Welcome to the new manager podcast. I'm your host, Kim nickel. Hello and welcome. I'm glad that you're here. And I hope you're doing well. Today. I want to talk about meetings. It's often the most dreaded part of the work week rarely do people say, you know, what, I need more of. I need more meetings, most of the time. It's a feeling like there are too many meetings. They are not that useful. They take up all this time and there's no time to actually do work.
So, I've been thinking about that and also today, I facilitated a half-day, team off-site was a team of 16 people. Several of them were very new and they were anticipating growing and bringing on new hires and one of the focuses for the meeting was to talk about team Norms, including What are our expectations around? How we do our team meeting? How do we make them more effective and together? We spent three hours a good chunk of that time. Was just focused on like, how do
we share information? How often do we want to have meetings? What are the expectations around different time zones? Should we use Mewtwo? Should we use the hand raised feature? Like really getting quite detailed and One of the things I really appreciated about the experience and that I wanted to bring to you was that it can be very tedious to look at how you do meetings and have a conversation about that rather than simply just going with the momentum of how you've done
meetings in the past. But the value of that is tremendous. So yes acknowledging, it takes
some effort. But it can be so worth it, especially as the team is growing because the more people you add to anything, the more you amplify, the things that work and the things that don't, and sometimes teams can work very well together, only at a certain size and then as the size of the team grows, or you start to lose people and bring new people in. Then some of the relationships that created the processes and systems start to break and
Things become difficult. So here's what I was thinking about that. I wanted to share with you. Number one. Most people don't like meetings for the same reason. They don't like brussels sprouts. They've just never had a really good one. And if you've only had a Brussels sprout, that was I overcooked and not that flavorful. You would probably not want to have more and sing with meetings. If you have never had a meeting that was thoughtfully designed.
That was very clear about what you were to accomplish. That had the right people in it. That had the right amount of trust and structure and focus, and a feeling of satisfaction. Then, of course, you wouldn't want to have another one. So it takes some work to be intentional and I thought and how you plan meetings, some of the things you want to ask yourself are. What are your team norms and look at what are the Norms you have right now?
What is your current status with your team meetings and make a list? If you had to identify the characteristics of your meeting, what stands out to you? What are the norms and do this without any Judgment of whether Whether it's good or bad, just assess. Just take a snapshot. What do we do right now? Then you also want to ask? What are your personal preferences? You might be in meetings that are very much against your personal preferences.
You might think I need to say yes to be a team player. So for example, you might be in a time zone where every time meetings get scheduled it conflicts with your lunchtime. And you're thinking, I just have to say yes to these meetings because they are scheduled and I have to be a team player. And so I will be accommodating and all of that is great. However, be intentional. You may be able to change that meeting simply by saying. Oh, I'm not available at this
time. You might simply block time on your calendar, that shows you as not available, so you can protect that time for lunch. And remember, we all do. Bunch of different times. Some of us are early lunch people, some of us quite late. So we can't assume that the person booking, the meeting has the same preference for the same understanding. There are things you can do to support your ease and well-being and your personal preferences.
Also consider, what are the constraints due to time zones, or where people are located? Now that a lot of us are working in a hybrid environment. What are or expectations or group preferences around when you're in the office or when your remote and as you start to look at all these things, your current team, Norms, your personal preferences, the constraints you're working with, then you ask, how can you design for that to make best use of everyone's attention and time
and energy? And yes, it takes emotional labor and a desire to To do this work, but the payoff is that you start to create Clarity. You make it easier for people to work well together. And as you grow, you establish an environment and clear language, that makes it easy for new folks to acclimate and to ramp up quickly. It's a way of creating more he's in the system and in the process so that it's easier to do good work together.
Now, most of us. Of us, simply create our meetings by default by habit or by neglect. So, of course, there is high meeting a version when we're not being intentional about the humans who are part of this experience. And this can also look like lots of confusion low-level resentment or a general sense of fatigue. So the good news in all this number. Your past does not create your future. So just because you've been doing meetings in a way that is just, you know, might be
tradition. This is just how we've always done our meetings. They've always been an hour long just because that's part of your past does not mean you need to make that your future because you get to create your future now in the present moment, and this is an iterative process. So don't think you have to come up. Up with a perfect meeting plan or the perfect team norms and then launch them and have everything go perfectly.
This is an iterative living process because you are a living a live person and you are working with other humans and there is a dynamic relationship here. The overarching question is, how do we work together? And then specifically how do we design our Meetings. So, that we make the best use of everyone's time. So that maybe we even look forward to them because they are effective. They are connective and it makes our life better to have these specific meetings.
Now, just as one small note. I have found it in my own practice to be very helpful to never schedule things for a half or a full hour. 90 minutes 45 minutes or 50 minutes is lovely because that means that you build in a little buffer time. So that whatever is coming next you're not going to bump up against that and sort of not give yourself transition time. And for the person that you're meeting with it gives them a little bit of buffer time as well.
So you can build that into your practice. Simply by adjusting the duration of your meetings, a lot of meeting tools and calendar, tools will give you default settings for the 15, 30 45 or our you do not need to follow that. You can make it 20 minutes, 25 minutes. And what happens when you have a more compressed time, is it requires you to be more clear and focused about how you're going to use that time? And that benefits everybody when we do that, work up front.
So that when we arrive, we're ready to go. You can also think in terms of what is this meeting for? Is it to build connection? Is it to share information? Is it to have a live Q&A so that we can be very efficient together and answering everyone's questions around this particular topic. Are we meeting in order to make a decision? What is the purpose?
What will success look like. And when you have that sense of clarity, that also means that if you reach that success marker, before the allocated time, you can then release people, it is okay, to end meanings early. It doesn't mean that you, you know, misallocated, right? It just means, like, okay. I set 25 minutes for this meeting turns out. We were able to Accomplish everything in fifteen. So we're done. Like continue on and use your time giving people time back is a gift.
It's not something to feel bad about. So that is what I wanted to offer you today is simply this thought of how can I make meetings better? It's unlikely that you will ever be completely free of them. So as long as you're going to have them, why not make them good. How do you want to work together? What will make your meetings better? You have more power to influence
this and create a good outcome. Then you might realize and if you're thinking well, but I am not the one setting the meeting. I'd have no choice but to accept the meeting invites and to go along with what's given to me. I would question that. You never know what else is possible.
And this also is where that level of awareness and communication, skill comes in and remember, being a leader means going first, and sometimes that means like raising your hand or speaking to someone separately and saying, hey, I know we've been doing our meetings in this way. I have an idea, I wanted to share with you. I wanted to see what you think and you can offer a Cheston, invite them to see what's possible.
One of my clients was telling me, I work with this person and they suffer from a lack of imagination. They just can't see what's possible. And so, they're always, you know, doing things the way they've done it in the past and they're always surprised and resistant. When, you know, they suggest doing something different. We're all there from time to time. It's fine. But remember that just because the people around you have fancier titles, or have been there longer.
It doesn't mean that they know the most or the best about how to create an effective meeting. There, might be an opportunity to improve things and you can do it through small choices and really gentle adjustments. And when you start to find what works, oh my gosh, everybody loves that. Everybody loves it when meetings get better. So that is what I wanted to offer you today. I hope that you have a really good week coming up. I hope your meetings are effective.
Joyful and satisfying and if they're not remember, you can do something about it. Alright, that's it for me today. Have a great one and I'll talk to you later. If you know it's time to level up, but you feel your Perfectionism Self Doubt and uncertainty getting in the way. Then come work with me. We'll have six months of one-on-one coaching and it all starts by going to my website, chemicalguys.com coaching and joining my waitlist. Talk to you soon.