Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Mastermind Mastery. I am your host, Tina Corner Stoltz, and I am on a roll with a series around moderating. The skill of moderating. It is a skill where I'm not talking about running a meeting, I'm talking about within the meeting structure, how it is that you ebb and flow navigate in such a way that it makes the meeting so much more valuable but impactful that you're not just letting it happen, but you're navigating it to bring out the best
that it can be. And that's the skill of moderating. I realize that over this last year, actually, I've been doing the podcast. I haven't spent much time on the skill of moderating. And for those of you out there that have been running groups for quite some time, always, always improving upon your moderating skills are not only going to serve you well, but serve your members and increase their member experience. And we all know what it's like to be in a meeting that
wasn't planned or run well. You do not want to have that be the case where your members experience that from you. So today I'm going to dive in to a very narrow topic in regards to moderating, and it's a little bit about tracking the copies that are not processed. And copies, for those of you, if you're a new listener, is a challenge and opportunity of problem or ideas. So, Copi, it is what the member brings to the table where they need help and solving with insights and experiences from their
peers. Most of us, okay, will ask the members, what, Copi do you have today? And that is in itself a skill. So what you don't want to do is say, what is your copy? And somebody says, I don't have one today. And you let them off the hook. And I've talked a lot about that, so I'm not going to get into that today. What I'm going to get into is why do you need to track the ones that are not processed? Because there is a lot to that and why you do that. And yes, it is part of moderating your
meetings. While it's very tactical, it's not the behind the scene nuance of what to say when, etcetera, but by tracking copies that are not processed versus just the ones that are can be extremely enlightening for you. Now, it may sound like a lot of hard work. It doesn't need to be. You just get a big excel sheet and you put the members down one side, you put across the top the topics or the member across the top and list underneath them all the topics in the month.
So it can be very easy to do because you're just describing it with one sentence what it was. So don't let it seem like a lot of hard work be the reason not to do this. Because the reason you do need to do this is this. So here's a bunch of them and what it can mean to you in helping you run even more effective meetings. So the most obvious is you're going to find trends, right? Tracking a trend in common topics. So the first thing is, is that all your members are going to articulate
what their copy is that month. We all can't process all of them that not enough time unless you're doing a retreat or something to that effect. Because if you are trying to process a copy from every single member every month, you either, number one, have a very small group, or number two, you have a bunch of time. Or number three, what usually is happening, you're not doing them all justice because you can't just spend 20 minutes on them
unless it's a very simple one. And that's not the case always. Okay. So you have to typically rank and choose who the ones you're going to do for that particular meeting. So the ones that are left over, if you are tracking them and your members know that you're tracking them, then they realize that there's going to be a sense of accountability coming back to
them at some point. Whether it's next month, we're going to talk a little bit about that, or whether it's at the end of year when you do a recap and it will create a sense of, I should be sure I'm bringing relevant copies, not layups or I kind of copies. Okay. And it encourages them therefore, to come with more real relevant ones if they know that you are tracking every single thing they have said about what is on their mind with coping.
