Camille Rapacz: How often do you meet with your team? Is it too often? Or maybe it's not enough? More importantly, does every meeting contribute to raising the performance of your team? Today, we're talking about meetings because whether you're having too many or not enough, this is an area that always is in need of improvement.
Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores. What you really need to know about building a successful business.
I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
Camille Rapacz: Hi, George.
George Drapeau: Hey, Camille.
Camille Rapacz: How's your week been?
George Drapeau: It's been a very interesting week. It's been spring break for our son, and it's been a nice week. Good and busy.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. I talked to you guys on Friday of his week and it sounded like you were having a lovely time. We had a lovely day. I was quite jealous.
It was
really nice. How's your week been?
I did not get spring break. So I was just a same old, same old. I should give myself a spring break. Maybe that's a thing I will start doing.
It's pretty fun.
It is pretty fun. I should just say when Avi has spring break, I have spring break. Yeah. Yeah.
George Drapeau: Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: I like it.
George Drapeau: What are we talking about today?
Camille Rapacz: We're going to talk about meetings cause meetings! This might be the number one thing that people complain about the windows. We have too many meetings. I hear this all the time. You hear this a lot.
George Drapeau: My number, my top two are meetings and status reports.
Camille Rapacz: Statistry. Oh, that's a good one. Maybe. Well, okay. Another topic. We'll have to talk about stats reports. Okay. But today we're going to talk about meetings.
George Drapeau: Yeah. Meetings.
Camille Rapacz: So I'm curious. Oh, and you're in your whole career. So you got to think way, you know, back George decades in your whole career. What percent of the time do you feel like your team meetings?
We're adding value to the team. And by team, I mean here, just like just meetings with your team, all the other myriad of meetings you might have in the organization, just team meetings. How many of them were really adding value to the team?
George Drapeau: 33%, one third, I'm going to say a third of them. And I might be, remember, I'm an optimist, so that might be true.
Camille Rapacz: Oh no, it could be worse than that.
George Drapeau: Yeah. Oh my goodness. I'd like to give it a higher number, but I mean, we should talk about what we're trying to get out of team meetings. Cause I can. I can think of many instances across every job I've had instantly where I can think of bad team meetings and where I can think of good team meetings and think of great team meetings, including all hands meetings.
Like one of the best team meetings I've been in was when I was at Sun working with Netscape and the Netscape browser people had a weekly all hands meeting. That was fantastic.
Camille Rapacz: Wow. What made it fantastic?
George Drapeau: So first of all, the team was in crisis and they needed to meet.
And so every week they all got together and they hashed out a bunch of painful issues. You would see these really painful, civil, but painful arguments going from one half of the team to the other half is basically two halves of the steam, the vice president who ran the division was he was great.
He was a vuncular. He really was this really nice adult supervision in the room kind of guy. He was a great hire for the division, and he was clearly the connecting tissue between these open source punks. Thanks. And the suits at AOL who had bought Netscape, he was great at, impedance matching between them.
So he always brought the truth from AOL about like, we don't have much time to ship this product. Otherwise we're going to be cut and really fostering discussion that needed to happen on a weekly basis that, saved morale from tanking. And they invited, I mean, we were there because we, as part of this contractual agreement, we were invited to collaborate with them along with a couple other companies.
And I think some of the other collaborators from other companies showed up, but like five of us from my team showed up. I showed up every week because it was just fascinating to watch them work. And they were open kimono about it. It was a very open discussion, uh, no holds barred, and they talked about serious issues.
And I think mostly it helped preserve team morale.
Camille Rapacz: How many people were in this big meeting?
George Drapeau: 150.
Camille Rapacz: Holy cow. Okay. I am so glad we started with this and I didn't even know you were going to do that because
George Drapeau: it's unusual.
Camille Rapacz: That is unusual. And it was weekly. You said. Weekly.
George Drapeau: 150 people.
Camille Rapacz: 150 people.
It's crazy. So this gets right at the first thing I want to address, which is the main reason I bring this topic up. I wanted to hone in on this because I find that people are focusing on the wrong thing when they're trying to fix meetings, and it's frequency. They're struggling with like we have too many meetings and we're doing it too often and so they're trying to say every time I hear the solution to meetings in an organization, it's we just need to meet less.
We need fewer meetings and it's not the right solution because you just gave a perfect is like most organizations are probably like, no way would I have a weekly all hands of 150 people, right? Most organizations probably shouldn't do that. They should not. Organizations
George Drapeau: weren't in the
Camille Rapacz: situation that you described.
That was a very unique situation,
George Drapeau: right? On paper, this meeting should never happen. This shouldn't be there on paper. Everything's wrong. On paper, that meeting
Camille Rapacz: should never have been good. Yeah, exactly. That's great. so. My point is we need to focus on other things, right? So that's what I really want to talk about is what do we focus on?
How do we focus on the right things in order to make sure that team meetings are going well, and they're actually doing their job, which is to raise the performance of the team.
After this meeting, I should have given them something that allows them to work better together as a team, whatever that problem is we're trying to solve.
Yes sir. In the back row, George just raised his hand. Hand was hard on that podcast .
George Drapeau: So you asked me what percentage of team meetings over my career I think have been valuable. I gave you the answer about one third that seemed to surprise you. What's your own answer in your own illustrator's career?
