Ep261: Meetings Don’t Have to Suck: Learn a Better Way to Create and Collaborate | with Dr. Steven Rogelberg

Zack Arnold

I am here today with Dr. Steven Rogelberg who is an organizational psychologist. He's the Chancellors professor at UNC Charlotte, and author of the new book glad we met to the art and science of one on one meetings. And according to the person that I would consider my own personal Obi Wan Kenobi of leadership of relationships of networking, as well as an organizational psychology Who is Adam Grant, he says that Steven Rogelberg knows more about how to improve meetings than anyone on Earth, coming from Adam Grant. For those that don't know, that's about as big of an endorsement as you can get. That's like Michael Jordan saying of another basketball player, they're the real deal. You've done keynotes for companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Pfizer, Cisco Bank of America, I could spend the entire call mentioning the list of names. But there's one notable one that I think is going to pique the interest of my audience today, which was Warner Brothers. And I bring that up, because you can speak to this because you've spoken to many companies. The other people that I've talked to in Organizational Psychology and leadership, those that have worked in both a corporate space in the entertainment space, say that they've never seen anything more messed up or disorganized in entertainment. I've got that distinctly from Greg McKeown. He's like Hollywood is a whole different kind of mess, right? So I guess where I want to start today, is, first of all, saying immensely appreciative of your time. So thank you for being here.

Steven Rogelberg

Oh, my gosh, it is such a pleasure. I really appreciate it. And

Zack Arnold

I am confident in saying that today's meeting could not be an email, but most of them could be. So I guess where I want to start is by answering the quintessential question, why do Meetings Suck?

Steven Rogelberg

All right, well, let's just get right into it. Let's

Zack Arnold

just dive into it, shall we?

Steven Rogelberg

So there's, there's lots of reasons why we struggle with meetings. You know, Meetings Suck, because we often meet just out of habit. We're not intentional, we don't think about why we actually need a meeting is the meeting the best vehicle for having this conversation, because we have a lot of choices. And so we meet out of habit, we meet for the wrong reasons, we over invite, or we under invite, which is more rare. We don't embrace our role of a facilitator in the meeting. And instead we do most of the talking. And the more the leader talks, the lower the ratings of meeting effectiveness, to no surprise, we don't have a proper close to the meeting. So people leave going, I don't even know what the heck we just decided. So it's from soup to nuts, a bad design, bad facilitation, and no clarity upon ending.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, and well, we could dive into all of those. And we'll probably hit quite a few of them. But I think that the the one where I want to start is that I think that it applies to meetings, but applies to so many other things that are broken, but are never fixed is that well, we've just always done it this way. Right? This is just how we do it. Why is it so hard to change things when we've done them the wrong way for so long?

Steven Rogelberg

I love that. And you know, really, as an organizational psychologist, I'm driven to study pain at work, especially pain, where, you know, we just haven't done anything about it. And yet, we know it's a problem. And meetings are that perfect combination of pain, yet it's an essential activity. Like it's really critical. You know, meetings are an evolution in organizational functioning, right there an evolution over what we experienced during the Industrial Revolution, where it was all command and control systems. And so meetings in many regards, or where organizational democracy takes place, right. It's the it's essential for communication, cooperation, coordination, consensus decision making. So meetings are so important. But we're wallowing in bad ones. for three reasons. Do you want me to share these three reasons with

Zack Arnold

God? Yes, let's just go right into the weeds.

Steven Rogelberg

All right. So first of all, leaders think they're not the problem. When you serve a people coming out of a meeting, there is one person who says that was really good. Is that can you guess who that one is? Oh, yeah, it's

Zack Arnold

me right here. CEO, leader facilitator, you have no idea how self conscious I was preparing for this. I'm like, Oh, my God, it's all me. I'm the problem. So yes, I'm right there with you. So leaders have

Steven Rogelberg

a blind spot. So that's relevant, right? So if you are a blind spot, you're not motivated to make changes. You think the problems with others so we have a leader blind spot. We also have the reality that organizations actually don't provide any training around meetings. We have found that only around 25% of managers received training on how to lead a meeting. This is another Her incredible blind spot. And then the training that does exist, is not meaningful. In fact, it doesn't align well with the science and a good example of that, and we can talk about it more later. Because I think you're going to be intrigued is this notion of agendas, the effects of having agendas on meeting quality is minuscule to nothing. And when we really stop and think about it, it's not a surprise, so many agendas are recycled. What matters more is what's on the agenda? Who's invited? And how do you facilitate completion of the agenda, that's the hard stuff. This is why in my book, my chapters called agendas are a hollow crutch, because sometimes people think they have an agenda. Now they're good. So we have a blind spot for the leader, we have a lack of training for the leader. So they just wind up reusing the dysfunctional practices that they themselves have experienced. And number three, there's an organizational blind spot. Namely, if you look at an organization's engagement survey, there's nothing on there around meetings. So here you have this activity that's consuming so much time that you know, people are going batty over. And yet, as an organization, you're not assessing it. So there's no feedback or accountability at the organizational level. So that's a lot of blind spots. And that's a lot of skill gaps. And those things together, just keep leading us to wallow in bad meetings.

