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: Thanks, Brendan. Great to be here, mate.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: Let's get straight, and what I'd like you to do is just to give listeners a bit of an overview of your journey, even a little bit about the Table Group and this concept of organizational health.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: The Table Group We're a firm, we're run by or led by Patrick Lencioni, who's an author, he's written several books, including, most famously, the Five Dysfunctions of A Team. And as a firm, we've got a small group of consultants spread out around the world, mostly in the us, but a few of us in Australia and in Europe.
And we work with leadership teams and CEOs mostly in the area of organizational health. And when we talk about organizational health, we talk about four key disciplines. One is the idea of getting the team highly functional, so getting the leadership team really functional. Without that, you can't really do anything. And once the team is able to discuss, debate, decide and execute together in a strong way, then we want them to create clarity for the organisation. So this is exactly what we are going to do as an organisation. And clarity is different to certainty. It's important to note that no one can be certain. The markets move, you know, government policies change, so we can't give anybody certainty. But we can say right now, in the current circumstances, this is what we're all going to do and we're all going to roll in the same direction. So we ask them to work as a team to clarify, here's what we're doing as an organization, then to communicate that really clearly and make sure the system supported and the broad categories there. We. We talk about that as organizational health, an organization that's doing that. So that's what we do. We spend our time doing that with leadership teams and as I say, CEOs in a lot of cases. Myself, I joined the table group in 2012 formally. I've been talking to them the year before that, originally as an international partner and then as what they call a PC or an internal consultant two or three years after that. And yeah, it's been a really great journey to spend all of my time sort of working with people, meeting with people like yourself, Brendan, and other sort of leaders of the industry and working in organizations that are genuinely putting these things into practice, which is always really exciting.
[00:02:53] Speaker A: Let's get into our topic around meetings. First of all, let's put some context around this. Why are meetings so important?
[00:02:59] Speaker B: I think I'll take a leaf from Pat's book here. Pat, my boss Effectively, we talk about, if you're a surgeon, then the surgery table is kind of your place. If you're a teacher, the classroom is kind of your place. Well, if you're an executive or someone in a management role, then the meeting is kind of your place. It's what it is that you do. Coordinating people, coordinating resources, coordinating talent, taking advantage of the talent in your team. Most of that genuinely happens in the meeting. It's where the ideas come together. It's where alignment comes from. So a team that doesn't have good meetings really can't be a good team. It's where you combine the ideas and you take advantage of the different capacities and views and perspectives of the people and you bring them to bear on the problem that you face together. The whole notion of meetings being anything other than the central part of any given day, I think fails to see why we organize originally. The notion of coming together to organize is that we're trying to do more together than we could do by ourselves. And the way we coordinate that activity is largely through meeting together, discussing challenges, and then and then deciding on what we're going to do together. I don't think meetings could be any.
[00:04:04] Speaker A: More critical, given your experience. If you could put a percentage on good meetings versus bad meetings in an organization, where would you say that percentage sits?
[00:04:13] Speaker B: I would say 95% bad. Most meetings are terrible. And that kind of comes back to our measure of what a good meeting is. We would say that the two things that a meeting needs to be a genuinely good meeting, number one, it needs to not be boring. It needs to be engaging, it needs to be interesting, it needs to be vibrant, it needs to Have a real life to it. The reason for that is because, as I said before, the point of the meeting is to move information from some people to other people. We need people talking about challenging things. We need other people listening to that so that we can A share different perspectives. So if we're trying to make a decision, we can make the best possible decision given the knowledge that we all have and B, so we can all learn, learn from the other people in the team. You know, the whole two heads are better than one thing. So that's the notion of why we're in a meeting. And if you're not really listening or not really contributing because you're not engaged because the meeting's boring, then it fails. So the very first thing a good meeting has to be is interesting and engaging and most meetings fail right there. Most meetings are boring. Most meetings spend a lot of time talking about things that aren't relevant to all parties or in a way that's off track and people feel disillusioned with it. There's lots of wasted time with them and they fail to engage properly because of that. Second thing you need to have a good meeting is you've got to be spending most of your time talking about the most important things. So if the majority of your time is spent doing the most important things and it's being talked about in an interesting way, it's super engaging, then you have a good meeting. The other thing, if you were going to pick a third one, you would say we conclude at the end, we come to a conclusion is what we're going to do and that conclusion is clear. So it ends with clarity. Most meetings fail on one or more of those of those criteria. So that's why I say most meetings aren't good in that sense. And you can tell because of the relationship people have with meetings. So people talk quite negatively about meetings, whether it's their own meetings, the number of meetings. If they were really engaging and most important things were getting the most time, people wouldn't speak like that about them.