So by tracking all of them, not only the ones that get processed, but we're going to focus on today, the ones that not get processed is you will see a trend in common topics to where you either need to know then that one should you get a speaker or some expert to come in and talk about. Okay. Or maybe you have a roundtable discussion if that's more appropriate because it can be more applicable. Cause it's more broader topic that's not
so much extremely personalized to everyone. So maybe it's an accounting like Copi, relevant to your coming up on the year and how people do this or that with their accountant. And so that can be a roundtable discussion. It could be that there seems to be a trend in sales compensation. So then you might have an expert come in to talk about sales compensation, that kind of thing. So you're gonna see trends that will help you in planning future meetings. Okay. You will also be
able to see a trend with the member. So if a member is always bringing up, let's say, HR issues, well, that's a bigger issue in itself, right? Leadership issues, client issues. So you want to be able to address the bigger issue and point it out as perspective to the member. Do you realize that the last four out of six meetings have all been wrapped around something similar to x? And that in itself can be so enlightening to the member and appreciative because they're in
the weeds and they're not going to see that. But you as the moderator can help them see that through tracking their copy topics they bring up that you don't even process in addition to with the ones that you do process with them. All right, so you have trend as a group, trend with a member. It also will help because you can bring up these
topics that aren't processed when you have your one to one. If you do those or coaching session, if you do those or quarterly achievement session, if you're doing those, it allows you to say to the member, I know you brought this up last month, we didn't talk about it. How was it going? It's not intended that you take the place of processing that with them versus their group, but it could be that you help them gain clarity around it
so that it is processed with the group in the next meeting. But at least you get also a good view. Is it something that's gone away? Is it still there? And is it something that's really brewing? And it's going to become a major issue. And so you need to head it off the pass and possibly be sure it's prioritized for the next meeting. Also, what will happen is when the members have all shared a copy topic, it can encourage members who have similar topics
to get together and talk about them. There are times at moderating, you might lump them together and have one discussion and knock out two birds with 1 st. But also if somebody has tackled it successfully or have had experience with it, they can take it offline and help that member one on one. What happens then is that encourages other members to help other members when you can't get to topics in the meeting because you just don't have enough time to do that with
everyone. So then you can have copy processing outside the meeting with members. Maybe it's two members get together and talk to them about it specifically if it's something that is important to that member, but you just couldn't get to it because the urgency of others that day was more if you have strategic partners, so many of you know that that's one of our key ingredients to success is strategic
partnerships. But if you are aligned with someone, whether they are allowing you to have the meetings in their location like they're a host or a sponsor or significant centers of influence, that giving trends to them as general knowledge about what's going on with business owners. If that's your, your type of groups that you're running, I'm just using it as an example. But what is on their minds can be extremely beneficial
to them. And of course, you're doing this without breaching confidentiality. But let's say, for example, you have a bank that is your strategic partner or a key center of influence, and your members are, let's say, worried about interest rates and what that's going to do to slowing down their business. And they don't know about what's going to happen with the election necessarily. And that has the impact on whether interest
rates are going to rise or the labor market and all of this. Well, you might share that with the bank and say, you know, this is what they're feeling. Do you mind coming and talking for me a minute? What your perception is about the future in the next few months on these topics? It could be that maybe you have a financial wealth firm that is a sponsor of your groups or connected in some way, and you might see trends where your members have not done proper planning. It could be estate planning.
It could be maybe they don't have proper 401k for their companies, be intended to all of those things. And therefore you could ask for some resources to share with your members about that. And it's just helpful for your strategic partners to know what's on the minds of clients that are like
theirs, that are in your group. So it gives value to your strategic partners, your centers of influence, and allows you to tap into resources to help your members on those topics, which is why being a resource connector to your members is important. This is one way that you can do it that is super easy and doesn't take a lot of effort because it's what's happening in your meeting already. Now the accountability part is that you can bring it back up next
month, just to say, last month, you brought this up. We didn't process it. Is it still on the table? You know, or you can look to see if they repeat it. And if they do repeat it, then you probably need to process it, etcetera. So you can include as an appendix to your agenda this excel sheet to show them, because it can be insightful for them to sit there and go, I can't believe I keep talking about this. I'm going to get off my butt. I got to
solve it. Okay. So it can be motivational, insightful to them. So I encourage that you, at times, if not every month, show them what they've been bringing up, and that actually instills some accountability for action in your member in a gentle way, because you provided data, right? Knowledge comes from data. From the standpoint of when you provide it, it provides insight. It provides knowledge. Knowledge is power. So today's episode, a little
bit shorter. I just want you to grasp the concept of the importance of tracking the copies, the challenges, opportunity problems, or ideas your members are bringing up in the meeting. Tracking which ones are processed, which is what almost everyone does, of course, because you follow up on what the result was that in next month's meeting, but you don't track the ones that you don't touch.
And I'm encouraging you to do both, because what you don't touch, there's a lot of opportunity in there for how you can increase your members experience in all those ways that I talked of. So until next week, I so appreciate each and every one of you here listening. I hope these, in my, you know, sincere, genuine voice here, that the whole point behind me doing this is to help you run your groups better, to be the best that you can be as a moderator. And until next time, go make it happen.
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