Zack Arnold

There's a lot that I want to dig into. But the first thing that I'm really curious about because I'm not sure that there's a better person on the planet to ask this question than you. Because as I already mentioned, you straddled between the corporate world and organizational management, and the least a little bit from what I can tell in your bio dabbling in the creative world. And in movie studios. When you said that less than 25% of managers and team leaders received training on meetings, I would venture to guess it's about 0%. In Hollywood, I leadership is not prioritized at all, because there's no structure in organizations like Google, Facebook, whatever, there's a vested interest in learning these skills, because people come into the company full time and they want to grow as a team. In Hollywood, everything is one project at a time, you're a widget and a machine, you do this job, you do this job, you do this job, let's just coordinate what needs to get done, then we go our separate ways. And there's no long term investment or any kind of sense of team culture. And it might be a little bit different at the movie studios themselves. But from my perspective, and from the perspective of almost everybody listening, we're on the creative side, where the editors, the composers, the directors, the writers, and we're just cogs in a machine. So nobody has any concept of how to lead a meeting. And I'm curious if you've noticed anything similar, having worked with so many different companies, I've

Steven Rogelberg

definitely worked with a number of organizations in the creativity space. I've worked with another number of media outlets, a lot of organizations that have programmers, game makers, did a lot of that with Google, certainly Warner Brothers discover, to name some so yeah, you're certainly right, that dysfunction across those organizations is apparent when it comes to meetings. But Zack is everywhere. It's everywhere. Like, I get asked, okay, tell me, Robert, what's the one organization doing this right? Or what's the one sector doing this? Right? There isn't. This is this is a universal problem. In fact, one of the things that I get a kick out of talking about in my keynote, is that I, I share some data around what percentage of employees complain about wasted time in meetings. And I give three choices A, B, or C and C is like 70%, or more employees complain about bad meetings. And I've done these speeches throughout the world. I'm talking, you know, China, Germany, Chile, Mexico, I mean, every every continent, well, not every but and it's always see, it's always see, like, the world is not united on many things. But when it comes to the misery around meetings, like we are one big family of pain, and every sector is struggling. And what's interesting, though, is getting this right. It's definitely we know it's going to help individuals and people. But it's critical for the organizations that the data links effective, effectively running meetings and organizational profitability is even tied to retention of your top talent. Right? If your top talent, your top designers, your top creatives are wallowing in bad meetings, guess what? They're out of there. They're leaving. So one of the there's not many wonderful things that came out of the pandemic of course, but one of the wonderful things I did come out of the pen EMIC is much more interest in the topic of meetings. And moving away from just accepting bad meetings is the cost of doing business and more into this perspective of how can we make this

Zack Arnold

competitive advantage. I want to put a pin in that for a second, because I definitely want to go down the road of how much things if it evolved or devolved, depending on your opinion, since the pandemic, because so much is done remotely and technology is either helped or hurt about what I want to dig into a little bit more. First, is if this is a universal issue, and it's not a matter of well, it's Hollywood, or the tech sector, or it's the United States, it seems to me this is more a human problem. What is the universal connectivity between all these things that just makes us universally bad at meetings? Just on a human level? globally? What what do you find is the common threads that make us just so inherently bad at this,

Steven Rogelberg

we think that we are really good with people. And if you look at our divorce rates, we're not, we're not really good by 50% of divorces, I mean, 50% of marriages end in divorce. So our ability to engage with and work with interact with people is just not as good as we think we are at it. And at the same time, we have a false sense of competence. I mean, think about your line of work, right. So podcasts, you know, why is you're successful, and others aren't. That person who's not successful, they think they're just as good as you are. Whether or not what you do is you prepare, right? You think about the conversation, you think about the story, you think about you listen carefully, right? You're engaging in all these behaviors that separate you from those others. But I can't stress enough that those others, they think they're just as good at you. They think they're really good at doing a podcast, but they're not. Right? Because you think about it with the podcast, everyone should. Everyone should think they're good at it. It's just a conversation. But we know that's not the case. And the same applies to meetings. Everyone just thinks that when it comes to having a conversation, yeah, I got the skills for that. I know how to do that. And they don't. Yeah,

Zack Arnold

I know that I've worked for a multitude of leaders, where I was on the receiving end of the meeting had very little to do with the agenda. And as soon as it starts with everybody tell us One fun fact about yourself, or lets everybody share what you did on vacation. And there's 12 people on the call. I'm like, shoot me in the head, like, let me just go do what it is that I meant to do. I I understand team building, and we want camaraderie, but especially if it's on a zoom call, just let me do my work. I can't be alone and feeling that

Steven Rogelberg

way. Oh, you're not? I have an alternative to that. By the way. That's awesome. Yes, let's hear it. So first of all, you're completely correct this idea of being on a zoom and telling people hey, let's go around. Everyone's saying what they did this weekend is horrible, people who can't see. And it actually serves no purpose. Because there's no meaningful connection that's achieved that way. And you know, when we think about the pandemic, what people miss was genuine connection. That's what we were longing for. And so an alternative approach to what you described, is that as people enter into your Zoom meeting, if it's doing virtual, obviously, all of this can be done any package. And in person is you actually right when they come in, you assign them to a breakout with one other person. And they're assigned with this one of the person for just two or three minutes to have a conversation. And then they come back and the meeting starts. But the beauty of this approach is it's only two minutes, and it's real. It's a real conversation, it's not a BS conversation, is you being able to connect with someone else. And even if it's just two or three minutes, at least, it's real and genuine. And every time I have a meeting, we randomly assign you to someone else. So over time, you're starting to build some of these relationships. This is akin to when you walk into a meeting room and you look to your right, or you look to your left, and you have a person there and you start talking, but it's genuine is a real conversation. Yeah,