Let's see. Just to be clear, these are not meetings I'm running, they're team meetings that I'm part of in some way. Yes. Running and participating, right? Yes. Okay, so not just mine, because mine 100%. Obviously. Yeah, I mean,
Camille Rapacz: we're perfect, so yeah, why would we talk about
those?
So if I include, project meetings that I've been part of when I was on project teams and run by other project managers, I think the percentage actually goes up a bit, like I've been lucky to be on projects with good project team members.
It's a similar concept. It's just a team that's not, all reporting to the same person. Maybe closer to 50%, if I add that in.
George Drapeau: Not bad.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. I mean,
George Drapeau: it could be a lot better, but it's not bad.
Camille Rapacz: It should be a lot, a lot better.
Okay. So let's, the way I want to come out, this is, I want to talk about just the types of meetings that you should consider. Okay. Because as with everything, there's no one answer here. There's not a, every single team should be doing a B and C that does not exist. Yeah. Every single team should consider all these types of meetings and then deploy them In a way that is appropriate for their team based on what problem they're trying to solve based on the maturity of their team, based on what's going on in the organization, what you're trying to accomplish, whatever it is.
You want all these meetings in your little toolkit of meetings, and then you use them accordingly. So this is your job as a leader or as a manager. Even your job is how do I know what the right thing is to do to keep my team going so I can start by just thinking about all of these things.
I'm just going to start with, describing a few. And then I may have some questions to sprinkle in.
So the first type of meeting, and I'm guessing this is probably the most basic meeting that you experience as well, George, but, the one I see that's just most common is just your standard team meeting, this is typically involves, I get my team together, give them updates. Or, you know, you're going to a meeting and your boss is giving you updates, checking in on how's everybody doing? How's the work progressing? It might be a weekly or a monthly meeting, but it has some regular cadence to it.
it's a, we're just checking in meeting. Those are fine, but this is a pretty generic kind of meeting.
George Drapeau: Folks, I can see her list. It's a really great list. This is the most dangerous all the meetings for me because it's the most generic.
Close to agendaless. this is also my standard. I don't give up on this meeting. and I think what's dangerous about it is. You can just kind of go there and be talking at your people the whole time, and they get bored, and maybe that's not the most efficient way to deliver information and way to keep them engaged.
And you have to really decide what kind of participation you want. For me, when I keep these team meetings, what I try to keep in mind is what employee surveys say all the time is executives Seem to have this clear idea of strategy and vision. They expect everybody to understand and get it. And so most of the time people don't.
And so I figured my job at this meeting is to tell them stuff that I'm hearing and try to relate it in terms of they actually care, about. That's what drives me mostly from these meetings. Plus a bit of minus trivia stuff, like, Hey, you got to file your expense reports by this date, or we have performance reviews coming up or stuff like that, that I'm reinforcing what I've already said in email.
And that's like, I apologize, like, look, here's the boring part of the meeting, but you need to know what I'm telling you. So pay attention.
So other than that, it's nice to get. Everybody together. So they experiencing each other. But if I haven't set up a way for them to connect with each other, then it can fall flat on its face.
So for me, this is the most dangerous of the list that you have, you know,
Camille Rapacz: agree 100 percent because it's just a generic meeting and we approach it that way. So it becomes a catch all for all this stuff. And so many times I have talk to leaders or seen leaders doing this thing where they're like, Oh, I got a team meeting.
Come up. What am I going to talk about now? Why are you having the meeting? If you don't know talk about, you should already know. That's why you scheduled the meeting. So if you're doing that, then that means your meeting needs more structure and substance to it. Like you said, updates are good.
But you really want to focus on the stuff that requires some conversation. Like, I know they're going to have questions about this, or I know it's going to be harder for me to put this in an email than it is to explain it. And that speaks to what you said. Is there something about the strategy or about the organization just structurally that's going on that you want to explain to everybody?
I always think of this one as is this something that could have just gone in a newsletter or is it conversational news? And to your point. Sure. It can be an opportunity to say, Hey, I sent you guys this email that had these 3 things to do.
Please make sure you do it. Just reminding them. You can get that on an email. The to do's we're adults here. There's stuff you can read and there's stuff we should converse about. So separate those things.
And then the check ins, this is great too, like, how's the team doing? What do they need? But you need to do more than just say, so, anybody need help?
You're just not structured enough. And really pulling that out of your team, or you haven't done enough to make the team genuinely believe you when you say, I want to hear the problems and not just the solutions. I really want to hear the problems you're working and even create a space for how can we do a quick brainstorm on that as a team for you.
Who is working on this problem. So checking in be a little bit more than just, are you good? Are you good? Are you're good. Cause you might not get the real essence of what you're trying to get to when you're in person with people. So think about how you want checking in to be better than just that surface level.
And then my last thought about this is that. I always think of this as I want to create a conversation with my team. It's not a one way distribution of information from me to them. I want to create conversation with them and among them. That's my opportunity to also get them talking with each other, if that's what I need to do.
When I think about the standard team, meaning those are kind of my top things that I think about when I'm going to set one up.
George Drapeau: I agree with you. I want to make two comments here. One is the good news folks, is that When you start hearing about these other meetings, it's going to get better.
They're going to be easier to wrap your head around. They're much more focused, very clear agendas, almost in the meeting name, the type of meeting. I would say if you do most or all of these meetings, Then do this one last, do the standard team meeting last, because if you do all the others, you will have gotten most of not all of what you need done by this one.
