Everything you need to know about running an effective meeting…in 22 minutes
Summary
- When revising meetings, always consider the balance between something being valid and useful; strive for high utility even if it's not 100% correct.
- A company meeting cadence dictates the frequency of your regularly scheduled meetings and should create order out of chaos.
- Think of the meeting cadence as the "heartbeat" of your team, offering predictability and security which foster innovation.
- Predictability in meetings creates certainty for employees, which is crucial for a stable and creative work environment.
- Companies can function without a set meeting cadence, but 95% of companies will benefit from one.
- The right cadence can help if you feel constantly reactive, are misaligned with your team, are unaware of real problems in your company, are unclear on team time use, or if progress feels slow.
- After adopting regular meetings, a realization came that what's best for the business may not align with personal preferences, but it's necessary for growth.
- Reject extremism in meetings; instead, find a moderating balance that serves your business.
- Customize your meeting system to fit your company’s size, needs, and activities, rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach.
- Regularly evaluate meetings; remove those that are no longer necessary and adjust as needed, embracing change.
- The purpose of meetings falls into two categories: strategic (planning, large-scale, why, long-term) and tactical (the doing, small-scale, how, short-term).
- Regularly adjust which topics are discussed at which intervals: annually, quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily, focusing on what is most relevant to those time frames.
- Prepare for meetings by ensuring attendees have the right information beforehand, that the right people attend, and that there's a clear agenda to achieve the meeting's purpose.
- An overabundance of meetings can lead to chaos, weak culture, and lack of innovation, while too few can result in inefficiency and feeling out of control.
- The ideal cadence leads to high productivity, morale, innovation, peer collaboration, and accountability.
- Self-rate your company's meeting cadence to identify areas for improvement and make adjustments.
- Continue to learn and adapt to running effective meetings to keep your company moving forward.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest starting by examining the current meetings in your business. Consider if they balance validity and utility. Aim for high utility even if they're not 100% correct.
Here's a good way to establish a company meeting cadence:
- Create a "heartbeat" for your team by scheduling predictable meetings. This will give everyone a sense of certainty and foster a creative environment.
- If your business feels chaotic, constantly reactive, or progress seems slow, introduce a regular meeting rhythm.
- Remember, what's best for the business may not be your personal preference, but it's necessary.
- Avoid too many or too few meetings. Find a balance that's productive for your business.
- Customize your meeting system based on your company's size, needs, and activities.
For implementing an effective meeting cadence, follow these actionable steps:
- Establish strategic meetings for long-term planning and tactical meetings for day-to-day operations.
- Schedule meetings at appropriate intervals: annually, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily, as needed.
- Always prepare for meetings by sharing important information beforehand, inviting the right people, and setting a clear agenda.
- Regularly review and adjust your meeting schedule. Drop meetings that no longer serve a purpose.
- Self-rate your company's meeting effectiveness and make necessary changes.
- Keep learning and adapting your meetings to maintain a productive cadence, leading to high productivity, morale, and innovation.
To make meetings useful, ensure everyone comes prepared. Prepare by doing the following:
- Share relevant information with attendees before the meeting.
- Determine who needs to attend to make necessary decisions.
- Create a clear agenda to keep the meeting on track.
Regular evaluations will help ensure meetings remain a valuable aspect of your business operations. Adjust as needed, and don't be afraid to change things that aren't working. Embrace this as part of your company's journey to growth and efficiency.
Quotes by Leila Hormozi
"Extremism is easy, moderation is hard."
– Leila Hormozi
"It's not about the meetings, it's about what the meetings do for the company."
– Leila Hormozi
"What people don't want is an unpredictable CEO."
– Leila Hormozi
"If people are not clear and they don't feel secure and safe, then it's hard to innovate."
– Leila Hormozi
"You have to remember that you have to take control of this."