Zack Arnold

I liked that. I liked that a lot. This was a conversation that I had had with one of my team members who was actually my Podcast Producer, she's on with us currently. But she had said to me, it was like a year or two ago. One of the things that I put out to my team specifically, just for a sense of context, it's a very small team. It grew from first just meet and then me and two other people and now there's about 10 of us. But I said that it is very important to me that we develop the skill of meeting and communicating and this is something that I want to get better at. But I suck at it right now. And I know very little about us. We spent the last year really trying to figure it out to work out the kinks. And her suggestion was in this she was very right about this. She's like You're very agenda driven very, actually, let's talk about next steps actions here. The jobs she's like, what if we just spent the first 10 or 15 minutes, and we just shared with each other. So we had human connection. And the intent behind it was great. Well, we kind of fell into that. That hole of well, it's 15 minutes of just sharing this, that or the other thing? I guarantee we're going to try this one on one thing, because I think that this is great. Oh, yeah.

Steven Rogelberg

Oh, it's, it's so much better. Because 15 minutes, that's a lot of time. If you're a leader, and you want to build the connective tissue among your team members, create a strategy for that. Let's think about it. Right? Meetings are a small part of that. But there's lots of other things that can be brought to bear if you're trying to build a sense of team and cohesion. And so many leaders just fall into this trap that oh, yeah, my meetings have a mechanism for building cohesion. That's like, so misguided, in fact, and I think you're I know, you'll appreciate this because I know you have athletic background. You know, one of the things with cohesion is cohesion often follows from success. So if you have a team or meeting that excels, guess what happens? People like each other, being really productive fosters cohesion. So this idea of taking 10 to 15 minutes away from getting stuff done. I'm not as keen on it, I'd rather you know, do this shorter two or three minute intervention, have a fabulous meeting, where you kick butt? And then you're building cohesion through that. And then as part of your long term plans, okay, how can I build the most cohesive team? I have? And what could that look like? And what strategy will I have and be intentional and purposeful with it?

Zack Arnold

Yeah, I love all that. What that made me think of is that and I'm glad you brought up sports, because I've always been so interested not so much in the actual sport in the athletics of it or even in the players on the team. I'm such a nerd and that ever since I was a kid, either all the major sports teams or the major league sports or you know, iconic movies. I was always more interested in the coach. Like when I talked about ad nauseam about how the Karate Kid was my Star Wars and I ended up working on Cobra Kai is, you know, my like my dream job. I was always way more interested in Mr. Miyagi, his philosophies than Daniel. When I watched miracle way more interested in the coach and the Kurt Russell character than the team Hoosiers obsessed with Gene Hackman. I don't even remember the players names, but I love the Gene Hackman character. So I've always been interested in leadership. And whenever people would look at successful like football teams, I was really into football for years, everybody underestimates the power of the locker room and the culture in the locker room and how that makes such a difference in winning or losing. And that's one of the things that I've really zeroed in on is now that I'm building more of a team, rather than just and I fell into this trap is a solopreneur. Transitioning to building a team. Well, I've got a really long to do list. Now I have more people. So I'm gonna outsource my To Do lists, right? And that just wasn't working. And essentially, the meeting was a faster way of outsourcing tasks and to do lists. And then I realized, well, that doesn't work. And it was more about how do I delegate authority and use meetings to solve problems. So working in Hollywood, as an editor or as a creative, I've seen so many horrible meetings where you literally have every department head. So you have like 50 people on the call. And it's a disjointed mess. And it's two and a half hours and nothing gets done. Versus you get 345 people on a call. And it's about let's solve a problem together. And my team and I hope and again, I hope that the leadership blind spot isn't there, because my team might be on this call and say, Oh, Connor meeting sucks. So I could be wrong. But now what I've done is I've structured it around a question, here's a problem to solve, anybody can jump on the call the feels that they have a relevant solution. So we as a team can solve this problem. And now I love our meetings, there's so much fun. So

Steven Rogelberg

I want to I thought, oh, go ahead. No, I mean, that's one of the things I talked about, in my, my research. And by the way, before I forget, when you're talking about fostering connection, one of the greatest ways of doing it is through one on one meetings. And I know we're going to talk about that, because that's the one meeting that people actually want more of, not less of, so well, we'll get back to that. So you were mentioning while I was talking

Zack Arnold

about the idea of how we were structuring meetings around solving problems, and I actually I'm gonna I'm gonna get also we can use this to roll into the concept of a one on one because i think i and maybe it wasn't a mistake, but I made what I thought was the mistake of it only being one on one meetings, the only two options were everybody on the team on the same call, or it was one on one and I realized I'm having the same conversation five times and for this problem, whether it's podcasts content or, you know, course content, I was having the same conversations and nobody was talking to each other. So it was all silos. But I think I've thrown the baby out with the bathwater where now it's all either full team meeting. It's small groups working on a problem. But we've kind of not eliminated but we've removed a large part of the one on ones. So let's talk about because you you said earlier, meetings are essential. And I think a lot of people that don't understand meetings would say, No, they're not, it can all be done via slack and email. So let's talk about why meetings are essential when they work. And this idea of one on ones versus small groups and how to structure

