CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

MEETING ROUTINES

Without question, board meetings and team offsites are some of the most productive and enjoyable experiences of my professional life. As far as meetings go, they represent an extremely small slice of what can be a very big problem. CEOs go to dozens of meetings a week. It's important to keep them valuable and productive and to avoid “death by meeting.”

LENCIONI'S MEETING FRAMEWORK

As I mentioned earlier, Patrick Lencioni is one of my favorite business writers and we now use his framework for mission, vision and values from The Advantage at Return Path. He’s also written a series of business fables, all of which include valuable lessons that are easy to understand and easy to communicate. His books include The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (on how to create meaning for people in their day to day work when they’re not doing something intrinsically meaningful like curing a disease or feeding the homeless), The Five Temptations of a CEO (a summary of five leadership traps every CEO has to avoid), The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (the flipside of The Five Temptations, focusing on positive traits)—and Death by Meeting.

Death by Meeting isn’t about attending too many meetings, which is what I've always called “death by meeting.” It’s about staff meetings that bore you to death. With a great story featuring characters named Casey and Will (my two oldest kids’ names, which had me chuckling the whole time), Lencioni describes a framework for splitting up your staff meetings into four different types of meetings: the daily stand-up, the weekly tactical, the monthly strategic, and the quarterly offsite (see Table 25.1).

TABLE 25.1 Patrick Lencioni's Meeting Framework from Death by Meeting

There’s definitely something to the framework. Over the years, we have done all four types of meetings, though we have never had all four in our rotation at once (that felt like overkill). At a minimum, I think that any two get the job done much better than a single-format recurring meeting. As long as you figure out how to separate status updates from more strategic conversations, you’re directionally in good shape. If you vary the time, place and format enough to be interesting—but not enough to be disruptive—you will keep people (including yourself!) from being bored to death.

SKIP-LEVEL MEETINGS

I was talking to a CEO the other day who believes that it is “wrong” (literally, his word) to meet one-on-one with people in the organization who don’t report to him. I’ve heard from other CEOs in the past that they’re casual or informal or sporadic about this practice but I’ve never heard someone articulate that they actively stayed away from it. The CEO in question felt that these meetings, which I call skip-level meetings, undermine managers.

I couldn’t disagree more. I’ve done skip-level meetings for years and have found them to be an indispensable part of my management and leadership routine. If your culture is set up such that you as the CEO can’t interact directly and regularly with people in your organization—other than the five to eight people who report to you—you are missing out on great opportunities to learn from and have an impact on those around you.

That said, there is an art to doing these meetings right. My five rules for doing skip-level meetings are:

1. Make them predictable. Have them on a regular schedule, whatever that is. The schedule doesn’t have to be uniform across all these meetings. I have some skip-levels that I do monthly, some quarterly, some once a year, some “whenever I’m in town.”
2. Use a consistent format. I always have a few questions I ask people in these meetings—things about their key initiatives, their people, their roadblocks, what I can do to help, what their point of view is about the company direction and performance, and how they are feeling about their role and growth. I also expect that people will come with questions or topics for me. If I have more meaty ad hoc topics, I will let the person know ahead of time.
3. Vary the location. When I have regular skip-levels with a given person, I try to do the occasional one over a meal or drink to make it a little more social. For remote check-ins, I now always use Skype or videophone.
4. Do group meetings. Sometimes, group skip-levels are fun and enlightening, either with a full team or a cross-section of skip-levels from other teams. Watching people relate to each other gives you a really different view into team dynamics.
5. Close the loop. I almost always check in with the person’s manager before and after a skip-level. Before, I ask what the issues are and if there is anything I should push on or ask. After, I report back on the meeting, especially if there are things the person and I discussed that are out of scope for the person’s job or goals, so there are no surprises.

Doing skip-levels often and well empowers people in the company. Managers who feel disempowered by them aren’t managers you necessarily want in your business, unless you really run a command-and-control shop.

RUNNING A PRODUCTIVE OFFSITE

My senior team has four offsites per year. I love them. They are, along with my board meetings, my favorite times of the year at work. Here’s my formula for those meetings:

• Why. There are a few purposes to our offsites. One is that our senior team is geographically distributed across four offices at the executive level and six or seven at the broader management team level. So these are the only times of the year that we are all actually in the same place. Even if we were all in one place, we’d still do them. The main purpose of the offsite is to pull out of our day-to-day duties and tackle strategic issues that require more uninterrupted time. The secondary purpose is to continue to build and develop both personal relationships and team dynamics. It’s critically important to build and sustain deep relationships across the executive team. We need this time in order to be a coordinated, cohesive, high-trust, aligned leadership team for the company. As the company has expanded (particularly to diverse geographies), our senior team development has become increasingly critical.
• Who. Every offsite includes what we call our Executive Committee. Ours is mostly composed of my direct reports, though that group also includes a couple of other senior people who don’t report directly to me but who run significant parts of the company (seven to eight people total). For two of the four offsites, we also invite the broader leadership team, which is for the most part all of the people reporting to the Executive Committee (another 20 people). That’s new; in the earlier days, it was just my staff and maybe one or two other people as needed for specific topics
• Where. Offsites aren’t always offsite for us. We vary location to make geography work for people. We try to contain costs across all of them. Every year, probably two of them are actually in one of our offices or at an inexpensive nearby hotel. The other two are at somewhat nicer places, usually one at a conference-oriented hotel and then one at a more fun, resort kind of place. Even when we are in one of our offices, we really treat it like an offsite—no other meetings and so on—and we make sure we are out together at dinner every night.
• When. Four times per year, at roughly equal intervals. We used to do them right before board meetings as partial prep for those meetings but that got too crowded. Now, we do them between board meetings. The only timing that’s critical is the end-of-year session, which is all about budgeting and planning for the following year. Our general formula when it’s the smaller group is two days and at least one dinner. When it’s the larger group, it’s three days and at least two dinners. For longer meetings, we try build a few hours of fun activity into the schedule so it’s not all work.
• What. Our offsites are extremely rigorous. We put our heads together to wrestle with and sometimes solve tough business problems, from how we’re running the company to what’s happening with our culture, to strategic problems with our products, services and operations. The agenda for these offsites varies widely but the format is consistent. I open every offsite with some remarks and overall themes—a ministate-of-the-union. Then we do some kind of “check-in” exercise either about what people want to get out of the offsite or something more fun like an envisioning exercise, something on a whiteboard or with Post-its, and the like. We always try to spend half a day on team and individual development. Each of us reads our key development plan items from our most recent individual 360 and does a self-assessment, then the rest of the team piles on with other data and opinions, so we keep each other honest and keep the feedback flowing. Then we have a team development plan check-in that’s the same but about how the team is interacting. We always have one or two major topics to discuss coming in and each of those has an owner and materials or a discussion paper sent out a few days ahead of time. Then we usually have a laundry list of smaller items—ranging from dumb/tactical to intellectually challenging—that we work in between topics or over meals. (Every meal has an agenda!) There’s also time at breaks for subgroup meetings and ad hoc conversations. We do try to come up for air but the together time is so valuable that we squeeze every drop out of it. (Some of our best “meetings” over the years have happened side by side on elliptical trainers in the hotel gym at 6 A.M.) We usually have a closing “recap” exercise as well.
• How. Lots of our time together is just the team, but we usually have our long-time executive coach facilitate the development plan section of the meeting.