[00:06:07] Speaker A: In the hybrid working world, I've seen too many business owners and their businesses suffer because of poor performing employees leading to below average results. If you want to improve your employees performance to deliver consistent results for your business, you have to master one on one meetings. The doors to our master one on one meetings training program are opening soon. I'll teach you how to improve employee performance and deliver consistent results using one on one meetings. To be one of the first people notified when the doors open, go to leaderbydesign AU waitlist, don't wait, sign up now. Absolutely. Again, there's that phrase coming in my head, you know, not another meeting. I want to get some real work done. So you just talked about the things that are really important around having good meetings. So that's the 5% of people out there that are having great meetings. Let's contrast that so it's really clear for the 95%. What does a bad meeting look like and what is the impact a bad meeting?
[00:07:11] Speaker B: I think a bad meeting would be one opposing that. So a bad meeting would be boring to start with. Normally that's one way to have a bad meeting. Another way to have a bad meeting would be where you're hearing dominantly from one person. So we fail to share information in a genuine way. Another challenge, sometimes in meetings where it goes bad is a topic might start and people get excited about that topic and then they all get caught up in that topic. But that topic is only relevant to a few key people and it's not the most important thing that we should be discussing. So if you're spending a lot of time in a meeting going, this really isn't relevant. We've got this other thing to talk about. We're not talking about the real thing. That's probably a bad meeting. It's not one that you feel like we've got clarity at the end, like I don't feel I'm better able to do my job. I don't feel I better understand what it is that we're trying to do as an organization. When a meeting ends with these sorts of feelings in it, then that's, that's a bad meeting. And I'd say that's a typical meeting. A typical meeting. You'll come in, it might be an information cascade. The leader will come in and say, right, here's what I need to tell you. Do this, do this, do that. Who's got an issue? Someone brave might raise an issue and then they might get a bunch of different responses. They might get a gather a bit of information around it. You might have sort of department check ins where you hear from everybody about what's going in their department, but no one's really sure what they're supposed to check in on, what they're supposed to raise, what they're not supposed to raise. And it can sometimes deteriorate into everything's fine in my area. I'll just think of something to say because I don't really want to be vulnerable or share with people here what's actually going on, I'll do that in the background. Because this meeting, I'm a bit uncomfortable sharing in front of other people. So I won't share things in my space. So it becomes sort of transactional or platitudinal in what people share. So really, it's got nothing in it. It's got nothing in it. We talk about what we have to talk about. That would be a typical bad meeting.
[00:08:56] Speaker A: In your role, you observe a lot of meetings and you help coach leaders with meetings. Tell us a story that you may have where you've just seen a really, really bad meeting.
[00:09:05] Speaker B: I think the worst meeting observe is after you've explained to them how they should run a good meeting. And you go in and they're just doing what they've always done and they ignored everything you said. I think that's. That's the worst type of meeting to go into. And you sit there and you think, no, you're not doing that. Okay, now you've done. I think that a worst meeting. I haven't had a sort of a horror story meeting. And I think that's the problem. We think that a bad meeting should be something that is obviously bad. I mean, people have been in meetings where it got very emotional, people took offense and it sort of went socially bad. But that's really quite uncommon in my experience, anyway, every now and then, and most people can remember when it has happened, so it's not that frequent. I think the typical bad meeting, the problem with a bad meeting is that it's really just nothing. It's sort of like a. It's kind of like a zombie meeting. I think that's what a bad meeting is. It's just a meeting that's just like every other meeting. And it kind of doesn't cover anything. It's just the volume of bad meetings that's the problem, rather than. Than being critically bad. I think if they were critically bad in that there was immediate emotional or organizational damage done from the back of that meeting, we would address the meeting's problem. The issue is that they're progressively and consistently and culturally and expectedly bad. When I say bad, I mean boring and unfocused and inconsequential in a lot of cases. And you might get a bit of information from them, but nowhere near what's required to WARRANT an hour, 45 minutes, a bit of benefit. So it's really the volume of bad meetings that's the problem. It's they're all kind of bad and in their weight. They just dominate and make the whole of the workplace, terrible. I think in a lot of cases make it drudgery when it doesn't need to be.
[00:10:43] Speaker A: What is it that as leaders we're not getting? Because I know myself, I mean, I held those meetings that you're talking about that are bad, terrible. I'm like, wow, why did I even think that that was good? I'm not sure I thought it was good, but I didn't know any better. Why do we just have this expectation that meetings are bad?
