Lead In 30 Podcast

How Often Should You Meet With Your Team?

• Russ Hill

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I get this question all the time. Executives who wonder how often leadership teams should meet. In this episode I share what I've seen work best across all the various executive teams we've worked with over the last two decades.

We dive into how often you might consider meeting in your standard leadership team meetings, how often to do strategic offsite meetings, and the best way to do one-on-ones. 

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About the podcast:
The Lead In 30 Podcast with Russ Hill is for leaders of teams who want to grow and accelerate their results. In each episode, Russ Hill shares what he's learned consulting executives. Subscribe to get two new episodes every week. To connect with Russ message him on LinkedIn!



Speaker 1:

How often are you meeting with your leadership team, or how often should you be meeting with them? Let me share with you best practices. We're seeing right now in this episode.

Speaker 2:

This is the Lead in 30 podcast with Russ Hill.

Speaker 1:

You cannot be serious.

Speaker 2:

Strengthen your ability to lead in less than 30 minutes.

Speaker 1:

If you've listened for a long time, you know that I'm a huge fan, a huge believer in the power of walking around, right Management by walking around. I had an experience early in my management career that one of the senior executives in our company, when I was asking him for what's your secret like, how did you build this part of our company into such a successful endeavor, and he said it's, the secret is I walk around. And I thought what, wait, that's it Like, that's your secret. You walk around. And then, as I matured and gained more experience, I realized what he meant it was and in fact, we teach it as three different words. I want you to think about these visibility, accessibility and transparency. Okay, visibility, accessibility and transparency. So when I talk about walking around and in today's day and age, where so many of us have teams that are hybrid or somewhat virtual or all virtual, you have to do that differently. So I'm going to get into each of those in just a second. But first off, welcome into the Lead. In 30 podcast, in less than 30 minutes per episode, we give you a best practice, a model, a framework, an experience, a story, something for you to think about, incorporating or leaning into in the way that you lead others as you try to expand your impact, expand your influence, expand your income, expand your results.

Speaker 1:

And my name is Russ Hill. I make my living coaching, consulting senior executive teams at some of the world's biggest companies A little under the weather, so I might take a little, a few cough breaks here. I just can't shake this cold that I've had forever. It's driving me insane and, um, I'm half a step away from just surrendering, going into the doctor and say, come on, give me something to just kick this thing. But, um, anyway. So if you notice it, that's uh, that's why I might sound a little nasally. Um, by the way, if you want to find out more about our 30-day leadership cohort, our 30-day leadership training program, maybe taking it into your company, leadin30.com is where you can find out more and you can meet some members of our team and even reach out to some of them on the website. There. They are amazing individuals. I can't recommend them any higher than I do.

Speaker 1:

Okay, visibility, accessibility, transparency let's talk about those real quick. And then I'm going to spend most of this episode talking about visibility how often you're meeting with your team, and I'm going to share with you, because we're having these, this conversation with the executives that we interact with, that we work with in our consulting business all the time, and they're asking questions, and so I'm going to share with you what we see. We're pretty passionate about this and um about what works best based on the results we see, and the industry doesn't really matter. So, but before I get into visibility, I want to talk about these other two. So well, in fact, let me just break down all three words. So management, by walking around, making sure that you're having an impact that you could be having as a leader First thing is visibility.

Speaker 1:

Visibility is what I control. It's how often I show up for meetings, it's how often I'm walking the factory floor. It's how often I'm rounding with patients in the hospital unit. It's how often I'm sending an email out. It's how often I'm making a post in Slack. It's how often I'm reaching out, texting or calling my team members. It's how often I'm doing an all hands meeting. That's I'm controlling it. It's outbound visibility, if you will. So I'm scheduling this and there's a cadence to that. Right, if you go too long with it, if you're got a member of your team, they're like man, I haven't heard from Russ in forever. Then it starts to affect the culture, it starts to affect their energy level, it starts to affect their um, their alignment with our vision and and reminding them about what we're trying to accomplish. So visibility is I want to have a cadence to that and we're going to get into that, as it relates to meetings, in just a second.