Steven Rogelberg

them. Okay, so first, I want to before I forget, one of the things that I talked about, and I'm really happy to hear that you do this is the new innovation and agendas. So as opposed to structuring them as a set of topics to be discussed, frame your agenda is a set of questions to be answered. And by doing so, now, you have to really think, right, you have to think about why why are you having this meeting to solve these questions, you have a better sense of who to invite. They're relevant to the questions, you have a better sense of whether the meeting successful, the questions have been answered. By having your agenda framed as questions, you now create an engaging challenge that draws people in. And if you just can't think of any questions, it likely means you don't need a meeting. So this agenda as questions approach is fabulous. It's a simple intervention that can yield tremendous results. Now, some other things, you're absolutely correct, leaders have a variety of different communication choices they can make. I mean, obviously, there's team meetings, you know, there's tons of asynchronous opportunities. So many leaders, especially with creatives, have fabulous success, you know, having basically this asynchronous document for each of their people. And, you know, people pose questions they get answers is this dialogue, it provides this connective fiber between, you know, the various meetings, it becomes documentation when you have performance appraisals, or what have you. So, the use of asynchronous documents are great, it's a great way of having a meeting. And the added bonus is it doesn't interrupt your workflow, which is a real common issue for creatives. Right? Because people can access their ascending document when it's convenient. Related to this, some leaders, you know, if they need to just create some one way announcements, instead of scheduling a meeting, they do a little podcast with themselves, they record themselves, it's so easy to do. And then they send it out, and they let people listen at their own time. Right. So so many people, and in particular creatives, you know, they crave uninterrupted blocks of time. And as leaders, we can promote that, through the various communication vehicles that we choose to use, like we can be much more sensitive to that. So that's an easy intervention. But circling back to that other piece, one on ones, one on ones, which is obviously, you know, that's the core of my new book, glad we met the art and science of one on one meetings, those meetings. They're so different than the other ones, right? One on one meetings, is the one type of the meeting that should not be an email. It's the one type of meeting that employees want more of, not less of, in fact, our research shows that what employees desire is having these weekly, which I think is really interesting. And this was a cross cultural, global study. What was also interesting is senior leaders counter to generational stereotypes actually wanted the most one on ones, because they recognize right how valuable contact is with your manager. So these one on ones are this opportunity to truly connect with your manager there orchestrated and facilitated by the manager, but it's not for them. It's for the direct. It's that one predictable time, every week or every other week, where that direct knows they have you that they can bring up what's on their minds, and have a discussion with you about it. And the role of the leader is not to jump in there. And this isn't necessarily rescue or solve but just to ask good questions, and you know, provide counsel when it fits. But these one on ones can truly elevate employee experience. We all know the adage that people don't leave bad jobs, they lead leave bad bosses. Well, one of them ones are your opportunity to prove you're not a bad boss. And I get asked often whether one on ones are optional. They're not. They're required. This is literally where leadership It takes place. This is your stage for leadership. So one on ones are critical for promoting employee engagement and success. But it's also good for your success as a leader, right, we're evaluated by the success of those that reported to us. And so as our team members and team thrives. So we Furthermore, what's generally been found is that when managers have regular one on ones with their people, they actually have less interruptions between meetings. So they have more uninterrupted time. Right. So this is good for the leader. It's good for the team, team members and the team. It's foundational to your inclusion efforts. And I'll add that it's also just good for your well being and health, one of the best predictors of life satisfaction is helping others and one on ones are your opportunity to show up for someone else to truly see them.

Zack Arnold

I have a very unique perspective and that I can look at this from two diametrically opposed angles. The first of which is you said, the creatives desperately crave focused blocks of creative time where they're uninterrupted, oh my god, that is the story of my life. And the reason why as an individual creative working as a team, where I am and a cog in a machine, do not tell me when to meet, do not constantly say, did you check your email? Did you get this message, you didn't hire me to answer emails and be in meetings, you hired me to edit the show, or whatever the job might be? Right. So that was always the way that I saw meetings for most of my career, then all of a sudden, I transitioned to the leader. And I said to myself, well, I want to meet with all my team. So I know what they're up to. But the slat that I took, I saw, I think I'm doing some things right with a one on ones, but I want to dig into this a little bit deeper. I said to them, I want you to bring the agenda. This is not me telling you what to do think of me as your coach, right? I work for you in these meetings. So it's your responsibility to come with questions, challenges, and I want to coach you through it. So I think that for the meetings themselves, maybe they're not as awful as I think they are. Or again, maybe I have a blind spot. Here's what here's what really hit me though. And this is still the kind of the rock and the hard place that I'm between. And I can't imagine a better person on the planet to solve this problem than you. I'm also still a creative, I still want to be able to write or I want to be able to do whatever, you know, content development I'm doing or I still have a creative job on the side, right. So what I found is that now as the leader, like we, as we talked about, from a communication perspective, doing only one on ones created silos, and a lack of communication between people working on the same project, setting that aside, I found that I am in meetings all day long, and I never get anything done. So that was one of the reasons that I said, we need to find a different way to meet, because I'm the bottleneck because the creative work I'm responsible for I can't get done because I'm always doing one on one meetings. What's the sweet spot? What's the middle ground to make them work, but not sap up all of my time? Or my team's time? Yeah.