[00:10:57] Speaker B: I think it stems from the nature of what a leader thinks that their role is. I think as we think our role is to have that strategic insight, to see over the horizon and to kind of be pulling the levers as we need to. Quite often we think of our role as a leader to communicate out to the broader organization about the direction, to be visionaries and foreseers and those sorts of key parts. In our language, you would say it was smart that most leaders think that the key part of their role is smart. And one bit that gets neglected is that ownership of their team. And as a consequence of not really owning their team, they don't really own their meetings. Let me do that in two parts. So the first one is owning your team means taking responsibility for them as individuals in how they coordinate together, what work they're doing, what work they're not doing, having challenging behavior conversations with them, and all those sorts of things. You've got to say, well, this is my team. If this team or any individual within this team isn't doing well, then that's my personal responsibility. You can't just hire great people and expect them to just do their work. If you hire senior enough, you won't have to. Manage them is not a thing. That's not a legitimate thought process. All people need management top to bottom of any organization. So once you own your team and you have taken that sense of that's part of a key part of my leadership role. Even as a very senior CEO, where it's always harder sometimes, then you've got to say, well, as part of owning my team, I need to own my meetings. So if I own the meeting, which doesn't mean that necessarily I'm facilitating all of them. But if they're bad, that's my problem. If they're unfocused, that's my problem. If they don't conclude, that's my problem. If we're not clear on what we're agreeing to do, that's my problem. If they're boring, that's my problem. This is my meeting. I own this meeting. And it'll be how good this meeting is that delivers how good our team performs. And it will be this leadership team's performance that dictates how successful we are as an organization as a whole. And to clearly see that not only is your responsibility, but a clear causal change or at very least the number one lever you have to pull in influencing your organization. I think it's leaders that fail to see that and to understand their role in that that leads to most bad meetings. Second to that, most people learn how to run their meetings from the meetings that they are in with their boss. So if the senior leadership team is having bad meetings, you can almost guarantee that the next layer of the organization are also having bad meetings because we've set and accepted that level, that expectation.
So in a little bit of that, there's kind of the solution too. It has to come from the top down. You do get pockets of brilliance in lots of organizations where someone's taken the initiative. But broadly, if some organization, if some meetings in the organization are bad, probably most of them are.
[00:13:33] Speaker A: We've built meetings up a lot. I think we've hopefully we've given people a perspective or you've given people a perspective on how important these things are to get right and to improve upon. How about you tell us a little bit about the different types of meetings so that people get a context around it. Because that is a big problem, isn't it? Understanding the different types of meetings?
[00:13:50] Speaker B: Well, one of the challenges is if you don't know what you're supposed to be talking about in this meeting, it's very hard to stay on topic. So we try and break them up. So we say, well, there's different topics. There's administrative topics, there's tactical topics, there's strategic topics, and then there's kind of nebulous, over the horizon, really, really big picture topics. And to cover each of these topics in one meeting gets very, very messy. We talk about as meeting stew. So Pat talks about it as meeting stew. When you're just trying to, you don't really know, am I supposed to be talking in this level of detail? Do we need to move to a strategic topic? And all the challenges associated with that. So what we try and do is we try and say, right, there are different types of meetings. The very first type of meeting is an admin meeting. And this is the day to day, little bits and pieces, coordinating diaries, being in meetings together and appointments, little bits and pieces that you need to be able to talk about that. And for anyone that's co located, which I assume basically no one is at the moment, but even in a virtual sense, this is actually even more impactful. We call the daily check in. So a daily check in is Normally very short, 5 minutes, 10 minutes of the absolute outside. And really what you're doing is you're just coordinating everybody's diaries and you're creating a place where those relationships that have been built in that team can be maintained every day. Lots of teams that we're working with at the moment are doing this virtually and have found that if they were doing it, it was okay and kind of important before when they were all co located or working in the same office. Now it's extremely important and it's yielding great results for any team that's done that. So the first thing I would advocate is if you're a remote team just checking in for five minutes at the start of the day, if everybody's working, anyone that is working should be on the call. If you're not working today, you don't have to be and really just go around and hear from everybody really quickly. So we call that the daily check in. That's been the meeting number one. That should get most of the small admin things out of the road. So that when you get to your weekly meeting, or what we call a tactical meeting, you're able to focus in on what's important in the next couple of weeks. How are we going on what we're trying to do collectively and how we're tracking against sort of key tactical measures. The key word there is tactical. So this is the normal meeting that everybody dumps everything into, like the weekly staff meeting or the fortnightly staff meeting or team meeting. Getting this meeting right kind of fixes the rest of it. But that's the second type of meeting. One of the key things with this meeting is it shouldn't have big strategic topics in it. A strategic topic is something that's going to take longer than 20 minutes to talk about or really isn't relevant in the next two to three weeks.