– Leila Hormozi
Full Transcript
what is up guys today we are going to talk about the world's most exciting subject in management which is company cadence and as you guys know i did the management series and this is number five in the series so if you haven't watched the other four i would suggest you go do that however this one actually if you notice i was delayed on it it's only because a couple things happened one is i had alex look at my framework for meetings and he was basically like you need to write three books on meetings and i was like i'm gonna shoot myself so then i went back to the drawing board and then ultimately came down to uh there is validity versus usefulness right and so something can be valid but it might not be useful and so i realized that i made an entire um essentially course on running meetings and though that it's like absolutely 100 correct it's not useful because y'all aren't going to go through five hours of that um and it's a ton to implement and so i actually broke it down into much smaller more useful now is this 110 correct no this is 95 percent correct but 100 useful and so that was my goal with this presentation and so i'll stop rambling and kind of just get straight to it to explain what we're going to talk about today what is a company meeting cadence okay and notice i say company meeting cadence i'm not saying company cadence today we're only talking about meetings we're not talking about slack we're not talking about me email we're not talking about any other things just meetings okay a company meeting cadence is how often regularly scheduled meetings happen in your business that is it how often are we having regularly scheduled meetings okay so what is the actual cadence of the company and the goal of this is to hopefully if your business is in a spot where you feel like there's a lot of chaos and reactivity and it's just like this big ball on the left here what i envision when i think of like getting the right meetings in place is that you kind of just go into this nice little yarn ball and that's how it feels every time for me that i rework a cadence in my company or i implement cadence in one of our portfolio companies specifically when things are going on people feel like they're treading water it's often that they don't have the right cadence or their quality of those beatings is just and so that's what we're gonna talk about today so that you can you know if that's you as well uh you can fix it so that being said what i want you to think about is the cadence is basically like the heartbeat of your team right without it you don't really know how healthy the team is so if you don't have a predictable set schedule for your team it's hard to really know what's going on and i already know what you're thinking because i said the word predictable and i've said the word meetings it's just like two red flags which is laila these are meetings i hate meetings and you're like predictable you know it sounds like a commitment sounds like things i have to have on my calendar it sounds like i have things i have to go to and i have to commit to you're right yes and the reason that i'm an advocate of this what people don't want is an unpredictable ceo what people don't want is unpredictability in their job what creates predictability is certainty certainty comes from having things like this scheduled it comes from knowing what the future holds somewhat does it mean 110 no you can't predict the future in your business but they can know somewhat what their day-to-day and week-to-week is going to look like so there can be chaos going on in the business but you know i've still got the weekly meeting i've still got these three huddles we're still going to talk about my performance on our one-on-ones and that's something they can always rely on and because of that it creates a place of security and when people feel secure and feel safe they can create in your company and if people are not able to feel that way they don't you do not unleash the creativity of other people and therefore you're never able to innovate without yourself so i hope that that makes sense because this is more important than people understand it's not about the meetings it's about what the meetings do for the company okay so the question really is because i'm sure you think this like could you function without a cadence can you function without that absolutely there are companies that can definitely function without meetings i have a few friends that they're like dude we only use slack and we only use click up and i hate meetings and i'm not doing it i totally get it i also have to know and they admit that their teams are like i wish that we had more time to see each other i feel like we can't communicate as well over slack you know there's some things that get missed i don't think going to one extreme and doing all slack or all meetings or all this is ever the right answer okay so this is my personal opinion this is what i have found works for me because i have tried not doing meetings in the very beginning during lunch we had no meetings i've also tried having a ton of meetings and doing all the communication meetings i don't like either of them extremism is easy moderation is hard okay and so what this is is that i'm trying to teach you how to how to add the right amount of meetings into your company not so many that it's crippling but like enough that you're like these are productive and they are moving the company forward that is the goal the goal is not to have meetings for the sake of saying we checked the box we had a meeting nobody cares about that it's to move the company forward so i believe that there's a healthy mix of communication a company that's usually a mix of written and you know verbal over zoom uh if you're a remote company which you might be if you're watching this maybe not maybe it's in person but especially if you're a remote company i think it is important to have meetings because like working at your desk all day on slack and never seeing people it is a little bit isolating and so can you function without them and be successful absolutely there are some fantastic companies that have 95 of people cannot so that being said we are going to talk to the 95 today okay so if you feel like one you're constantly in reactive mode and you're not able to get ahead you're frustrated because you and your team are not the same page like you feel like every week when you're asking them what they're working on you're like what the like i just i feel like you should be working on these three things but instead you're working on these things over here and you're just like i have no idea where this person's game is from right you're just like mind-boggling you feel in the dark about the real problems in your own company so you feel like there's stuff going on and like it continues to like seep out and kind of like you're hearing around the sidelines and gossip and someone tells you on one off but you're like i don't understand like how are these things happening and like you're trying to