Steven Rogelberg

So I have two quick responses. One is start using asynchronous more, because that will free up some time. So start looking for ways having more asynchronous conversations with your folks, you know, second, just be much more intentional with how you place these things on your account. You know, you should lock up certain number of hours each day for your creative work. That's not a negotiable. If you don't respect that time, why would you expect anyone else to respect that time? So if you think it's important, schedule it well get. And when you're scheduling meetings with your team, you know, basically, the ideal and this can be all through conversations is once you have a better sense of how each team member wants to schedule their meetings, then, you know, you have this working model so that, you know, if you want to respect Bill's time that he generally prefers meeting in the morning. That's great. Now you know that and you could take that into consideration. So start having these conversations around what are people's preferred meeting schedules and make note of it. But that doesn't mean that you give up your scheduled creative time. But those two things together, holding sacred your creative time and being more intentional with your scheduling of meetings, that will generally allow you some blocks of time to get into flow, which is critical. Now initially, people thought that only creatives would benefit from getting into flow. But that's not the case. All humans benefit from flow. All humans benefit from uninterrupted time. And then furthermore, I do want to say that when I've worked with creatives and programmers and such, they are fine with meetings, if they're good. They know that they do need some meetings, but they rebel against is bad meetings that keep keep interrupting them from doing their jobs. But if they're well placed good meetings, people are good with it. Like they get it, they get, it's important that they're not working in complete isolation. So that additional attention, ality with scheduling using the asynchronous. And then I'd also add in your case, sack that I would look to decrease your meeting times. You know, we know from the research that there's something that exists called Parkinson's Law. And this is the idea that work expands to fill whatever time is allotted to it. So if you schedule a meeting for 60 minutes, it will take 60 minutes. But we can use this to our advantage, right, we can schedule meetings for 45 minutes for 35 minutes for 25 minutes. And Parkinson's Law suggests that we will still get it done. So let's play with more aggressive meeting times. And if they're not working for us, we can increase. Right. So now, you know, I get asked to do a lot of different consultations and meetings, as you suspect. And my typical Mo is when someone tells me a time, I'm like, let's try to do it in 15. And if it doesn't work, we can always find more time. But 90% of the time, we're done. We're done. So I think those three approaches can help to give you some of the uninterrupted time for flow that you crave. Yeah,

Zack Arnold

I love all of that. And it tells me that I think maybe I'm on the right track, because the the aha moment that I and my team had recently was that I have a very specific amount of time where I make myself available to my students literally called the office hours, just like if I were a professor at a university, where Tuesday and Thursday mornings, you click this button, you get 20 minutes, just one on one with me, I saw the problem. And I said, what if I did that with us as a team. So they can go on to a calendar and say from 1130 to 12. On Wednesday, I want to solve this problem, great. But I am now blocking out more of that time for me to be the creative and not the manager. And that's made a big difference. When it comes to Parkinson's Law, this is actually a concept that I teach to my students in my program, because we have a whole time management department. So one of the things that I just kind of want to add for the listeners that have never heard this, I've actually renamed this principle not officially, I call it the mother in law principle, which is that if you know your mother in law's coming to your house in three hours, it takes you exactly two hours and 59 minutes to clean your house. It doesn't mean that maybe it'll take half a day or a day, however long you think it's gonna take to clean your house. If she arrives in three hours. It takes you two hours and 59 minutes to clean your house. Right meetings work the same way allotting time to write a chapter of a book or cut a scene. If you really shorten that time. You can kind of gamify how quickly and how efficiently Can I actually get through this.

Steven Rogelberg

I love it. So many good things. Candidly, I love what you said about the one on ones. You absolutely nailed it. I mean, what how you described it for yourself is all mean, that's what emerged from the research is the best approach. You know, it's it's not your time. It's not the time for status updates, right. As leaders, managers we have, we have the power, we can schedule a million meetings with people if we need to check in with them. So we have that ability. I hope we don't. But we have that ability. This is just one of those opportunities for the employee. Right? This is that one time that they can share what's on their minds. And, and our job as a manager is to really encourage them to think, think broadly, about what they talk about. Right? So they could talk about their jobs, they could talk about their teams, they could talk about the broader organization, they can talk about personal issues that impact work, they can think short term, they can think long term, you know, aka like career stuff. So as a manager, we want to prime them to think differently. Because if we don't do that, typically what employees do when they go into one on ones is they give you what you want to hear, right. So they'll start doing a status update, because they think that's what we want. So we just need to re affirm that this is not about monitoring work, we can do that a million different ways. This is about focusing on what's on your minds, you know, what's what's taking up real estate in that brain of yours. And let's try to work through it. I also want to go back to something that's come up a few times. So I want to I want to label it more explicitly, which is I want leaders to start having meetings about meetings. Now. I know people will make fun of me for that. But holy crap, like how are we not having a meeting about meetings? If you know your people are spending all this time in it, and they're miserable? How could you justify not talking about it? And so if we have a problem at work, and we want to And we want to fix it. It's not going to go away on its own, we have to talk about it. So yeah, managers actually need to start talking to their people about how to make these things truly work for them. Right How to make sure that meetings don't prevent them from being creative, right? Let's start talking about this. I'm not talking about building your schedule, with meetings about meetings. But as we move into 2024, if we want to chart out a new future of work, from a meetings, collaboration perspective, that is actually positive. It's not going to magically happen. We have to have a conversation around it.