Speaker 1:

Then accessibility pretty obvious. Right, that's incoming. So it's how often? How fast do I respond to the text that I'm getting? How fast do I respond? Or how often do I respond in the Slack channel or in Microsoft Teams or whatever platform you're using? How often can somebody send an email and know that I'm going to get back to them? And we all have our preferred methods of communication. Like our team at our firm would be like man, you can't get ahold of us through email. I just really suck at email.

Speaker 1:

Now, on text messaging, I'm pretty darn good. I pride myself on that. Few times it slacks, but I always tell people. If you can't get me on email, or you sent me an email and it's been 24 hours and I try to be good on that you just ping me, just poke me on text, or same thing with Slack. So Slack. I do pretty good in Text, pretty good. And if you call me, my cell phone rings 95% of the time. 90% of the time I'm going to answer, unless it's a week where I'm super busy, I'm on a plane or I'm in client meetings all day. But if I'm not at a client meeting or I'm not on a plane, I'm going to, I'm like I'm going to do everything I can to answer. It might just be hey, I'll call you back in a minute. Like I want you to hold that belief If you're going to answer.

Speaker 1:

Accessibility. So you think about how often am I visible? How am I doing in that area? How often and I'm working on that with some people right, and and and and it ebbs and flows and then accessibility Okay, that's really important, because some of you are super visible but you're not accessible. Or some of you are accessible but you're not visible tracking with me and then transparency is okay. Well, when you're make yourself visible or when you're accessible, do you tell me really what's going on? Like, do you give me? Do I feel like you're genuine? Do you feel, do I feel like you're telling me what you really think? Are you giving me the data that I need or are you giving me the company line? You're kind of holding back or you're really good at listening, but you're not great at answering my questions or sharing the data or sharing your vision or letting me know how you're reacting to something.

Speaker 1:

So, visibility, accessibility, transparency we wrote about those in one of our books I can't remember which one, I think it's. I think it's a remote ability, but I'm not sure to the remote ability or the great resignation. So if you want a little bit more on that and some stories that go with it, pick up that book, if you haven't already. Uh, I think it's remotability, okay. So, um, let's talk about meeting cadence, and this falls under I. I, I wanted to zoom out, macro and give you visibility, accessibility, transparency, so that I could show you how meetings are under visibility. So some of you, you're really good with your meeting cadence, but you suck at being accessible. You're not cutting it right, your, your team's, having challenges, that that leads to that. That affects engagement in a negative way. It affects, um, morale, it affects, uh, motivation and drive and our urgency when you aren't doing all three. Okay.

Speaker 1:

So, under visibility, I'll get this question all the time, especially from new clients of ours on the consulting side. How often should we be meeting? And some of you lead leadership teams. You're a senior executive, you're a mid-level manager, so you're leading leaders Like you lead people leaders. Others of you know you've got mid-level manager, so you're leading leaders Like you lead people leaders. Others of you know you've got direct reports in their individual contributors, their frontline supervisors.

Speaker 1:

In this episode, I'm talking mostly about those of you who lead teams of leaders, of people managers. And if that's not you right now, I still want you to listen because that's going to be you. As you scale your company or as you scale your career and you go up the org chart or you increase the size of your organization, you're going to have that leadership team. And, by the way, as you build that and you build members of that leadership team, you accelerate the pace of achieving results. That's how you scale right. So it's not just you leading the pace of achieving results. That's how you scale right. So it's not just you leading the department.

Speaker 1:

Now you got other leaders around you, which allows you to gain altitude. Now you can soar higher and look at the horizon more and be more strategic in your mindset, because you're not as tactical, because you got people now that are doing that for you, and some of you are in companies where you got to scale the leadership team more. You got to beef it up. The reason you're not growing as fast as you could be is because you're wearing too many hats and you're too tactical and you're flying at too low of an altitude. Right now You're doing the stuff that at this point in the company's evolution, you need to be gaining altitude. You need to be more strategic. You need to be gaining altitude. You need to be more strategic. You need to be planning ahead. You need to be being able to use your mind share to focus on where we could be going rather than what's happening today. You with me.

Speaker 1:

So, as you build out that leadership team, or if you've already got it and you're a senior executive at a decent sized company or a large company, how often should you meet with that leadership team? Or if you've already got it and you're a senior executive at a decent-sized company or a large company, how often should you meet with that leadership team? Not every week, that'd be my first position. I mean there are a few exceptions, especially if you're like managing. I can think of one organization in the insurance industry and this is a major growth part of this Fortune 10 company, and so the senior leader in that area she did.

Speaker 1:

She did like they call them stand-up meetings. None of them are in the same building, they're spread out in different locations and somebody's working from home, or a few of them are at home today and a few of them are in those offices in those different states, and generally the leadership team's traveling a decent amount and so she's doing just stand-up meetings and what that is is every Thursday or Tuesday, I forget when they do it, you dial in on Microsoft Teams or whatever platform it is for that company, I can't remember. And they've got it scheduled for like half an hour, but they rarely take the full half an hour and she's got no agenda. This is just like a check in a huddle. It's like what nurses do in a unit when one shift is getting off and the next shift is coming on. So all she does is everybody shows up, whoever can make the meeting. It's like, okay, what do we have? What do you guys need? And it's her being accessible, right, and it's her making the other teams accessible. Okay, what do we have? That's bubbling up or anybody got a question or is there something that's stuck or what do we need to be aware of? And this is this is a meeting with no slides. It's got no agenda other than we're just checking in with each other. It's a standup meeting.

Speaker 1:

So that happens weekly because of the urgency of the projects that they've been working on. That's an exception. Most leadership teams. Weekly is too much Like you're, you're wasting time there. Again, there are exceptions the outliers. If it's working for you, stick with it. Just most of the organizations that we work with they do not. The leadership teams not getting together weekly, there's not that much to talk about. And the senior executive doesn't want the leaders talking, they want them executing. So every other week is pretty standard.

Speaker 1:

So every other Monday and Mondays are generally the days for meetings, and typically a Monday afternoon, either a Monday afternoon or a Monday morning. Why? Because we're setting the pace, we're setting the tone for the whole week, plus you've got the weekend to kind of plan and fine tune the agenda and you want to do the meeting. Typically, like in our firm, we do it Monday morning. Why? Because a lot of times we're flying Monday afternoon, otherwise we would do it Monday afternoon. People are most productive in most organizations in the morning. So I don't want a meeting in the morning, I want people executing, I want them building stuff, I want them getting stuff done. So like three o'clock, when the energy level kind of goes down, or two o'clock or one o'clock, that's a great time for a meeting in the afternoon for us and our organization A lot of you too. You got people in the air, like people are running off to the airport. So we know that typically half our leadership team is going to be in the air on a Monday afternoon and so they probably are flying out at 10 or 11 or whatever. So if we do a meeting at nine, we're going to catch them.

Speaker 1:

And those early morning meetings it depends on your culture and your style or whatever. I've always despised early morning meetings. Why? Because I'm not a morning person. Some of you are. You get up at like four, I don't know why, but you do, and that works for you. So an eight o'clock meeting, a seven o'clock meeting, works great for you and in your culture. For me, you're not going to get my best. I'm happy to be there at seven. I'm happy to be there at six. I'm happy to be there at eight. You're not going to get my best. You get. You schedule the meeting for nine or 10. I've had a chance to check email, I've had a chance to get a couple of things done, I've had a chance to get going and now you're going to, you're going to get me with some energy on the upswing. So for me I prefer like a nine or 10 o'clock in the morning meeting If we've got flights in the afternoon, because that that's people's less productive. Yours is going to depend on the factory shifts or people's travel schedule or the hospital, whatever all these different variables.

Speaker 1:

But generally every other week, what do we do on that agenda? It varies, but what you don't want to do and I've been a part of these meetings for years is, yeah, we're just going to get together and go and maybe look at the calendar and then we're just going to go around the horn. We're just going to go hear from everybody Talk about a wasted opportunity. So, unless there are specific things that okay, this is what we want sales to report on every other Monday. This is what we want marketing to report on. This is what it is and it's just this little bit of data that works, or you can split it up Next week is marketing, the following week, the two weeks later, is sales, whatever it might be, always start the meeting with your key results.

Speaker 1:

We teach it in Lead in 30, tkrs, team key results. So we're starting with that. Hey, you all, as we start the meeting, it's it's just like it's just foundational, and so it's uh, here, here they are, and uh, just, and that always leads to comments. Like you know, you guys were crushing it on that first one. Great job in the last few weeks on this, that and the other. You're're always it's the first slide that's shared, it's printed on the agenda the team key results.

Speaker 1:

We always, always, always, always, start with the team key results or the organization's key results in the meeting and then typically the agenda will be structured around it, because one key result is going to be sales, most likely, and everybody affects that revenue number, but you're going to let sales take it. One is going to be around profit or safety or quality or something, and that's naturally kind of sits under one leader. We all impact it, but that department kind of leads the charge on it. And then you've got another one that might be people or engagement or whatever it might be, or a customer or patient. We've got somebody that kind of sits under patient experience or or, um, people management, whatever, and so they, they, they kind of lead that one. So you see how that's structured, okay.

Speaker 1:

Ok, then, if you are not doing quarterly offsites, why aren't you? Absolutely, and what we typically see. It depends on the size of your team, depends on the organization. Typically it's two days or a day and a half and you're not in the office. Why? Because you get interrupted, people step out nonstop, people get pulled out of the meeting. You're not thinking creatively.

Speaker 1:

Go to the hotel and rent a meeting space, go to whatever facility If you can be outdoors and we're in a season right now where most of us can't be outdoors but be somewhere where it's the windows. The whole room is full of windows and I can see like get my creative thinking, curb, appeal matters here. Spend some money, go to a nice place, maybe stay overnight, whatever it might be. Get people out of the office building, get them to a place that gets their right brain creative juices flowing. Get them to a place where they can sit down and and have a cup of coffee or a or a bagel or whatever, and they're sitting around and they're kind of there. There there's time built in to get to know each other and to the agenda Isn't so fricking structured that we can't have some time coming in and out of the room Like you want this team bonding, you want them just naturally talking to each other, you want to give them breaks and whatever Super important.

Speaker 1:

And then, if you do, some of you can do it in a day, day and a half, don't. And these meetings that go from 8 am to 5 pm are brutal. You think you're getting people's best up at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. They're fried. No, we usually start at 9 because we're going to give people some time to get emails done or get some breakfast in the morning, and then we're done at 2 or 3. Why? Because you're not good after 2 or 3 anyway, no one's paying attention. You're fried. Good after two or three. Anyway, no one's paying attention. You're fried.

Speaker 1:

And so I've worked for bosses, I've worked at firms where they're like yeah, we want to. We're spending all this money getting people together. We're going till five. I'm like well, you're getting nothing. Like you, if you, we're gonna all act like we're fully engaged the last hour or two, but you really get nothing. So that that's. That's my bias on that. In being in as I would challenge most of you to have been in more of those meetings than I have at more organizations, more companies with more executive teams, I've just I make my living doing that. So I've seen it in organization after organization after organization.

Speaker 1:

There is a difference on the team where the leader gets his or her team offsite every three months, does two days or does a day and a half or whatever, and doesn't have this fricking structured, crazy agenda that goes nonstop. We'll start at seven, we'll end at six. Oh my gosh, I dread these meetings right. So, also on the agenda, part of it is strategic and part of it is culture. So I make my living, our firm. We typically come in and run a half a day of those two days. Every quarter we typically are running half a day or it might be two hours, depending on how much movement's needed, how deep in the work we are, and we're coming in to talk about how the team's working together. So part of the offsite structured on the what what we're trying to get accomplished, it's strategy and part of it is structured around how.

Speaker 1:

When I say, culture. I'm not talking about you're playing games. That's not culture. Okay, that's just fun, that's just building some bond or whatever. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is where you're exchanging feedback and how you're showing up with one another. We were talking about where you need greater alignment, where the organization is having some silos. We are talking about that. We don't have enough clarity in this area or whatever. You're talking about the how. These are meaningful, productive, intense conversations in a how we work together. You got it.

Speaker 1:

So part of it the majority of the meetings on the what, and then part of it's on the how we work together, and you either bring in a consulting firm or you bring in somebody that knows how to do that if somebody to run that and you got to have the real conversations. This is where you dive in. You're talking about the real stuff and you're getting people to be candid and right. Otherwise it's a total waste of time. People are just telling you what they what, what they think you want to hear. That's what you're saying to each other.

Speaker 1:

So the other thing I'd say about that is in those strategic offsites, do not do death by PowerPoint. Okay, from eight to nine, we're going to have marketing present their strategic update and then, from nine to 10, we're going to get a quarterly business review from whatever team like poke a razor in my eyelid. Review from whatever team like poke a razor in my eyelid, like no that, because most of those are boring, and the way most of the leaders, your managers and you, the way most of you present you've got all these slides and data and you've lost me after slide four, like totally tuned out. The other thing I'm on my soapbox here, the other thing that matters is no freaking laptops. Are you kidding me?

Speaker 1:

You're seriously going to structure the room in a U. You're going to have everybody sitting at a laptop and you're going to have marketing report for this hour and that business unit report for that time and this team report for that. Everybody's on their laptop. They are halfway listening, if that much. They're responding to emails. They're doing black Friday shopping. They're responding to text. They are not. They're halfway listening. Why the crap did you pay to get everybody together? Get the laptops closed.

Speaker 1:

Old school people, notebook, ipad, whatever tablet you want to be writing on, or a sheet of paper, and I prefer old school, like no technology. We're going to take breaks so you can go in. We're going to give you 30 minutes every hour, every hour and a half, every two hours. We're going to take a 30 minute break. That's when you go check your email, that's when you go do whatever. That's when you make that call. Otherwise you're in here, Technology's off.

Speaker 1:

Let the team know, I mean, if there might be there might be occasionally, 25% of the time a major fire that erupts with a customer or somebody else and somebody's got to step out. But but some of you, you run your meetings. We, when we start working with clients, we'll see this and then we'll give them feedback and they'll stop doing it because we push on it. Some people are like, yeah, I got to manage the clients. Well, hello, do you have a client fire breaking out literally every 15 minutes Because your sales dude's walking out or on his phone, or she is every 15 minutes? I can't have that many fires and if you do, you need a new sales manager or you need they. That that sales manager needs stronger lieutenants because you can't go through a two-hour meeting without being interrupted. Like nobody's that important. The president sits at a meeting for whatever I mean. Okay, you know what I mean. So, um, that's quarterly offset.

Speaker 1:

Last thing I want to talk about is one-on-ones and you all, frequent contact. What I care about more, based on what I've seen work in organizations, I care about the structured one-on-one that's important, but I, what I care more about is the spontaneous phone call, the spontaneous text. Some of you suck at this. Some of you are really good at it. This goes to kind of the. This is right under visibility.

Speaker 1:

So, more than the one-on-one, the formal one, where we sit down once a month and we review whatever, I just want you calling me, like twice a week. I want you to, I want you, I want to hear your voice. Just, no agenda, out of the cold. Just call me. Hey, jared, it's Russ. How are you? Hey, man, I just got off a plane, whatever. You got five minutes, absolutely. What's going on? Oh, not much man, we're just doing this. Whatever? Anything specific about what you're calling? Nope, just checking in. How are you, how are things going? That's what management by walking around sounds like.

Speaker 1:

Or if you're in the physical location which very few of you are in the same physical location with everybody all the time but if you are, that's going and checking in with somebody. It's walking over hey Mike, how's it going? Just want to check in with you for a second. I might even close the door for a minute, just spontaneously close the door. And I'm doing this two or three times a week. I want to be close to my people. I want to hear their mood. I want to see their body language. I want to be, I want to. They're going to bring stuff up three or four minutes into that conversation. They're going to go. Actually, we were in this call, you know, I'm actually I'm glad you're here because I want to bring this up with you and that's where the stuff comes up. You don't want it in a meeting three weeks from now or two weeks from now. So it's the one-on-ones, that interaction for me, that's.

Speaker 1:

I care a lot more about the um, the, the, the frequency of that, than the formality of it. It's strategic offsites every quarter and I didn't give you a lot on. I kind of talked to you about the two different categories, what you talk about, but we could get more in another episode if you wanted to, or you could just direct message me if you want, and, uh, and and, and I can answer any questions you've got about. Well, what does that agenda look like? And then it is the every other week. For some of you it's once a month meeting with the leadership team. Visibility that all fits under visibility, okay. Visibility, accessibility, transparency, how we interact with our team Okay, hope that's helpful to you. I hope that you're thinking of some tweaks that you can make. Your impact on the people that you lead is huge. You've got to be accessible to them, you've got to be visible to them, and how you do that is critically important. That's what's on my mind in this episode of the Lead in 30 podcast.

Speaker 2:

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