And those ones all have easier, more clear agendas. So hot tip, but I'm just going with that.
Camille Rapacz: I will add on to that hot tip, which is as I talk through all these meeting types, these don't need to be singular meetings of their own. You can combine these. So there are types of meetings and you can actually say I want this type and this type and I'm going to have a one 30 minute meeting and I'm going to do these two things.
George Drapeau: That's cool. We'll come back
Camille Rapacz: to that at the end. Yeah. You'll see how this works. So if you're like, Oh my gosh, I don't have time to have all of these meetings. That's not what I'm telling you to do.
George Drapeau: Hey, buckle in, folks. Watch this. Watch what she does. Okay,
Camille Rapacz: so the second type of meeting, this is one of my favorites, and I think is, not well utilized or utilized enough, which is doing a team huddle or a stand up.
And this is typically a daily. So it's like a very short, you know, If you can just 15 minutes stand up it's a daily sync up for your team on the work on prioritizing on what are the issues of the day, maybe level loading some of the work across the team. So it's more distributed more evenly depending on how your team operates, but it is just, we are syncing up in the moment.
Everybody's clear on priorities and go. And it's called a huddle because it's like in football, if you were having a huddle and what's the play today. Go. That's what you're doing. So it's very quick. The challenge I hear people have with this is, Oh, I have people who tend to just talk on and on and they don't understand it's supposed to be a short huddle.
Or, some people will say, well, our work doesn't really lend to this. I will always challenge that. I think it's pretty clear. Some work lends to this much more easily than other types of work, but I think everybody could benefit from this. It doesn't have to be daily. It could be weekly.
Maybe that works better for your team, the way that you operate. But it's such a great way to just everybody look each other in the eye, line up on what all the work is that we agree to accomplish as a team, and then go, everybody's off and running. So that one, I think is a really powerful and highly underutilized, meeting type.
George Drapeau: It's a good one.
Camille Rapacz: You've done these
George Drapeau: Yes. And currently in my organization, I don't run one, but my lead engineering manager does for the engineering team.
Camille Rapacz: Oh,
George Drapeau: perfect.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah.
George Drapeau: It's great.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. And you don't need it to be, I mean, actually that's a great point too, is it doesn't need to be your meeting.
Maybe it's, you know, a part of your team is doing it and one of your team members is running it and that's how they're managing the work at that level of detail. Perfect. That's what they should do. This isn't the type of meeting typically a VP would have. It's the type of meeting that managers and frontline, leaders are doing.
All right, so that was number two.
Number three is a planning meeting. So sometimes you're thinking as you're running a team, I need to get a plan together for them and our or we're working on a big project and I need to create the project plan for this or whatever you're doing. And it can be really easy to just skip past the engaging the team part in this planning because we think I need to give them a plan.
When really what you need to do is plan with them. So if you do a planning meeting, you could get the plan started. You could start to lay out some milestones or whatever if you want to. And then you present that with the team and have them fill in all the blanks. And boy, they're going to do it better than you.
Just know that. You're going to be like, Oh, good point. I didn't even think about that. And then they're also going to have context for the work that you're going to ask them to do in this project and feel more ownership when you do it. So it has like winning, winning, winning all over it to just sit down and do a group planning meeting.
And even if you don't lay out any milestones, if you don't do anything, like you just like, we got a project and we need to get from here to there in this amount of time, let's start by just identifying milestones and do that with your team. It's great. So maybe you're struggling to get a plan on paper.
This is a great way to help yourself get it started. Like engage everybody in that conversation. This is one of my favorite meetings. Of course, I was a project manager. So, but I do hear leaders as I coach them. I realized that they are not using this skill that they have in sharing that with the team.
They feel like it's their job to do as the boss. And they're missing that opportunity to engage with their team.
George Drapeau: For a while now, I've had globally distributed teams for the past 12 or 13 years. I've had a team in India and then the team in North America and I'll go and visit the India team once or twice a year.
That's always a good opportunity for me do some sort of planning with them along with the other stuff We do we devote maybe half a day and do some planning think about the agenda up front and it ends up serving I think several of these purposes. The planning is always good I get to see how they think now that because I don't see him all that much.
It's really helpful.
Camille Rapacz: I like what you said about you get to see how they think like it is great, a great way to engage your team and see also like who are my real rock stars here who really good at this or who are the people that I need to coach a little bit on how to do this kind of work.
I always like thinking of this as just like project planning as a team sport. It's not just a project manager's job or a manager's job or like a leader's job. It's a team sport. Like we all come together to do that. Another example I have of when I think this is a great type of meeting to have as a leader, as a manager is when change is coming to the team and the team's going to need to adapt.
So it might not be around a project, but it could just be, for example, one of my clients recently, they had a team member. Leave so team members resigning and they're going to have to redistribute the work while they're waiting to get them replaced.
They got to do some work redistribution on the team. that's a great time to have a planning meeting. Let's make a plan for how we're going to adapt in this time period until we have a new person come on board. And there's always something like that going on, so there's always a reason to come together and create that new plan.
So that was number three.
Number four. This is one of my other favorite reasons to meet problem solving. Now, this is a way to help your team slow down and stop firefighting and actually work on problem solving. So depending on how good your team is at doing that, you may as, or you as a leader for that matter, you might need to do a little bit of.