pull the string but you just feel like you can't pull it you can't see what's happening you feel confused you actually don't know what people do with their time and this is typically much more rampant in virtual companies is that you feel like you have no idea what everybody's doing and it feels like you're out of control like you're like i don't know what everybody's doing why am i paying you what are you doing with your time and lastly you probably feel anxious that things aren't moving fast enough how ironic you think oh meetings not having them will move faster but in reality most of the time meetings with things faster if done correctly so if you feel like this this presentation is for you and i have been here before guys because when we first started gym launch for the first eight months i think we had like one meeting every two weeks and we got up to about 10 people and i remember thinking myself like i don't want meetings i don't want to do it i hate having my calendar like especially because you know you get into business and a lot of times you do it because you want freedom and so it's like my calendar's pulling up like i don't want i don't want to add more to it voluntarily you know like if you need something let me know that's kind of how i went and i'll never forget the first meeting that i ran when i scheduled it and i told our team and at that time our operations manager um who was more like a project mentor ea and she messaged me and was like i am so freaking happy that we're having meetings and i was like what and we did the first one and everyone was ecstatic and at the end everyone's like i feel so much better i have so much clarity i feel like i need to know what i need to work on and i was like ah it's like this is good for the company so like was it my personal preference no i don't want meetings i don't want things on my calendar i don't want like commitments i like having flexibility in my day is it what's best for the business yes it was and that's honestly propelled us forward when we started doing that and so if that kind of sounds like you i totally relate and i understand and that's probably why i actually really like teaching about meetings is because i'm like i don't like most meetings either because most people do them incorrectly and they follow some preset cookie cutter cadence from some waterfall cookie something system and it's like you need to have 17 meetings every week and you're like well i've got to follow the system so i need my 17 meetings and i'm like yeah are they necessary for your business that's like telling somebody who weighs 150 pounds and then telling someone who is 200 pounds and then some somebody who is 100 pounds and you need 2 000 calories it doesn't work that way you can customize anything to yourself and you should for your own business and so that's what i want to give you is the frameworks to work on that for yourself and so the question is how can you know if your meetings are good or if you are just not good at running them this used to be me i would sit through our company meetings and yes i put them into place and my team would like them and this and that but i was like these are so boring and i just like hated them i was realized that especially on mondays when we had the most meetings i disliked those days the most i started realizing i didn't look forward to mondays over time i actually dreaded mondays because of all the meetings we had and then one day i came to this realization i was like i spend so much time in meetings like i looked at my calendar and it was like you know i don't remember like 37 hours meeting something ridiculous right and the company was bigger at this point was doing like almost like 4.5 million a month and i realized looking at that i was like i run meetings all day every day every day of the week right if the meetings suck in the company that i own it's because i suck at running them it's not because meetings suck it's because i don't know how to run a meeting and then i realized i was like i spent 90 of the time hosting meetings and i've never read one book on meetings that's bananas like i heard people say you should have these these six kinds of meetings i did it and then that was it right but i never spent time trying to learn like is there a skill behind hosting meeting is there skill to understanding what kind of company cadence we need and how we adjust that for our company i spent no time on that and so i realized it wasn't my company it was me and so i really dove in these are four books that i read but i read i think six or seven books on meetings and then i found the commonalities between all those books and that's kind of like the principles that i've applied and i'm sharing in this presentation today because i realized you know i suck and so that being said what i want to share with you guys if you feel like this is something that is useful in your company and something that you're struggling with is i want to share the three elements of really having a successful company meeting cadence okay so i'm breaking this down to what i have found is the most useful to me am i saying that this is 110 correct no there are nuances what did that what i mean by that is that this is not going to be the 110 correct for every company but i think this is going to be more useful for 100 of the companies okay so that being said let's get jiggy with it the three elements really when you're thinking about the meeting cadence okay there's pulse there's purpose and there's preparation and yes i chose those because they all have a p and you can remember it easily so what i want to start with is pulse okay what is the pulse the pulse of your cadence determines if the meetings are productive or pointless okay so what is a pulse it's the uh activity times size so you can think of pulse as how frequently you're having meetings how frequently you're having meetings is dependent on the amount of activity in the company and the size of the company okay so think about like this if we are rolling out a new product if we've hired three new people and if we uh are doing a quarterly launch of a new something we have a lot of activity size if we have a lot of humans if we have 100 humans if we have 200 humans if we have 300 humans naturally there will be more meetings and this is what i have found is that typically when there's more activity and more size you have more meetings now if there's more activity and it's a smaller company there would be less than if there were more activity and is a bigger company and that's because what happens is there have to be more levels involved in the decision making process and in the meetings typically so to make one decision in a small company might take one or two meetings in a large company it might take seven or eight meetings and so that's why i kind of came down to activity times size so if you're thinking like uh and this is why you should be adjusting your cadence with the company if you are if you have a cadence that you start out with when your company is new you might have more in the beginning because there's a ton of activity and new that you're doing all the time and you need like really fast feedback loops well as that activity starts to fade the size of your company may stay the same the activity goes down you may not need all the meetings you had when there was high activity same to say the other way which is you might have a neutral amount of activity but you continue to add more and more people at more levels and so maybe you have a new level of management in place you might have to add a meeting because you have to disseminate the information down to somebody who then disseminates the information down now does that mean you're attending all those meetings no and we'll talk about that later but that is typically what happens so pulse is activity time size right so on one side if you don't have enough meetings right if you have a ton of activity and you have a lot of people and not enough meetings typically what it feels like is chaos there's disorganization people are not following through i'm telling you this is number one is there are unfinished projects everywhere nobody follows anything through this is like the number one now the number two is that you have a weak culture people say that they have a strong culture but then their team spends 20 hours a week on meetings and face-to-face time with other people on the team and it's every time and if that's the case then that is your culture your culture is typically derived from the interaction with your team and so if every time you're interacting with your team it's a meeting then do you think you have a good culture and then lastly it's just really low innovation because if people are not clear and they don't feel secure and safe then it's hard to innovate and then silos appear people start to kind of like congregate with the people they're comfortable with they only talk to those in close proximity they don't venture out into the other departments or to talk to people that they don't normally see every day and that's what happens if you don't have enough meetings for the activity in size now on the other side if you have too many meetings for your activity in size say you have lower activity and less people then what that may look like is you have really low productivity there are long hours spent but not much move forward you have a lot of uh duplicity meaning like you have one meeting and you feel like you have another meeting and you feel like you're talking about the same thing and you're like what the hell speed is low morale is also low because people feel like they're having their time wasted okay this when people think of meetings they typically think of this because what most companies do is they adopt the meeting cadence of a company that is a different size and has different factors involved and then they never adjust it they never customize it they never play with it they just follow a cookie cutter system and i'm telling you guys i've seen this time and time again you don't need to follow a cookie cutter system you can think for yourself and that's what i want to teach you in this video and so what's the sweet spot when you have the right amount of meetings you have high productivity you have increased morale you have fast innovation peer collaboration and high accountability that's what we want that's the goal of having meetings and having the right pulse and what you have to remember is this is in constant flux there's not always a right cadence for right time and there's no standard prescription and anyone who tells you it is full there are meetings that you can recommend but there are guys i've seen people do it so many ways and still get the job done like they managed to not have a quarterly meeting and still be successful oh my god you know what i mean like it's just like anyone who tells you anything else is trying to probably sell you a meeting system so anyways sorry it gets me going anyways so this is what it looks like right i think this is from this is from one of the books i don't remember which book but either way i took a screenshot so it's basically talking about the example of a cadence and a company which is example one is there's too much distance kind of like we talked about there's all that disorganization chaos example two is it's too close there's all that look how much they overlap there's so much duplicity and then example three is their instinct right there's always gonna be a tiny tiny bit of overlap but for the most part they're in sync with each other moving forward in the same direction that's what we want to aim for and what you have to remember is that every time the rider forgets to regulate the cadence the horse takes control and so you as the ceo as the operator as the leader in whatever position that you're in of authority are the one that's responsible for regulating that cadence you cannot what what typically happens is we become blind to the way we do things something i have put into practice is every month i look back at the last month and i look at all the meetings that we've had and i decide what i need to change for the forwarding month because it changes that frequently and there's nothing wrong with change in that aspect if the company doesn't need this one meeting for the next four weeks i'm gonna take it out it's useless it's waste right so you have to remember that you have to take control of this the second piece when you're considering meetings and how many you should have and what it should look like is the purpose right the purpose of a meeting cadence is the reason for why each individual meeting exists okay what is the purpose of each meeting we have on our calendar well there's typically two things right if i were to categorize the purpose for any meeting that is held in any company i come down to two things is either strategy or tactics so tactical is when we're doing the doing this meeting is about what we're doing it is small scale it's talking about how or what and it's short term right so like a lot of meetings that you'll think about like a huddle something you're doing on a weekly basis or a daily basis those are typically the doings right we're into the doings we're into the tactical we're quickly iterating and giving each other feedback on what we are executing on now on the other side we have strategic strategic is typically planning it's large-scale initiatives it's talking about the why and is long-term focused and they're also more infrequent for the most part because you don't need as much strategy as you do tactics especially in most businesses so then the question begs how often are we talking about the strategy how often are we talking about this tactic right and so when you ask yourself how often are we talking about this thing you get to say well we talk about this thing either annually we talk about it quarterly we talk about it monthly we talk about it weekly we talk about daily right so think about this in a typical company annually we're going to talk about the vision of the company the performance of the