So if it's not important in the next two to three weeks or it's going to take longer than 20 minutes to talk about, then don't put it in your tactical meeting. Put that in its own meeting. Let me give a little context there. Lots of people become managers because they want to talk about those big strategic topics. That's the fun stuff. That's why you go to business school. That's why you're interested in like how things coordinate. And we can solve this system, we can solve that problem with this. It's talking about those big ideas that's actually quite fun. Because it's quite fun though we tend to get distracted by it in the tactical meetings and we fail to talk about the tactical things that we need to on a weekly basis. But we also fail to talk about the big things properly. So we find that over a period of week after week after week we might raise and half discuss a really important issue and feel like we never really concluded because it's too big for that forum. So we say a strategic topic deserves its own meeting. And once you understand that a strategic topic deserves its own meeting, you've kind of, you've got, you create space for it and you move it out. Once you move that, that the big strategic meetings into the big strategic topics into their own meetings. We call them ad hocs. So strategic ad hocs. We would advocate having a backlog of ad hoc topics. So here are the four or five big topics we know as a team, we still haven't fixed, we haven't dealt with and we're going to do these over a series of meetings. So the first meeting is admin. The second meeting will be a daily tactical or your weekly tactical rather. And your third one is ad hoc strategic meetings. The fourth type of meeting we advocate is a quarterly sort of off site or a big check in. And that might be one to two days every quarter. And in that meeting you don't want to be too tight with it. We don't want to be too specific, but it's for over the horizon conversations. How are we going with our own health and our own team functionality? How's the big picture plan going? How are we going against the annual strategic and whatnot, those broader questions. So that's what you want to be dealing with in your quarterly off sites.
[00:17:45] Speaker A: Soon as people talk meetings, they think agenda or preparing an agenda. Tell us about agendas for meetings. Because all of these types of meetings is like, wow, I'm having these four types of meetings. I better prepare four different types of agendas.
[00:17:57] Speaker B: I think it's different for different meetings. And the most challenging one, as I said before, is the. Is that tactical meeting. And that's typically the one where everybody maybe if it's a Monday morning meeting, you might send out an email on Friday and see if anyone got any topics for the agenda. And two people will send something back and the rest of the team won't mention anything. So the leader comes up with their own agenda. And then we walk into the meeting and what we've basically got is last week's conversation that we can go back to. And we've got two or three agenda points from the leader and maybe one or two agenda points from everybody else. And what that doesn't target remembering the two things that make a meeting good is one is engagement and the other one is that the most important things get the most time get the bulk of the time. So one of the key challenges is how do you determine as a team or even as the leader or facilitator of the meeting what the most important thing to spend the time is on. And we would say you can't really know that on Friday afternoon. If your meeting's next Monday or next Tuesday, you can't even really know it as one individual before you get into the meeting. So in that particular case. Now that's not true for strategic ad hoc meetings. So in a strategic ad hoc meeting, we know what the topic is. And what we needed rather than an agenda for that is we need a process. We're going to have two hours and we're going to go through a process here where we look at all the options we discuss, we bring people up to speed on the challenge that we're facing, we raise options, and we might, you know, brainstorm, whiteboard some options and then we might narrow down, then we might make a decision or the leader or the decision maker will make a decision on which of those options we're going to take in what combination or what the action plan will be. So that's sort of a, that's a pretty standard, like a open, narrow, close as facilitator would discuss it. Structure of a meeting in and around a specific topic. So an ad hoc meeting, a strategic ad hoc is quite specific, but it's the tacticals that get messy because we don't really know what we need to deal with until we've kind of heard from everybody.
[00:19:41] Speaker A: I wanted to raise the point you mentioned earlier around the daily check in, how does that meeting look? And the reason why I want you to do this around these four meetings is, you know as well as I do, most leaders, when they hear, all right, there's these meeting structures, they can understand the concept, but they think, oh no, it feels like I'm going to have to have more meetings and that's the last thing I want to do. So go into a little bit of detail around the daily check in first, then we'll work through the others.
[00:20:07] Speaker B: Okay, so a daily check in it's normally brief. When it used to be in room, I used to say at the end of the time you're just allowed to walk away because it is a meeting that does tend to expand. I would say, if you understand the purpose, there's two purposes to that. One is to move administrative information around between team members for coordinative purposes. Ultimately, you should be able to reduce the number of emails between the team through the rest of the day. Little quick conversations. What have you got going on? Okay. Yep. What do you got going on? Okay. We would say share two or three things, maybe your big rocks for the day. Big things that you're doing today, big things that are on your mind, your key focuses and that just lets you coordinate with other members of the team about what's going on. So really it's team coordination. That's one of the big things. The second thing it does is it just reminds everybody that this team is the most important team that you're part of so you don't get distracted by people further down in the organization or different departments or whatnot. That's an enabling thing for alignment so that the team can stay aligned around what we're doing together. It keeps the team connected, it keeps the relationships in the team strong. So the relationship and then the coordination at admin. So pretty simply you would say, Brendan, what are your two or three things for today? You would say, I'm going to have this conversation with Andrew on a podcast and this afternoon I've got another meeting and I've also got to do some administration from a session that I did yesterday. So. Great. Next person. It takes about that long, you might have time for one little follow up question. But if you had a team of 10, which would be a reasonably large team in our books, that still shouldn't take longer than 5 minutes, 30 seconds. You can actually talk about a lot of stuff.