Coaching and supporting them in this way of thinking, because this is where you want to take time to say, do we really understand root cause? Are we really throwing out all the potential solutions to closing this gap and solving this problem? And then what's our plan to try something? So it's a great opportunity to coach your team and getting to problem solving.
It's a great time to get people to slow down and do more critical thinking instead of reacting. Which is a skillset you really need to build into your team. If you want them to start problem solving on their own, more than bringing you all the big problems. And if you want them to stop firefighting and do much more like genuine problem solving, so they don't just keep putting out the same fire day after day.
Yeah. This is a great meeting to start building into your team. Most teams I know really need this. It's like a level of maturity of the way that your team operates. This is the way to get there when you're trying to level up that, you know, performance. Yeah.
George Drapeau: Yeah. Okay.
Camille Rapacz: And sometimes you have a team who's actually really good at problem solving and they just don't know when they're supposed to do it because they're so busy.
So also creating this meeting is a way to give them that space and you give them permission. Like I do want you to problem solve. Here's where we go do it. And you'll, watch the ones who are really good at this. Just flourish. Hmm.
Number five. Strategic planning.
George Drapeau: How does this differ from number three? Planning. Okay.
Camille Rapacz: Strategic planning is at the organizational level. So when an organization goes into this mode, not a caveat to this is not every organization is doing this strategic planning process. Well enough for you to necessarily get this involved.
But ultimately what you want in the organization is that all leaders are able to have a strategic planning conversation with their teams and roll that information back up to leaders before they finalize the plan. So you should be able to share like, here's the strategic plan of what we're thinking.
Because generally your C suite is coming up with a strategy, They maybe involve some other people, but they're like, here's what the strategy is. What you want them to do is then send that down to leadership. And then you with your team have a discussion about it.
Like, what do we think about this? How will we be impacted? What's our input into it? What are the things we want them to be considering? And your team's going to say, Oh, well, if they want to do this, from our perspective, they need to consider X, Y and Z that maybe they haven't thought about and roll that back up to them.
And it might be things like that's going to really impact our staffing levels. And are they prepared for that? Do they know that we might have to staff up to do it? That's going to require a certain level of expertise that we don't currently have in the organization. So they need to consider whether we're going to outsource for that or we're going to hire that internally.
We need a new type of expertise.
Like say AI, for example, they want to go after AI. We don't have AI expertise. That's a probably a common one happening everywhere right now. So you want your teams to really be able to inform upper leadership about what's going on at that level. Again, this is one of those meetings I think is Probably happening the least across organizations and would really help organizations the most.
If they really let strategy get infused throughout the organization and got information rolled back up. But even if it's not, and it just gets sent to you after the strategy has been made. So if you as a leader, like, well, now I have the goals and the strategic plan from the organization, you still want a strategic planning conversation with your team to say, well, now what do we do with this?
What does that mean? Our goals look like? What does that mean? We're supposed to do in order to support this plan. So then it really becomes about implementation. Now we know what the goals are. How are we helping the organization implement all of this?
George Drapeau: Yeah, absolutely.
Camille Rapacz: So two perspectives on that one is the big dreamy, aspirational goal of, I get to provide input.
The other one is boots on the ground. I just have to figure out how we're going to, implement. is I think one I want you to talk about because I know you have a special way of doing this, which is QBRs. So these are your quarterly business reviews. Now that we got our strategic plan, we've set our goals.
We've said what we're going to work on in our own division or department based on those strategic goals. We know what our performance is being measured by. We have our key performance indicators, our KPIs, or we have our strategic goals. We know what we're supposed to be doing, but now every quarter we have to go report on how are we doing?
What are the issues? Where do we need to pivot? Where do we need to double down? All those kinds of things. And I know that a lot of organizations are like, Oh, QBR. And they just have to crank out their report. This is kind of where like the status report thing, I got to do that report and it doesn't feel very useful.
And it's not because QBRs are not useful. It's because you aren't making QBRs useful. I guess your job is a leader, right? So I know you have a way that you make this work that people actually like coming when you are doing a QBR. What do you do that you think is different?
For me, a QBR has a few purposes.
George Drapeau: The main purpose is for me to understand how am I spending my money? The people who report to me, what are you doing with my money and what am I getting for it? So it's structuring the QBR to present that way. It's a pretty good way to think about it. How to do this. On the other hand, one thing I do not like doing in QBRs, and so I take it out, is reporting accomplishments. Endless QBRs I see report how well they did.
You know, here's all the accomplishments we did, a bunch of highlights, and there's way too many highlights because you want to give everybody credit. And I take that out of the QBR, like, Let's celebrate what we did, which you have elsewhere, but that's not this. That's not the purpose of this meeting. we're going to find other ways to celebrate our accomplishments.
Trust me.
Also. I happen to usually be in, an organization that has many, many stakeholders. So what I really want to do is I want to create conversation from the stakeholders. I don't do all the speaking. I have people in my team do individual sections of the QBR so that they get used to presenting to executives. I want them to have a take that's opinionated that generates conversation and that generally works and I think people like the QBRs because they get to speak up and they do speak up and then they interact with other people they normally wouldn't .
That we're doing it is almost incidental. They get to talk to these other people, and I think that makes it interesting for them, but not just in a fun way. It's actually useful. I hear the conversation. And so I get an idea about where we should steer.