company the strategy of the company and the culture of the company in a big way in a way that says should we rethink this is this right strategy is this the right culture do we still have everything that we need to win this marketplace quarterly we're probably going to say are we on track to hit our annual goals and we're going to be reviewing and course adjusting and saying do we need to do anything different this quarter based on last quarter still strategic monthly is a little bit of a mix monthly we're probably gonna be saying what did we do last month what do we need to do differently this month maybe does it affect the quarter and maybe does it affect anything annually but for the most part we're just gonna see what we need to adjust and then weekly we're probably talking about what do we need to do this week to move forward to hit our monthly goals we're not talking about strategy at all at this point we're just talking about what's getting in the way of me making this week successful and then daily we're probably talking much more frequently daily multiple times a day et cetera about how we're doing that day how we're doing hour by hour how we're doing until lunch you know this would be very obvious like a sales team for example example because they have so much activity they have more frequent feedback loops most sales teams meet twice a day and so the question becomes how often are we talking about this strategic or tactical thing and then the last question that you want to ask yourself is how much time do we need to achieve the purpose of the meeting right so if i'm talking about something every day daily that is a very tactical thing right like say it's twice a day we meeting with the sales team do i think i need to do an hour or twice a day probably not i probably need to do it 15 minutes right because we're just keeping a pulse and science happening in a short period of time and it's very tactical versus you know if i'm doing a quarterly meeting we might need a full day to really go through and achieve the purpose of the meeting to find out where every department sits in accordance with their quarterly goals and annually we might need more than a couple days to make sure that everyone's voice is heard we take all the information and we all make decisions together to determine if our annual goals are still realistic and so what i want from asking these questions when we talk about the purpose of meeting is for you to be able to diagnose and prescribe your own meeting cadence these are the questions that you ask yourself it's like there's no reason that a huddle needs to be 30 minutes or five minutes it's what do you need to achieve what's the purpose of the meeting and then how long is it gonna take to achieve that purpose that's all like that's how you make meeting cadence and then lastly we have preparation okay what is preparation preparation is the process of making a meeting useful okay preparation is really information plus people over the agenda so what do i mean by that the information is what information should the attendees have ahead of time in order to achieve the purpose of the meeting right and so if i'm having a meeting to talk about the new product launch am i going to give zero information on the new product launch prior to the meeting probably not it's probably a big waste of time if i just sit there and tell people something for 20 minutes they could have read an email in five so it's what information i have to transfer to the attendees ahead of time so they have the same information that i have in my head to make the decision now you've got information we're going to add it people so we add in people which is who should attend in order to achieve the purpose of the meeting and people always lose their minds about this one they don't know who this is like probably where people get stuck a lot and where people make the most mistakes there's too many people or not enough people in the meeting and what it is is you don't have the right people most the time what you want is you want anyone that is involved in making a decision whose authority is needed to make a decision to achieve the purpose of this meeting that person or those people should be on the meeting and then who has information to contribute to add context in order for us to effectively make that decision so what that usually looks like is a combination of frontline who's the closest to the problem the project the process and then the supervisors or leaders or whomever who are the decision makers who get to take that information from the front line and then decide on what is actually going to occur and so if you have the right information and you have the right people then all that you need to filter down through is the agenda the agenda is just going to highlight what needs to be discussed or shared in order to achieve the purpose of the meeting and the reason that an agenda is really important is because if you don't have that and you have all the information and you have all the people what you might have is this really long meeting that never achieves a purpose but if you say the agenda is that we're going to review x review y come to a decision on one two and three then we know that we need to follow that agenda and we need to make those decisions if we don't and there's no one guiding the way then how do we know we're supposed to be discussing based on this information that's been provided we don't we're just like discussing the information and then like probably not making any decisions maybe arguing maybe not maybe just like coming up with ideas and that would be a different kind of meaning so that being said what i want you guys to do based on this information is rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 on company cadence so one would be like you have none of this and what you do have is really shitty it's not well done and then 10 would be that it's really fantastic and it's really well done and you feel like you need no improvement and so this was probably useless and you wasted your time and so i would rate myself on a one to ten in terms of cadence and what i'll tell you guys is i'm gonna have other videos on meetings specifically like how to really run a great meeting what they look like et cetera and more examples but this is the overarching strategy of when i look at a company specifically like when we have portfolio companies that come in and i'm thinking what kind of cadence do they need these are the questions i'm asking myself i'm not using some spreadsheet with like these are the seven kinds of meetings i'm asking myself first principle questions to come to the conclusion of what needs to happen to make their company move forward and it's not gonna be more it's not gonna be less than what's needed and so that being said i hope this was useful for you guys i know this was a highly tactical video and probably on a boring topic so gosh knows how many people are actually going to watch this one but let me know in the comments what you think of it and if it was useful for you