Zack Arnold

Oh, my God, it's so hilarious that you said this. I'm feeling so much less self conscious than I did. 40 minutes ago, my entire team, I sent them a message, a multitude of messages. And I said, we're going to slow everything down for the rest of the year for November and December. And you guys can make fun of me all you want. We're going to be having multiple meetings about meetings, because I want to figure out meetings, we're going to talk about them what works, what doesn't work, how do we restructure them? How do we make them work for us? And I'm like, Oh, my God, I must look like I'm so disorganized having meetings about meetings, and the only thing worse than a meeting is a meeting about meeting, right? I feel so much better about all the things that we've been doing. I've been way less self conscious that I was, I

Steven Rogelberg

think you have fabulous instincts I really do. I kind of, I feel like I'm talking to a brother from another mother. I definitely feel like your instincts are right. And and I think this idea of telling your team, I want to have a meeting about our meetings is such a good reflection on you. Right? Because we know people are miserable. So why be tone deaf with it? Let's go after what's making people miserable. And say, Let's try new things. And after a few months, we'll take a look at them again. And if it's not working, we'll figure it out. And interestingly, in the world of it in, you know, infrastructure, that's a smaller investment than meetings, meetings are more expensive than your entire it. And yet it we assign a staff around it. Right, we have a chief technology officer, we have surveys around it, we absolutely have meetings, whether I are it is doing what we need it to do. So we recognize that our it is this tremendous investment. And we want to make sure we get a return on it. And yet, in the world of meetings, we just assume that that same process and practices are not necessary.

Zack Arnold

Well, I think that we've I could talk just about the concept or the idea of agendas, one on one meetings, how to get the most out of that interaction. But the area that I want to zoom in to next, which I think number one is an area where I'm struggling a little bit. But it's also an area that I think is a lot more beneficial for those that are the individual creatives that want to start figuring out how do we implement this is how to conduct a good asynchronous meeting. So let me break down kind of the way that I'm looking at it right now. And you can poke holes in my thinking. But I see it in this idea, by the way of doing an like an announcement video. That was brilliant. I'm I'm already thinking like I could do a you know, a status update every week. Here's we're working on here, the things to know and I don't even need to meet up. I love that idea. So I'm already going to start doing that. But I see there's a couple of different modes of communication, one of which we use Slack. It doesn't matter if it's slack, or teams or whatever. But I see slack as just kind of like nudges like a knock on the door. But as far as this is a conversation that we need to access later. That's a resource that's more detailed. I tell them don't put it in Slack. Or if you do, it needs to live somewhere else, which for now is Google Docs. Could be Google Docs could be notion, what I don't want to talk about is the technology. This won't be notion versus Trello versus Asana. But help me and help everybody else understand how to organize the concept or the logic of an asynchronous meeting, because I feel like I'm still kind of struggling with this one.

Steven Rogelberg

Sure. It can look like a lot of different things. So there's there's not a single way. So there's not going to we're not going to uncover like this is the magic way of doing it. And I'm a big believer in creating support systems like async that just fit you as a person. So there's a few approaches that people have found successful, which by the way, this is why the new book, The glad we met you know I I signaled that in the title, right, the art and science, because when it comes to one on ones, there really is a lot of art to it. So the science helps. But there is an art my first book, The surprising science of meetings, that was really about dumping the evidence so people can start making better choices. There wasn't as much art involved. So when I think about asynchronous the the approaches that I've seen leaders have experienced the most success. One is framing In this asynchronous by date, and key questions, and then you know, so here's the key question I have. And as this is running dialogue, and these questions just kind of accumulate over time. A second approach is, here are my key priorities. Here's what's going on with each one of them. Here's where I'm struggling, running into issues, and allows you to immediately plug in some responses or comments. So that's a second approach. And obviously, the first two approaches can be approached. A third approach is more of a template based approach, where you basically say, okay, in a one on one, you know, we can talk about things related to your job, we can talk about things related to the team. So we basically structure our template. And I have some models in the in the new book, too, that people can just take. So you structure the asynchronous document, almost like this template is labeled this is, you know, weak x. And then people fill this in, implied or various questions that you'll chart into. And then basically, you're able to leap back through this asynchronous document and find the story that exists for that individual. And you're able to keep making the connections to what's been in the past. So those three approaches I think people have found great success with, I do want to share a bonus is that depending on your approach, let's say that you're the asynchronous is really about identifying the key actions that emerged from one on ones indicating what status and progress you've made, this stuff can actually just be thrown into an AI. And AI does a fabulous job content, analyzing notes over a long period of time. So you could put in the story of that employee, right, looking at those notes and telling your AI to identify the themes that emerge from it. And then it's going to do a fabulous job. And then that can become the corpus of material for your, your annual your every six month performance appraisals. So these asynchronous documents could just be so incredibly effective. For you know, just managing your people in a way that is less disruptive.

Zack Arnold

I hadn't thought about the AI angle. One of the things that we're working on as a team right now is taking Thiago Forte's concept of a second brain, but using it specifically for team communication. And we talked about right now we're looking at a notion, but again, this isn't about the tools, this is about the psychology of it, I said that I want our meetings to be a resource, if we have a great conversation about problem solving this issue, we're gonna have this problem a year from now, I don't want to have the same conversation, I want to be able to go back and find the AI summary of the notes or whatever. But I never thought to myself, the comprehensive overview of a long string of conversations, that's a whole new level that I hadn't considered. And that's I'm just geeking out on that idea right now. So we're, we're gonna double down on all of that. But the the other thing that I took away from this, and then the there's one other area that I want to get into, that we put a pin into, but this idea of having somebody on your team, like an IT leader, that's a meeting leader, I have now already thought to myself, I know who I'm going to delegate to this to them, and your job is to improve the quality of our meetings. Right. And if for the most part, I thought as well, that's, that's my job. But if meeting about meetings, like that's something that I have a great person on the team to delegate that to, but it never occurred to me, where there are so many department heads, but there isn't like a meeting and communication department head