Camille Rapacz: The two things I think you said that are really important are, it's a quarterly business review, not a business celebration. I agree with that. Becomes just a CYA like. Here's all the amazing things that we did and are doing.
You need to acknowledge your team doing a good job. This is not the place for that. And if you're actually then approaching what you talked about, which was, I want to, create conversation. I want a dialogue of people talking about how things are going. If you do that and you do it well. It will be obvious what the team has accomplished based on the conversation they create.
That's how they will go in there and show like, we're killing it because this is the level conversation we now want to have with you. These are the questions or the issues that we're dealing with. This is the next place we're going strategically and we want your input. It'll be so obvious at what level that team is performing based on that.
Let that work speak for itself. It's not just a, here's all the stuff we did. It's not a quarterly business reflection either. I'm not just reflecting on the past. I'm actually doing a review and I need to look at what do I need to do going forward? And I think a lot of QBR is misty forward looking part.
Because a QBR should be about how I'm pulling the organization forward. You do have to look back. Um, and so I think it's important to look backwards and say, well, what just happened and what are we learning? But the whole point of that should be about the forward movement, not just about, this is what we accomplished.
We got this milestone. Good job. And back to work. And I see a lot of QBRs end there. Like, good job, everybody. See you next quarter. No, no, no, no. Talk about what's coming next in the next quarter. And what are you going to do are you doubling down on what you're doing already? Are you going to change something?
Do you have some new ideas you want to bring into the fold? Like what's going to happen? And everybody should be energized when they come out of there. Like, all right, we all know what we're doing next quarter. We're fired up.
George Drapeau: I agree. Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: So fix those QBRs. If they feel like they're not adding value, fix them.
George Drapeau: Yeah. Fix them. Fix them now.
Camille Rapacz: Fix them now and you can fix them also by maybe having some of these other types of meetings.
George Drapeau: Absolutely. I think so.
Camille Rapacz: So I have a few more on the list here to go through. The next one is a decision making meeting. Yeah. You're gathering your team together It could be to talk about a decision that you as a team want to make together.
But more often what this really comes around to is a decision has been made in the organization and you now need to decide how you as a team are going to respond to this. So maybe, you've heard, the VP has decided that now we're going to do X, Y, and Z, and that has this trickle down effect down to your team.
And so you gather your team to say, Okay, decision has been made. Now we have decisions to make at our level in response to that. What are we going to do? In a way, it's also a planning meeting like them. What are we going to do about it? So you can start to see where some of these come together.
So it might be making decisions and then creating a plan. You could do that all in one meeting. But it's a great way to also just manage change on your team. So if there's change coming, anytime you can give them some opportunity or some agency in that decision making that's going on, this is when you do that.
You just get them in a room to have the conversation and always with a, and then what's our forward movement look like? What are we doing next?
George Drapeau: Yes, indeed. I'm gonna make a statement then tell you why it makes the first meeting tough for me I try to have most meetings I do include some some decision making like the point of the meeting the reason we're meeting Because we need to make a decision that we couldn't do outside of this meeting.
We have to get people together to do it It's not always true, but I try to have that attitude for just about every meeting I have Which really goes against the purpose of the first meeting on the list team meetings. I don't usually have as decision making meetings. So that's why I like this as a separate.
Supposedly calling out this is a decision making meeting. This is not a information sharing meeting or morale building or celebratory meeting. I like how you're doing that here.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, and this can also easily get sort of confused with a problem solving meeting. because I always think of every time I'm pulling people together, what problem am I trying to solve?
am I trying to solve a problem of team morale? Am I trying to solve a problem of, misalignment? Am I trying to solve a problem of, misprioritizing work? They're all aligned, but in the wrong direction, what is the problem that we need to solve? You might be like, Oh, my team's doing fine.
That's great. Then the next problem is how do I level up from where they are now to the next level of performance? So you're not settling for, they're just fine. You're like, Oh, what's that little tweak that I can make? So there's always a problem to solve some people like to think of it more of just like a gap to close.
Same thing. I'm here and I want to be at this other point. The gap is the problem to solve. So if you think about that, then you start thinking about, okay, well, which one of these meeting types is going to help me get there? Do we need a problem solving discussion because we have a genuine problem on the team to solve?
Do we need to make a decision? Because problem solving doesn't have to come out with a decision. It could be just, we advanced our thinking about the problem. Eventually you want a decision about what you're going to do, but not every problem solving conversation ends with we have made a decision in these, 60 minutes that we were meeting.
Some problems are much bigger than that. So you separate them in that way. So decision making meaning much more about, we need to walk out with a decision. So I like that if you're, whether you're thinking about what decision are we making or what problem are we solving, that will always give your gatherings purpose, whatever group is gathering.
So these last ones are, kind of on the more fluffy side, but they're also very important.
The next one is doing a team retrospective or lessons learned. This could be either very formal or it could be informal, but this is about discussing the past: a past project, a past issue or situation.
And because sometimes what the team needs is to be heard. And I know that a lot of people are resistant to letting people air their grievances in a public space. And I don't want people to misinterpret what I'm saying here as, you know, you should let your team freely just air their grievances at any time.
I think that there are situations where as a leader, you realize, they're going to do it anyhow. And instead of them having it, do it all behind the scenes and in the corners and have it become this little insidious thing going on. Um, I want us to do it as a team in a healthy space that I create for them.
And then I hear them so that we can then move forward. So if a project goes really badly or there's a situation with one of the team members that's now left and everybody's just kind of left with the toxicity left behind of that team member, these are great times to have your team just be able to have it out.
It's almost like a little therapy session. And you might want to get help. You might want to call someone from your HR department or a consultant to come and help you navigate that. But those are on in extreme cases. And so this hopefully rarely comes up for you, but sometimes it happens. But it doesn't always have to be about a bad thing.
You could have also be doing some sort of retrospective or lessons learned on something that went well, which we never seem to do. We never do a lessons learned on. Why did we do such an amazing job on that project we just finished? But it's worth doing because you can then combine it with the next type of meeting, which is a celebratory meeting.
George Drapeau: I would say that in my current job that I've been in for just eight months or so, this has become one of maybe my one or top Two favorite meetings, and it's not one I run. There's a guy in our organization who's very good at running this. And what he does is we say, we do it at the end of every quarter.
I would say it works really well when you're doing a retrospective on a process heavy team. And we have a very process heavy team. We run a full product lifecycle process. And we've been spending the last year trying to inject this new PLC process on the team. So there's been a lot of learning and a lot of churn.
And there is a lot of Complaint about it. So this guy goes and interviews people individually and gets all their feedback and then he collects it and we present it that way. So it It really cools down the temperature of the meeting because people have had their say, but not in an incendiary way where it blows up everybody else, but every, everybody still gets hurt.
Everybody gets to hear stuff. He just runs it really well. So for the right guy, structuring this meeting the right way really made a retrospective highly valuable. I love this meeting that he does.
Camille Rapacz: That's a great example and it does speak to it is important that you do this in the right way.
You can't just throw everybody in a room and be like, okay, so let's talk about that awful thing that happened.
George Drapeau: Yeah, group therapy is not the way to do this kind of meeting.
Camille Rapacz: That's right. So I like the, gathering information on the front end. So that you know what, how you want to navigate that conversation, you know what the common issues and concerns, you know how bad it could potentially be, and then you can navigate that conversation.
So everybody then feels heard, because you also don't want to have people feel called out. You also don't want people to feel like there's no way I'm going to say this in a team meeting, but they have things they want to say. So you got to respect all of that, but making sure that the team can collectively hear it all together is really important.
You know, we're all looking each other in the eye and just being like, yep, we all understand what's happening here. I love that you have that in your organization. And it's fantastic when you have somebody who really just stands out as like, they're really good.
So good. That kind of ties into then the next one, which is you do need to just celebrate that your team is winning. Share those kudos all around with your team at some point. And again, this doesn't have to be a separate meeting. It could just be something you tag onto every team meeting, but it needs to be genuine.
Like sometimes I see this end up on the agenda and it's like, by the way, I just want to say team, good job, blah, blah, blah. And it doesn't have any real emotion or energy. Yeah. So sometimes this is better when it's just a one off out of nowhere. I just want to have a 30 minutes with my team to just talk about how amazing this thing was and celebrate it in some way, because that shows like the thing mattered.
So just find those important moments to do it. Because recognition is a high motivator for people. When you talk about wanting to have a highly motivated, engaged team, and you want your engagement scores to go up on your team, acknowledging their good work is really important for that.
George Drapeau: Yeah. Agreed.
Camille Rapacz: Related to this is also team building. This is what I hear about a lot. People like, Oh, we want to do team building. And can you help us do some team building? Which of course, then the question is what, what problem are we trying to solve? There's always something. They're trying to fix something going on in the team, right?
There's some personal dynamics or I don't know, it could be a myriad of things. And they always see team building as like the solution and, you know, team building is good. You want to build camaraderie and foster trust and do all those good things because you want them to collaborate better together and operate better as a team.
Nothing wrong with just the purpose of getting together to also just to have fun together. Cause that builds that camaraderie and trust when you can just enjoy each other as regular humans. So all of those are good things to do, but you do need to be aware of people's individual needs and differences.
So introverts versus extroverts or individual people's physical capabilities. Sometimes they're like, Oh, we're going to take everybody whitewater rafting. It's like, can everybody physically do that? Cause you don't know if they're just coming and doing a desk job, if they could physically actually handle Whitewater rafting, right?
So you have to be careful how you design and set these up. You also don't want to do anything that might sort of embarrass somebody or call somebody out, maybe because, like, that same reason. Maybe it's some physical activity that they're just not going to be physically capable of doing as well as other people, and they're going to feel embarrassed about it.
Think about it this way. If it's genuinely team building, it should be something that builds up every individual, whatever you choose to do. Every individual feels built up in some way. Nobody feels slighted or diminished in any way by the thing that you design. That's the most important thing I think when it comes to team building.
And as I say that, there are a lot of bad ones. If you really start to look for all of these things, and whether it will be very inclusive, if you just think it sounds like a fun idea, do think about would every person on my team actually think this is a fun idea? Because if they don't, you're not building up everybody on the team, right?
You're not doing something that everybody genuinely will enjoy. I realized that makes it sound like, how can I find something that everybody likes? Well, you can find something that will work for everybody. Some people are going to like it more than others, but you can definitely find something that works for everybody and is not detrimental to somebody.
George Drapeau: Yeah,
Camille Rapacz: thoughts about that.
George Drapeau: I've always seen the team have fun and participate and be happy for the most part, you know, some amount of cynicism for heavy cynics that's happening, but I don't think I've ever seen one go wrong, but most of them.
We were talking about team building a couple episodes ago, and most of them have not achieved their full potential. Because I don't think the leader has really thought through what they want the outcome of the team building to be.
Usually it's just, Hey, let's get the strangers together. That's good. That's good. Come on, be a little bit more crisp than that. And I think most people don't take that step.
Camille Rapacz: Yes, be really intentional. This gets to what I was saying at the beginning where I hear a lot of people say, I want to do team building.
Why, why, what is it you are trying to do? You're trying to solve a problem or close a gap or raise the bar on something you're trying to make a difference in some way with your team. What is that? Is it purely for acknowledgement? Is it because you've got some new team members and you want everybody to start gelling with the new team members?
Sometimes it's just like, I've been neglecting my team and haven't done anything. So I want to do some team building. These are all valid problems that you want to solve, but really get into like, what is the purpose and what would a good outcome look like?
How do I want everybody to feel after this is over and then design from that.
George Drapeau: I'll give you two examples of during COVID team building events. One was, a virtual mixology event where it couldn't be there in person. So they would, somebody had found this company where a mixologist had prepared two different drinks and all the ingredients of the bottles and stuff and made these little boxes.
They shipped to everybody in advance. So there were like 30 of us on a Zoom or Google meet. Video conference and the mixologist there and they talked about the drinks and gave us a little bit of knowledge And then they had us prepare the drinks ourselves. We all did it We all squeezed our lemon and combined the ingredients and made two drinks and drank them.
It was fun I don't think it was team building at all. And it wasn't because it was virtual is because we were just there making a couple Drinks and kind of having a little bit of fun. That's just a let some steam out, kind
Camille Rapacz: of.
Yeah, it's kind of like if you just take your team out for happy hour or something. That's perfectly fine. Yeah, and you make your own drinks. Yeah, and you just gave them a fun way to do it. Yeah, that's cool.
George Drapeau: But not really team building. There was another one that I thought was, I'm going to call it team building, but I'm interested to hear what you think.
This was during a multi day meeting, virtually we had with a big partner and somebody had found a magician who was retailering his act. For an online world. And so he did his magic act by videoconference and he was amazing. And all of us were blown away. None of us had experienced this magic. This way, I and he involved us. I can't remember how he involved us, but he ended up having us participate in some way.
And we gave feedback and then outside of that, a lot of us were doing chat with each other about what we observed. And it was so novel for all of us that it engendered a kind of conversation amongst us that we wouldn't have had before. And so for that, I'm going to claim team building, even though it was.
Mostly viewing like the, like the one, it was most like the mixology event.
Camille Rapacz: I think that sometimes these team building things like that's great. It gives you something else to talk about of this common experience, like the chat that it created. If it creates this conversation for the team to have together.
And a way for them to get to know each other better in that conversation, then sure, that's team building, because you're trying to just build connections with each other. So I think anything that fosters that connection and conversation, it doesn't have to be about work, it can just be about this other topic.
Totally worth doing. The other thing it made me think of is sometimes when you do things like that, if you strategically line them up with work that you want to do with the team, like say you're in an offsite and you did, some sort of creative activity like that, that got a different part of everybody's brain going.
Oh yeah. And then you moved into some work. Problem solving or creative, you know, strategic planning. Like that's what you want to do. You want to do something that moves people into a different part of their brain and then take them back into the work. So they're approaching it differently because that's generally what you're trying to do in an offsite is I want a different approach to the work here than sitting at our desk.
That's the whole reason we came offsite. Otherwise, we'd be sitting at our desks doing the same thing.
George Drapeau: You know, that's so cool. I don't think I've ever thought about that explicitly, but that's exactly, right. Finding something that really enlarges a part of your brain like I've never done this, but something I've wanted to do for a while is take drawing lessons.
Camille Rapacz: Because I'm
George Drapeau: horrible at drawing. I can barely draw my own name, but I know a couple people who've taken drawing lessons. It's called writing, George.
Camille Rapacz: Writing
George Drapeau: your name. Yeah. Yeah, I know. I can't even do that. See, that's a bad arm. But, you can be taught how to draw, how to see better, and how to visualize.
Yeah. One, one technique for doing that is teaching you to draw with your non dominant hand. I don't know how much could be done in a single lesson. Part of what happens in a drawing lesson is getting you to exercise a part of your brain that you're not used to doing. And I love your comment about how that can set up a team to think differently about their standard stuff.
Cause that's a beautiful idea.
Camille Rapacz: Lots of great ways to do team building, but be thoughtful about it. That's my only message about this, really, is just know the purpose and what outcome you want and think about how all the other people might experience this so that it, it does do what you want it to do.
If you just want them to have fun, as I like, I want you to have fun, reward, then do that.
I have one last meeting type that I want to throw out there, which is kind of branching out from your regular team meeting a bit, but it's still about your team, but it's a cross functional gathering.
So it's you and another team. If you have a team that you tend to like your work goes back and forth a lot between your two teams, or a cross functional type of team gathering where you all come together and on any of these things that I listed.
It could be just a team building or could be any of it could be planning could be anything else, but it's a great way to break down those silos that we sometimes get stuck in in our departments and start working more cross functionally with other teams so that they can get to know them because.
You have team one, which is the team that you live on, but then there's rings, outside of that, the team expands as you go outside of your own team. And those teams are just as important for you to work well on. So I
George Drapeau: love this one. I want to propose on 11, a variant of this, which is steering committee.
So if you have multiple stakeholders, the kind of an idea where you getting representatives from each of them, you're trying to accomplish something, but it's more than just your team by definition, It's for representatives from a bunch of. team, steering committee.
Yes.
Camille Rapacz: Well, now that you went there, I mean, that would launch a whole series of other meetings at types that we could talk about outside as well. But we are not going to do that because that would take too long. So yes, outside of these, these are just like meetings you would have with your team. And that's all that I was really talking about here.
There's a whole bunch of other meeting types and organizations, but I really just wanted to focus on as a leader What should you be paying attention to in terms of the types of team meetings you should have?
So pay attention to all of these always ask yourself what problem you're trying to solve or what you're trying to accomplish And make sure you design to that because by the way, there's actually other things you can do within the team. Like you could have a team meeting where you're just discussing customer feedback.
There's training and development meetings. There's a brainstorming meeting. There could be an emergency response meeting. Like there are others that you could even do in your team. We didn't want a two hour podcast. So we
George Drapeau: just
Camille Rapacz: cut it short.
George Drapeau: The truth is we do want a two hour podcast. It's just, we're merciful to you people.
Camille Rapacz: You listening probably do not want a two hour podcast.
And like I said, these don't have to be separate meetings. You can combine these meeting types into a meeting if it really suits the problem you're trying to solve.
So think about that and how you might combine these to make the meetings more effective.
I have one last question for you. Of all these meetings that I just went through, do you find as a member of a team? Do you find that the leaders you've is there one that stands out as like the most overlooked or most underutilized meeting type?
George Drapeau: For the old guard, for old school people, they don't do stand ups or team huddles that much. It's mostly younger people who are doing that. They're really important meetings. And I find generally older people like me tend not to do the team huddles or standups.
What I find most commonly is managers miss out on some of the main point of each of these types of meetings, like team building. You spend a lot of time talking about what should happen in a team building meeting. I get on team building meetings all the time, and mostly the leaders aren't thinking about what they should get done in that.
So that's what they're overlooking or they're missing out, not the meeting itself, but what should go into the meeting or strategic planning meeting isn't that strategic or the standard team meeting is just just a mess. They do all of these meetings. None of them very crisply.
That's the main thing. But if I had to pick one that's one of these, other than stand up that people don't really do maybe decision making as a sole meeting or retrospective.
Camille Rapacz: I would say the retrospective is the one that stands out to me as missing the most. Because even if people aren't calling them problem solving or planning, those would be my second in line, but sometimes that gets worked in to a meeting Even if by accident, the ones that we don't consciously think about and that do require you to sit down and plan for that retrospective and that lessons learned.
And it's really important and the concept of the learning organization, which we've talked about before.
George Drapeau: This is always sticks out when I think of retrospectives, isn't there this meeting that hospitals do like the surgical team meets once a week and they'd review surgical cases and talk to each other about stuff like that.
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, I don't know if there's a special term for that. I know that there's one for, I think it's in the military where they talk about doing a hot wash.
George Drapeau: Oh, and I've heard that term hot wash. I like it.
Camille Rapacz: Which is like immediately after, an engagement or whatever, they do an immediate debrief, Like an after action. I don't know if there's a term for it and, but everybody should be doing these at some level there should be some level of, reflecting on what just happened before we move forward, immediate is great.
If it makes sense. For certain activities like that, it would totally make sense.
So now that you have all these meeting types in your brain. I don't want you to worry about overdoing it. Most leaders I know aren't meeting with their team often enough, even if they think they are meeting with them too much.
And it's because the meetings that they are having aren't accomplishing meaningful objectives, but they have more objectives to meet than what they're getting done in the meeting they have, because they're just not using them well.
So think about how am I using my meeting? Am I being as effective as I can with the meeting time I have? And then you can expand from there.
I do see leaders making this mistake of either not wanting to bother their team with things or just not recognizing how much their team could be helping them and the department or the division if they just engage them more in all these different ways. So don't feel like you're bothering or burdening your team.
They want to be engaged. They want to be involved in the work at this level. So specifically, I'm thinking planning meetings, problem solving those kinds of meetings.
George Drapeau: Yes.
Camille Rapacz: The main thing is to think about your team as your most valuable resource, use them wisely, engage them often. I mean, you hired all these amazing people.
So why are you just sitting them down to crank out work individually, put them together and get higher levels of performance as a team, they will do better if they really figure out how to team better, They want to do it. And you need them to do it if you want to raise performance.
So my parting words are, you may not need less meetings. You might just need better ones.
George Drapeau: That's right.
Camille Rapacz: Any last words, George?
George Drapeau: No, I love this. Love the list. Publish the list. People need to see this list.
Camille Rapacz: Okay. The list is coming out. So I will make sure that the list of meeting types is in the show notes for everybody.
I will also make sure that the link to our voicemail is in the show notes. So you can leave us a message if you have thoughts about meetings or have topics that you want us to make sure we talk about. there will be a link in the show notes. So you could book a free consult with me if you would be so inclined.
George Drapeau: You should do it folks.
Camille Rapacz: That's all I have for today. Thank you everybody for listening and we will be back in your ears next week.
George Drapeau: See you soon everybody.