[00:21:30] Speaker A: I know you mentioned this earlier, but I want to raise it again in the context of this because we're specifically talking daily check in. What do you think, or what do you see is the biggest issue that teams or leaders face in that daily check in as to why they go for longer that five or ten minutes?
[00:21:45] Speaker B: Normally it's because the topic escalates past administrative. So we talk about it administratively. We might say, well, I've got a, I'm rejigging that form for you. And someone else might talk about, yeah, we should do the other forms as well. Yes. And then we should talk about the form system. Okay. Actually, you know that anyone Notice that we have to go through a lot of protocols in order to get anything approved. It's really getting quite frustrating. And then the conversation's gone. So it's letting it deviate and missing the point. You can certainly have pre conversations and post conversations, but there is a bit of discipline in saying we are for this next five minutes, we're just going to talk about what everybody needs to be in. And then after that have side conversations after that, have side meetings about things that might have appeared in this meeting. And that tends to be what happens. So you might have the quick call and then you go, actually, I hear, I heard, you know, Brendan talk about that meeting he's got this afternoon. I need to talk to him before that. I'll get on a call straight after with him because he's reminded me that that needs to happen. But don't have that conversation in the meeting necessarily. That's how you keep it to time.
[00:22:38] Speaker A: So it really comes back to that word discipline. Understanding the different types of meetings and people in the group, particularly the leader, having the discipline to, if it starts to go down that path, to stop it. And if the rest of the team understand that there are meeting disciplines in the four months that we're going through, they will know that there will be an opportunity to get through these things if they're indeed important for the group to discuss.
[00:22:59] Speaker B: I like the word discipline, but I've got a lot I like more at the moment it's intentionality because I think if the whole team understands what the intention is, then they can all support it and we don't have to create people trying to get off the boat and then other people trying to force them back on. So we don't have to create as much friction in the system. We just articulate clearly what the intention is and that we want to be intentional in how we do it. And everyone comes with that understanding. If everyone understands what we're trying to do in this meeting, then there shouldn't be too much force involved in it. It doesn't need to, it's just. It's a self discipline if anything.
[00:23:31] Speaker A: Let's move on to the second type of meeting you mentioned, the tactical meeting, the weekly tactical meeting. Give us a bit of an outline of that.
[00:23:37] Speaker B: So weekly tactical meeting is the big one to get right. If you're doing your admin topics out of that and you're pushing your strategic topics out of that, then you should be in a good weekly flow or a good monthly or annual flow with your meetings. If you get that right. The structure is unique. The first thing we would say for this is we don't have a pre work made agenda. We make a real time agenda and we make it through two things. First, when we first come into the meeting, we do a quick lightning round, which is pretty similar to, you could call it a weekly version of the daily catch up. And really it's just what are the couple of things that you've got on this week? What are the big things that are happening between now and the next meeting for you or big things that you have on your plate? That is we call it the lightning round. And you've got to do that fast, otherwise it will hijack the meeting. It's not a department report, it's just a. Here is a couple of things that are going on for us. So we do that first. The point of that is to inform everybody about what is going on in everybody's head. Gives everyone a chance to talk initially so they all engage in the meeting and it gets a few things on the table that might become agenda points in a minute. The second thing we look at once we've done the lightning round is what are we supposed to be doing together? We would advocate, every team needs to have a short term, ruthlessly prioritized, clear picture of what it is that we are doing together right now that's most important. We have a bit of a model around it. We call it a thematic goal. But really what you need to be able to do is say this is what the team as a group are collectively prioritizing at the moment. So the second thing you do is check in on that, how are we going, how are we going against what we're trying to do together? So in that first 10 minutes of the meeting, assuming the meeting, say 70 minutes long or maybe 90 minutes long, the first 10 minutes we've checked in with the individuals and we've checked in with how we're going and what we're doing together. We should now be well positioned to say, okay, on the basis of individual focuses and collective focuses, what do we need to discuss? And you build a real time agenda right there from what are the challenges? So if you're having challenges with part of your collective plan, we discuss them. If someone in an individual, in the team is having challenges with something that the team needs to come and assist with or that is really a team problem. And we put that on the agenda. And the leader, when they're listening, as they're listening through that first two chunk, they should be thinking in their Head. I think we need to talk about that. I think we need to talk about that. We need an answer. So how we're going to solve that problem, I can see that we need to support Sarah in what she's trying to do there and I'd like to rally. So let's put that on the agenda and you sort of start building a little bit of a, a mud map agenda, if you want to call it that, in your head as the leader, as you're going through. So when it comes to agenda booking, you go, right, here are the six topics that I kind of dragged from that. Did anyone have anything else? What do everybody else see? And then we put them on there, we put that agenda down and then we becomes more like a normal meeting. As the leader, though they still need to drive that because there'll be some more and less important topics on that and there'll be some there that might escalate, that we might need to pull out at a certain moment and put into a strategic ad hoc meeting. But basically, once we've built that real time agenda, we just work through it. The other tricky thing about that meeting is, as you're working through it, everything has to go somewhere. So we have two other sort of boxes at the end. One is, what have we agreed to do here? So at the end of each agenda point, we want to make sure we're super clear on what we've agreed to do and who's agreed to do it, and timelines. And it's not so much for accountability, it's more for clarity, so that everyone knows exactly what the expectation is and there's no gray area within the team. So at the end of each agenda point, before you move to the next agenda point, you should end that point with clarity. What exactly are the next steps? What exactly are the expectations? Exactly did we agree? So as you go through, so you might need to be marking that somewhere. The other thing that we would say is at the very end of the meeting, you want to be able to, you want to come back and say, on the basis of all of these things, who do we need to communicate this with? Who isn't here? So once you understand that you should hopefully work through your agenda, pause at the end for the last five or ten minutes and say, right, let's reconfirm everything that we've said that we've agreed to just to make sure that we're absolutely crystal clear. And let's confirm who we're talking to about this. Who, who is not in the room needs to be informed about a decision we've made or an action that we're taking or needs to be engaged in a process here that we've initiated somehow. And that would be a tactical meeting structure for us.
[00:27:29] Speaker A: Go back to thematic goal. Why is a thematic goal so important for teams to have?
[00:27:33] Speaker B: Comes down to what a team is. So we would say a team is a small group of people who are collectively responsible for a common objective. So let me break that apart for a second. Small group. Small group. We would say less than 12. If it's less than three, it's a duo or a person. So more than three, less than 12. Once it gets more than 12, it gets very hard to manage as a team. A team that is sort of collectively responsible for something. And 12 is actually quite large. Even. So, I think optimal numbers, sort of somewhere between 5, 5, 7. Between 3 and 7 is really a very good number. But you can go up to 12 and still be a team. Secondly, collectively responsible for a common objective. If you take it to a sporting analogy, you would say that a basketball team were collectively responsible for a common objective. Now they've all got their own positions, they can play in different spots, and they have different skills, but in the end, there's one scoreboard. So their common objective is to win the game, and they're collectively responsible for it. You can't have a great game if you're on the losing team, or you shouldn't be able to if you have a collective responsibility. So that notion there is. In a team, what we're doing together is more important than what we're doing as individuals. Our individual performances are important to the extent that they contribute to the group's success.
So we're collectively responsible for a common objective, and that's what makes us a team. The counterpoint there is a working group. And we would say a working group is kind of like golf. When you play golf, you are together, and you might have different strengths and weaknesses, and you can certainly help each other along the way. But when you get the end of a round, you each have your own scorecard, as people keep pointing out, unless it's Ambrose. So assuming it's not Ambrose, everyone gets their own scorecard at the end of a golf game, which means I can have a great game, you can have a poor game, and my good game or bad game doesn't influence your good game or bad game. Even though we're together, we would call that a working group. So on the assumption that we have a team, what we need is a common Scoreboard and the thematic goal or a thing that we're collectively responsible for delivering together, that's more important, but supersedes our individual objectives. That is critical. Otherwise you can't really have a team. And if it's the most important thing for us to work on together, then that's what we should be talking about when we are together. Hence its centrality to the meeting.
[00:29:36] Speaker A: The other part that you haven't mentioned, but I know, and I know we're on a bit of a time limit this morning, but I do want you to share this concept of mining for conflict because that is also so important in these meetings from a leader. Can you explain that?
[00:29:50] Speaker B: Absolutely. So that comes into the functionality of a team. Like how functional is the team in being able to sort of raise and resolve issues and then successfully get to that point where they. They are collectively responsible. They take personal responsibility for something. We would say that if a person doesn't get the opportunity to weigh into a problem, then they're not going to be able to buy into that to the solution. So if you don't get to share your opinion in the challenge bit, we talk about it as conflict when there's a debate around what we should do. If you don't get the chance, or if your opinion is not valued within that conversation, then you're probably not going to accept the imposed decision that's made on the other side of or after the debate's happened. So it's really important that we encourage debate. Good, good, strong conflict. We call it conflict within a meeting. So there's good and bad conflict. Obviously there's. Sometimes there's no conflict. We call it artificial harmony when it's really friendly, but it's friendly because we're not talking about the serious issues. So that's almost no conflict or minimal conflict. And then there's interpersonally challenging conflict that people are paying an emotional price for. And no one really likes that. And we certainly don't advocate that either. You should go home feeling better about yourself. You should leave a meeting being challenged and tired and invigorated to some extent, but almost exhausted because of the. Your ideas have been challenged and you've been challenging other people's ideas and trying to get to an understanding of how we can work this together. That's normal. So tired is normal. But you shouldn't feel bad about yourself when you leave the meeting. So we would say that conflict that's generating personal distress kind of limits your ability to come back and have more good debate tomorrow or more Conflict, good conflict tomorrow. So we want to find that balance between not having conflict and having bad conflict. And how do you encourage that? And we talk about mining for conflict, which is the idea that we validate conflict. We say, this is important. It's important to value the differing opinions, not just to get on board. Because a natural tendency when someone raises something that makes kind of sense for everyone just to agree with it. And once a few different people have agreed with it, it's quite hard to disagree with that point.
So what you want to have is a norm within the team and certainly as a leader, you want to drive this norm of saying, okay, that's good, we've got that thought. Who has a differing opinion and welcoming and validating that differing opinion. So to go, who's got a counterpoint? Who's got another way of looking at it? What's a potential different solution? What if that solution wasn't the right one? What would another one be? And just to drive that differing opinion, to value that differing opinion, which we call mining for conflict. And it's a really key part of the leader's role. It is dependent on the relationships being able to sustain it. As in, if the relationships in the team aren't strong enough that people are willing to say something that might be a bit crazy, a bit kooky, a bit off message to raise contentious or perhaps unpopular opinions, then you need to have enough rapport or enough trust in the team to be able to support that. But assuming you do have enough trust, you may still need a little encouragement. And that's part of that leader's role in mining for conflict is to provide that encouragement, the incentive, the validation for the differing opinions.
[00:32:48] Speaker A: Let's go on to the ad hoc strategic meeting. Mate, we've got two more to go. Give us a bit of detail around that.
[00:32:53] Speaker B: Okay, so the ad hoc strategic would normally say two to four hours. It's topic specific. We're normally pretty good at this, so we don't spend a lot of time coaching teams on it. And ad hoc strategic meeting is normally the fun meeting. So if you keep it within the topic and you're clear about the outcome that you want, you can work through a process. Something that I've learned from experience is that some teams like to jump to early conclusions. Other teams like to perpetually introduce new opportunities, new options through a meeting. So if you've got two hours, I would say we're going to spend two hours discussing, debating, deciding what we're going to do here. I would break up a strategic Meeting. We always have. I always advocate breaking up a strategic meeting into parts. The first bit would be you need to give everybody enough information that they can argue with your point. So there will always be someone that knows more about this particular topic than everybody else. And you don't want to create an adversarial environment where they are proposing something and everybody else is either pulling it to pieces or they're seen as their job as critiquing a single idea that that structure doesn't really work. It's adversarial and it doesn't tend to help. So it's not an approval process. We want to get away from the approval process. A strategic meeting normally starts with a challenge. We don't know how to solve this. How are we going to solve this? What's the best way to solve this? But there'll still be someone that knows lots about it. So the first thing you want to do is hear from that person and get them to bring everyone else up to the point where they can legitimately discuss the tos and fros and, and the bits of it. Then you have a discussion, you generate options. Then you want to go through a phase where you go, right here are all of the options. Is there anything else? Then you close down new option time and you go into let's start narrowing time. So one of the big keys within that meeting is to know when we're introducing new ideas and know when we're narrowing. It's tempting to do both. You'll have some people that will be trying to narrow early and you'll have some people that are trying to keep opening up new ideas in the second half when you are trying to narrow and reduce the options. And then the last point is, you've got to end with clarity, what exactly are we doing? Who's responsible for what? And take a good 10 minutes at the end to really nail down the next steps, even though you'll be tired.
[00:34:49] Speaker A: Have you got a bit of an idea on a strategic type topic just to give leaders an understanding.
[00:34:54] Speaker B: So you could have two hours of topic. You might have one big topic. You could have a half day meeting if it was. We're reviewing whether or not we're going to go into the Middle east with our new business unit or we're doing a major acquisition. I have facilitated some strategic sessions with big organizations around large acquisitions. Are we going to buy this? And we. And we might spend a day with the senior executive team and perhaps the board or several board members saying, well, this is the acquisition. This is the consequence. And there's a lot of information that the executive team needs to have. Like what are the financial complications associated with that? What are the implications? What does this mean for our regular running budgets in the existing regions that we're running? What does it mean for resource allocation? What does it mean for our team members? Are we going to have to pull some of our existing team members out to go and support that? What will the impact be on the existing business of that? So there's a lot of information in and around that. So that's a very big end of town conversation that might be a strategic ad hoc topic or it might be we're going to implement SAP. Are we going to implement SAP? Is that the best solution for our problem? So there's a big technical basis so you might bring everyone up to speed. Look at the pros and cons, look at the challenges, other people's experiences, look at the current system and whether or not it's going to be better or worse depending on the cost. Make a decision.
[00:36:00] Speaker A: Andrew, let's move on to the final meeting type and that's. You called it the off site. One or two days potentially tell us what's involved there.
[00:36:08] Speaker B: The big things there is the loose topics that need the time to wander. So really the big topics there are what are the over the horizon challenges that we face? Is our course right? Considering the market movements and all those sorts of things. So it's really big picture and it's what do others see? The other big rock there is are we functioning well as a team? What are our relationships like? Let's clear some of the mess the that's built up between us as individuals and really have as a chance to reconnect as a team around some personal things and around just who we are as individuals and people. And what's the really big picture plan? We would advocate not making that too structured but loosely. You need to have some people stuff and some big picture topics within that.
[00:36:46] Speaker A: Is it right to say that of the four meeting types, the two that would probably require a little bit more preparation than what the other two may be is that preparation would really be needed for things like the ad hoc strategic and that off site.
[00:36:58] Speaker B: I think the preparation is around those two. Yes. But the practice around the structuring is the other two is the admin meeting and the tax call. They're the hardest to normalize but they require the least prep, which everybody loves by the way. It's great not having to plan for your meeting, just being able to turn up have your three things that you're going to talk about. It's actually, it's a frees up a bit of time outside the meeting.
[00:37:17] Speaker A: You've given us a fantastic context around meetings why they're so important. You've gone through the four different meeting types and really explained those well. So thank you very much for that. If there was one bit of advice you could give leaders that 95% you referred to that aren't having very good meetings at the moment, where's that starting point for them to move their meetings into a better place?
[00:37:37] Speaker B: As with all things that are significant, the starting point is always with yourself. So I think the first thing you got to realize is a, you're responsible for the meetings. A bad meeting that you're in, that's your meeting is your bad meeting. And as soon as you start to associate this bad meeting with yourself, you'll do something about it. Second thing is know that you can do something about it. Just because every meeting you've always ever been in has been terrible does not mean that all meetings need to be terrible. There's a legitimate way to do it and as soon as you own it and you realize the possibilities of how fun that can actually be once you've just put a little bit of structure around it, not agenda structure and you're focused on how we're talking, not just what we're talking about, you'll be amazed. You'll be amazed. I think you'll, you'll find a new lease of life in your, in your job if you go ahead and do those two things. Take responsibility and understand that it can be so much better. You can be so much better.
[00:38:25] Speaker A: I love it really. That take ownership side of things. Thank you. Take responsibility, mate. How can listeners get hold of you?
[00:38:30] Speaker B: Pretty easy to find. Andrew.mooreablegroupconsulting.com or you can look on the Table Group website which is www.tablegroup.com. i'm on the consultant page down the bottom in the international section.
[00:38:42] Speaker A: Or the other option is go up to Brisbane and you love. I can't remember the name of that coffee shop that we met in, but it was a nice little place and I pretty sure you frequent there quite often.
[00:38:53] Speaker B: They're familiar with me.
[00:38:54] Speaker A: Yes, I gathered that from the day we met there. Mate, you're a fantastic person. I love having conversations with you because every time we talk, mate, I just, my mind starts blowing up with the information you have and the experience you got. Thanks for giving us time today, buddy. And I look forward to continuing our relationship and friendship in the years to come.
[00:39:12] Speaker B: You're very welcome, Brandon. Thanks for inviting me. It's been great. I've had a lot of fun.
[00:39:24] Speaker A: There are very few leaders out there that know how to run effective meetings. As Andrew said, he estimates at least 95% of meetings taking place are bad meetings. The fantastic thing about this is that as a leader you can differentiate yourself very quickly. If you learn how to run great meetings, you will be part of a very small percentage of leaders who will make a big difference to your team and organization. The opportunity is now. Don't just listen to this podcast, take action on it. These were my three key takeaways from my conversation with Andrew. My first Key takeaway Leaders must understand the different types of meetings and their purpose. The Daily check in this meeting has an administrative purpose. The weekly Tactical meeting this has a tactical purpose with the thematic goal being central to it. The Ad hoc Strategic meeting. This has a strategic focus on critical issues affecting long term success. End the quarterly off site meeting. This has a developmental purpose and looks at over the horizon challenges as well as how we are functioning as a team. My second key takeaway A team is a small group of people who are collectively responsible for a common objective. The word team gets used in organizations very loosely nowadays. Most teams I have seen in organizations are actually work groups. They aren't focused on a common goal. If there is no common goal, which Andrew referred to as a thematic goal, there is no team. My third key takeaway the leader must take responsibility for meetings. As Andrew mentioned, meetings are the leader's domain. If the meeting is bad, it's your bad meeting. You need to make meetings interesting, vibrant and engaging. The leader must take responsibility for the meeting. Understand that it can be better and it will change everything for you as a leader. To summarize my three key takeaways Leaders must understand the different types of meetings and their purpose. A team is a small group of people who are collectively responsible for a common objective. The leader must take responsibility for meetings. If you have any questions or feedback about this episode, please feel free to send me a Message@Brendan brendanrogers.com thank you for listening. Stay safe until next time.