Steven Rogelberg

on. Right? It's fat. It's fascinating. Yeah, as you said in the intro, I've been very fortunate, I've worked with a ton of organizations. And with, I think what's telling is that my clients, you know, it could be the chief operations officer, it can be the CIO, it can be the chief talent officer can be the Chief Human Resource Officer. There's so many people. And there's not a theme, there's not a clear theme. And because no one owns meetings, no one owns collaboration. And we need that we need someone to say, Yeah, I got this, I'm raising my hand, I'm going to be a person that will monitor it, I'll keep looking for software to make us better. I'll keep helping to think of systems that provide feedback and accountability. And I'll keep working with the CEO to make sure we're fully realizing the potential of this. And that's actually an exciting role. You know, again, if you go back to the amount of time people are spending in this, how do we not have this, like it just seems natural. And there are some I know you you're you're not getting into tools, but I do want to give one plug to this Canadian company called Kairos. And they are creating this awesome plugin that basically just allows people to, you know, monitor them Eating activity, it creates a dashboard for the like a chief meeting officer to better monitor the situation. But it's just kind of a plugin that can work with Outlook. And they're, they're releasing their new products come January. And that could just be another opportunity for organizations to start trying to get their arms around the investment they're making in meetings.

Zack Arnold

How do you spell Kairos? For anybody listening, just we can put it in the show notes?

Steven Rogelberg

Sure. KIKAIR O S.

Zack Arnold

Excellent. We're gonna put that in the show notes. I could probably do an entire conversation with you for an hour just about that. But I want to be very respectful of your time, I got two more quick things I want to get into. One of which is I want to go back to something that I put a pin into very early in the conversation, which is this idea of how the pandemic forces to realize this as a priority. And we don't have to go too deep into that. But I guess the place to start is, there seem to be two diametrically opposed viewpoints on all levels from workers all the way to top CEOs like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, Elon Musk, which is that remote work has become so much less productive, and meetings and collaboration have suffered. And there are others that say, Oh, my God, this is so much better. With remote work, we collaborate more, we've been forced to learn meetings, what have you learned over the last three years about how remote work has changed the way we meet and communicate?

Steven Rogelberg

What we know about remote work, because we've actually collected data on this for decades, there's not new is that people are more productive on their individual tasks when they work at home. On average, we also know that on average, people who work remotely are more engaged, that flexibility is something that people cherish. With that said, that does not mean that people shouldn't be coming to work. There are things that are special around coming into a place, having spontaneous interactions with people, spontaneous engagements, there is something little sparks of creativity that happened when you were just out at lunch with someone. So there's value of working remotely, and there's value of working around other people. And so the challenge is just to find the right balance of that, depending on your industry, where your people are located. But this is another one of those things that, you know, when I tell leaders is, you know, instead of trying to say yeah, okay, let's have two days here, three days there or one day here, like come up with a broader philosophy, like what is the values that what goals are you trying to achieve as an organization, and then think about how your meeting strategy and place of work can help feed into those, you know, what people find frustrating is this thought of just a CEO saying, Okay, now we're going to try this. Now we're going to try that now we're going to go back to this, like, that's really frustrating, because it doesn't seem intentional or purposeful. And so the extent the CEO says, okay, as a company, these are our values. As a company, we're trying to inspire this type of innovation. We're trying to respect individual productivity. So it's, we're charting our strategy for place to what our ultimate goals are. And people will find comfort in that knowing that this is part of something bigger. And then, you know, when if people do come back, or when they do come back, coming back to work should not just be being in a bunch of meetings. Like, that's not what people missed about work, right? They missed the more casual interactions, those quick conversation, those quick walks. And so we want to make sure that when people come back to work, they're near the people, they need to be nearer. They are having all kinds of informal interactions, and they have lots of degrees of freedom to explore these relationships. So innovation, creativity, unexpected collaborations can emerge.

Zack Arnold

All that sounds great. But what about the guys like me that are thinking I don't have in person space. And I've got team members in Arizona, in Argentina, in the Philippines in Thailand, down the block for me like so for me, I very much see the value in a certain level of in person communication, the lunchroom, the watercooler those do have real value. Is there anything that I can do about that given I have no physical space, and it would be impossible to bring my team together?

Steven Rogelberg

Well, impossible to bring them together for some type of retreat. Well,

Zack Arnold

let's say impossible to bring together on a consistent regular basis, like once a week, once a month, that would be cost prohibitive for a retreat that's different. So yeah, go on.

Steven Rogelberg

All right. So to me, that can be a key part of the strategy where you have people gather, as an organization, be it every six months or a year, you're more intentional with fostering some mentoring. So when you have a new employee come in, you connect them with some with a variety of folks In their team and outside of their team, so that they start having some of these regular conversations, you have a program or that rotates over time. So they're meeting more people. So if you have that physical contact, you have that intentionality with regard to assigning people, you know, partners, and you start stressing that you want people to start making these relationships. So for example, one organization I work with, you know, basically started having lunches, where they say, you know, Zack would make sure that he has a lunch with Steven, once every week on Zoom, has a lunch with someone else, you know, every other week on Zoom. So we're, we're just together, right? And it's not necessarily agenda, we're just having lunch, but we're together. And so we can think of a variety of different tools that we can access. But if we have that one time, where everyone's come together, and you're really good at planning that time, that that crisis, lovely Foundation, and then you want to just make sure that your other informal systems between those gatherings are in place. And next thing, you know, you have a sense of team.

Zack Arnold

I love it. And that that's a big thing for us as we're, we're really doubling and tripling down on team culture. That's one of the great things about a startup is that even though we have very little financial flexibility, and we're still trying to figure it out, we've said from the beginning, we would rather move slowly, but intentionally and deliberately. And we want to build around a solid team and build around character and skills, not just who's the all star in this one department. And they come in and build funnels, where they can build course content is team cohesion and culture are important. But man, am I impatient. And I really like it all to just gel and work and all of our meetings to be perfect. But we've really we've we've really doubled down on making sure it's about team culture and communication. And this idea of I love this idea of like having a regularly scheduled kind of informal zoom lunch. And also I want to figure out how to do some form of an in person meeting, you know, once or twice a year, certainly not on a regular basis with people globally. But with with the few minutes that we have left, because I want to be very respectful of your time, I have hijacked so much of this conversation for my own personal selfish needs. I want to go back for a second specifically from the perspective of those that are listening, that are the the individual creatives that are part of a team, especially those that are working in Hollywood or other creative industries that are adjacent to it. If they're listening to this, like I would have been five years ago before I ran my own team thinking this is all great. But what the hell am I going to do about this? Because I'm the one that stuck in these meetings with people that don't have training and leadership or how to conduct a meeting. What do we do to start changing this from the ground up?

Steven Rogelberg

That's such a good question. And that's the heart of why there's so much frustration around meetings, because ultimately, when we're called to a meeting, we're pretty much relinquishing our power. And we're giving it to someone else. And they often don't treat it well. Right. When we give someone our time, that's one of our most precious commodities. And people seem to be very cavalier, and that frustrates the heck out of us. And that's also why we often multitask and beatings try to reclaim our power. So let me answer the question two ways, and the world of regular meetings. There's very little that team attendees can do if you're not the leader, but I'm going to highlight a few first of all, you can make sure that you're a model attendee. Right. So make sure your house is in order. Are you keeping your contributions succinct? Are you listening carefully to other people? Are you focused? Are you engaged, so make sure that you are modeling the behaviors that you're hoping to see in others? That's one. Number two, is that you can engage in shadow facilitation. So there's nothing that stops you during the meeting from saying, hey, you know, I know Zack was working on X, maybe, Zack, did you have any thoughts around this? Or, you know, Lisa was, you know, had, you know, Lisa, did you want to share so we can engage in some of these shadow facilitation behaviors, right? We can even make suggestions casually that, hey, can we spend more time on x? Because it's so important to where we're going next. Right? So we have some of these shadow facilitation behaviors that can help and then see, number three, number three is, remember the horrible feeling you have being in a bad meeting and swear to not be part of the problem? Right, we can all find some meeting that we lead, so harness that discomfort and, and I swear to yourself that you're not going to cause that upon anyone else. So those are the three things from our general meetings. Now on the one on one space just how I'd like one thing. And because I know, I know we're running out of time, I want to say one thing is that as a direct report going into a one on one, you cannot get what you need. Unless you know what you need. You just can't get what you need unless you know what you need. So before you go into that one on one, really reflect, think carefully about what types of information guidance counsel would be helpful, be genuine, be appropriately vulnerable. With you don't do those things, then the manager will just take those as cues that they should just be asking about status of various projects. So that's an issue. That's a that's something that's squarely in our court. But the more we give that thought, the more passionate we are around trying to get those needs met. You know, you start the meeting as a direct saying, I'm so happy we're having this meeting, you know, I have these really pressing issues. I'm just so glad thank you for finding the time. Boy, what a wonderful way of starting an engagement.

Zack Arnold

I would say that's not only great advice for meetings, that's great advice for life, you can't ask for what you need, unless you know what you need. I mean, we could get very existential about that. But man is that great advice. And I, I cannot advise enough how much people really should should think about that much deeper and much further, because we've just we've been told what we're supposed to need. And a lot of times, it's not in alignment with what we really need. I've gotten through about 3% of my notes for today's conversation. But I want to be very, very respectful of your time with this was immensely valuable. I'm sharing the raw link to this recording with my entire team by this afternoon. And hopefully, we'll get this out to my audience very, very quickly. But in the meantime, for anybody that wants to learn more, whether it's to go directly to find your book, or to connect with you, what is the best place to send people? Thank

Steven Rogelberg

you, I would say my website, I have a very strong LinkedIn presence as well. So certainly you can find me on LinkedIn. And that's just under my my name, Steven Rogelberg, and then my website, stevenrogelberg.com, stevenrogelberg.com. And I have so many resources that I put on there for folks to download. Obviously, there's links to my new book, The glad we met the art and science of one on one meetings, I hope people will check it out. I do want to say it I'm so passionate around getting this content out there because I know it can really help people. I'm donating all my author royalties to the American Cancer Society. Because that's just much more important for me to get it out. And so buy the book, if you want to level up your one on one meeting skills or buy the book if you want to help eradicate cancer. Either way, I love it. Just tremendous

Zack Arnold

amount of respect for all that, and tremendous gratitude for the time that you've prioritized in your life today to share with both me and with my audience. So, Steven, I wish you the best of luck and can't thank you enough for everything that you brought to me and my audience today. So thank you. Well, thank

Steven Rogelberg

you, Zack, and you did a fabulous job. The questions are great. I really appreciate your preparation, your facilitation, it was a meaningful conversation. Thanks to you. Well,

Zack Arnold

that means a lot to me. Thank you. You're welcome.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai