Running an Effective Staff Meeting | Claire Hughes Johnson

it's great to be here and I was looking at the overall agenda and thinking wow they gave me the real tactical meat-and-potatoes topic and I'm not gonna pretend actually this topic is a

hard one because it's actually quite easy to tell you what great meetings are it's not easy to do this stuff because meetings take work so the first thing

we're gonna do is talk a little bit about I know that there's a bunch of people in here but I'm not afraid to facilitate a session with a little interaction so if I could just understand you all probably do have

staff meetings that you run your leadership team give me a one word on what you think they're like today how would you how would you describe it in

one word updates okay

messy alignment okay any other one words

decisions ah sorry say again priorities

okay how do people feel about your staff meeting one word honestly one word great

yeah liar uh tired sorry alright you can do it how do people feel

how do people in the room not you feel

taxing alright taxing a bully get to her

hit miss what's that the okay if there were sort of two things that you took away from today's session that you think

would help you what what would like you guys have read books about this you've tried to run these meetings like what is the thing that's the root issue here does anyone want to venture the core of

the problem cognitive overload

okay any other insufficient way insufficient conflict that's a good one

unclear decisions alright alright perfect alright so what we're gonna do so so first of all my objective is to actually share meetings do take

work and meetings are actually in a really important team-building tool yet they are never treated as such and therefore they become in fact complete

energy sucks that start to expose poor dynamics in your team and end up with people playing really sort of think of it as like family roles the person who's always on their laptop in the meeting

the person who's not listening the person who's avoiding talking about the real thing whatever it is we all fall into these traps so we're going to talk

about so the objective here is let's say how to improve staff meeting and I'm

gonna seize on two agenda items here so one is I think unclear decisions and the

combination of insufficient conflict and lack of listening so the first thing we're going to talk about is one groundwork and then two and that is

going to address insufficient conflict and lack of listening so this is going to address some behavior issues that you're having and then two we're gonna

talk about just sort of running the meeting and we're gonna go for like about 15 minutes all right

and this is mostly gonna be me talking and updating and aligning with you but at the end we're gonna do a stretch goal we're gonna make a decision and the

decision is one thing you will each do differently okay differently and yes my

handwriting has always been this bad it helps with cognitive overload trying to understand what I'm writing alright so let's talk about groundwork so the thing that I think when we're talking about staff meetings this is really important

that people get wrong is there's humans involved and humans need to form relationships with one another or they will behave in their

sort of worst selves in my experience so this is gonna sound a little Dilbert like but honestly it's not and it's something we invest a lot in at stripe which is you got to lay groundwork with

your leadership team by taking them ideally off-site usually multiple times a year but definitely whenever there's new people or new dynamics you have to

reset the whole group that off-site experience is going to include ideally some mutual understanding you there's tons of work style analyses you can take

the Big Five personality test like I don't care what you do you're gonna put everybody through some mutual vocabulary they can use about different preferences that people have people have personal

preferences I am like borderline extroverted I'm actually not that extroverted but there are people that you're gonna work with who are very introverted and who would prefer to have the agenda ahead of time and would

prefer to have everything laid out you got to understand each other's personality and work style preferences share that information and what you ideally get is a vocabulary there's a

great one called the insights test it's based on the work of young but it's essentially people either all of these are the same which is are you oriented

toward task or toward people and are you extroverted or introverted and where what quadrant do you fall in and what preferences does that mean you have if you're very task extroverted you can be

very red in the insights wheel which is very direct very directive a little bit hard to work with sometimes when you're trying to get done which is what you're usually trying to do all the time and then in the other part of the wheel

is someone who's green who's a hosta MIT facilitative and collaboration and how do we bring everyone along and those people will be like this in your meeting and you actually want all those people I actually put our CFO at stripe through

one of these assessments before we hired him and I had a suspicion that he was going to be the complement that we needed in our wheel and I was right and it made a big difference to the company that we have someone in that quadrant I

know you guys think I'm a little crazy but you gotta understand each other and then once you have that foundation when you meet again you can give each other feedback on like I think you're being the good version of your tendencies or I think it's not

going well for you how can we help you because you've got to complement each other you got to know each other the other groundwork you got to lay is how are we gonna use our meeting what's the reason for this group to exist is it a

decision meet this is classic by the way is it an alignment meeting is it for us to give each other updates are we making decisions are we setting priorities I think meetings often get messy because

they're all of those things and you're not declaring it transparently so decide ahead of time what is our staff meeting going to be like what norms are we gonna have norms could be we send agendas

ahead of time we agree on who a note taker is we agree on who the facilitator is if anyone makes a request of the group they answer within a certain certain time frame etc etc but you

actually need to do the work to set the expectation of what good is in the meeting my favorite norm is that you actively decide what kind of decision

you're making is it an autocratic decision is it a consensus decision is it a democratic decision the thing with the most votes who's the decision maker

this is my favorite problem of staff meetings you guys got to walk in and say we're making a decision today I'm the decision-maker I would like to consult

all of you it's a consultative decision but I will ultimately decide or its we have a decision to make I want to know what all of you think and we're gonna generally agree ie

pretty consensus wise because this is a tough one that's the kind of decision we're making today or you come in and you say this is just a meeting what we're gonna align on a few things I think of these as the pre decisions let's make sure we're generally on the

same page but we're not actually making a decision set those norms set the cadence how often are you're gonna meet and then you've got to blow up the thing every sort of three to six months because usually it gets stale people

fall into bad habits and if you're in a growth stage you're adding new people anyway so you've got to reset the groundwork background worked that mutual understanding and that setting of expectations and norms means you can

then pull the meeting when it gets bad you can say hey we all agreed no laptops in the meeting Doug you're always on your laptop like what's up with that but you can't police people for their bad

meeting behavior for for being insufficiently able to call each other out my favorite thing is to set norms around things like no undiscussables disagree and commit everyone can put

something in the parking lot meaning there's always a person in the meeting who takes it on a weird tangent and you love them they're so creative but but but no we are going to nominate your idea into the parking lot because

today we have to make a decision right so have those that vocabulary of how do we want to run this and those norms and that's the groundwork I would say that

the other thing to be aware of back to your creative friend is that different people back to work styles and this happens a lot at stripe there are people who are operators and I'm one of them

and there are people who are creators I am not as much one of them I have found that we have to balance so we have an operator mode when we've got an agenda and we've got to make decisions and

there's pre work and we have to have creator mode meetings or else the founders of the company are going to go insane and so we have learned that we have different styles and we have to

decide which one we're in and we don't have much of an agenda for our creator meeting and I have to get comfortable with sitting there and nodding and being like yeah good idea are we doing

anything but it but it's really good energy for them and and I think that's what I've learned the most actually since I've been at stripe alright so you lay your groundwork people know each other people know what the meetings supposed to be and what good behavior

looks like they know if they're supposed to challenge each other they know if they disagree they volta mately got to commit they know they've got to listen and then they can call each other out on these things as opposed to you being the

hub and the spoke and the bad cop it's not that fun so one of your norm should be we will all make this a great meeting we will not all rely on moi but you do have to work to make it work and guess

what if it's not working your team is probably not working and that's the thing that I think people are like oh it's a bad meeting but we're awesome no usually those things are correlated all right running the meeting pretty first

of all there's lots of you guys know how to do this here's the problem most people don't run their meetings so the meeting just meanders through its life and people get hit or miss experiences out of it right

so running the meeting doesn't have to be you but someone has to do it and if they don't it will become you know basically anarchy so I think running the

meeting guess what here's what we did

purpose agenda limit this is a very easy

construct pal and then I would say it's really good to say okay this is why we're meeting today or these are the

purposes these are the objectives for today what are the agenda topics doesn't have to be extensive how long are we gonna spend roughly on each so someone can facilitate it most meetings by the way don't spend enough time per topic

and then it gets really frustrating and then what are we making decisions today yes or no and what type of decision are we making again back to the decision

type seems sort of like basic but a lot of people forget to tell people here's what's going to happen and that I'm gonna run the meeting and I am really comfortable with someone else running

the meeting I I run one of our weekly stripe sort of leadership meetings because I like I like running a good meeting and because it doesn't take it doesn't take energy for me the way it

takes from Patrick and we made an agreement that I would just take that over and we tell everyone Claire runs this meeting so talk to her if you want to put things on the agenda or what have you it's very nice but everyone knows and that's the most important thing they

know that I'm gonna be held accountable for it so that's just like some ideas on the structure of running the meeting all right I shared a bunch of ideas of

things you could do they sound super basic again easy to say not easy to do I'd like to hear is there one thing that anyone here is now gonna do differently

anyone come up with one thing you're gonna do differently yes someone else is gonna run it's totally fine someone else is going to run the meeting make sure everyone agrees that that's

okay and then do it alright anyone else other tactical anything you're gonna do

differently yeah so get a note-taker back I think meeting notes I am a big Patrick and I actually go back and forth

on this I'm a big believer in meeting notes one you get a psychological safety issue when some people have to miss the meeting and they're not sure of what happened and it creates a symmetry of information and people get weird about

it actually if you don't have some meeting notes I also don't think they're a transcript they're just like here's what we covered and here's what we decided or here's what happened while you were out it's also really useful to

go back when people unfortunately they don't disagree and commit they disagree and then they go against the decision and you can go back and be like no no no remember on March 30th we decided this

like it's really valuable to have decent they can be short meeting notes so get your note-taker back other things people took away that you're gonna do differently great who is the decision-maker often

undone what type of decision are we making on this one and it varies and by the way it can also be at the beginning of a meeting you know what we don't any decision to make tomato it's just get a line on a few things let's give each

other some updates but if you are making one who is it and what kind any other things people are gonna do differently have the have the creator meetings make

space for that we do it every six weeks or so and we block a few hours we try to be off-site yeah there's another yeah insight wheel is good they'll try to

charge you to send you a facilitator to train you on the thing they're not that good I'm just warning you I do it secretly on the cheap but you can figure out it's a good one because it gives you some good

vocabulary red yellow green blue that kind of thing good insights wheel any

other decisions or baseball or something something my key here is that I would

ask all of you this is a big commitment here can everyone agree to do one thing or try one thing differently yes roughly

can you like raise your hand if you agree alright that's pretty good that's near 100 all right so I made a decision all right so that was the meeting I just

ran a meeting the thing that I did at the very beginning is something I want to end with just a little weird of a thing to end with but I believe that all

meetings benefit from a check-in and I stole this from Fred Kaufman conscious business it's a good book you should read it I don't like most books but I

like the concepts and that one so there's a check-in and a checkout a check-in can be very much a work check-in like what's the most important thing we got to get done today what are

you guys waiting for from this meeting today can be one word it can be a sentence it can also be a personal check in when we do our longer form meetings we do a one top of

like stripe thing and one top of my personal thing because remember they're humans and they need to share or in the check-in you can often hear people say look I was up all night my team had a

crisis I've got a headache forgive me I'm gonna be a little bit of a pain in this meeting but it's nice to give someone a chance to share their mental state at the beginning of a conversation and also what do they want

out of the thing huge believer in check-ins you can do them very efficiently or you could take your time with them also can do a check out and the check out again can be one

word but the problem that happens with meetings final problem you guys know this is back to our work styles some people enjoy meetings and participate in them more than others and you often

don't get the best info out of the quieter more thoughtful people in your staff meeting so you need a few forcing functions in my opinion to have

everybody participate some people would call this like working on inclusion I think it has a benefit that it's more inclusive but really what I care about is is everybody got skin in the game in this conversation and if you're not

talking I'm gonna ask you to talk at least twice and at the end if you haven't your check out I'm gonna say hey hey Doug why don't you share what you thought about the decision we made today

as part of your check out let us know how you're feeling about it but it's a way to hold people accountable for their participation so we're gonna do a quick check out you guys had one word

something you look a little tired you've been sitting here since like eight or something you guys work these folks hard one word how you're feeling right now

one word over here energize alright someone over here inspired meetings yeah meetings are not

that inspiring I'm so excited other words you don't have to be nice by the way they can be bored they can be distracted other questioning not sure

you're bought into this whole meeting thing haha questioning what's happening when I when you're here I used to say to my team don't have

parties without me all right other structure structure can matter all right that was a quick check out so I think

we're almost a time I can take a few questions if it's useful did you I've been in like sort of all

say the spectrum of meetings my question is like if there's too much groundwork done like if someone's put out a dock and there's like a lot of information in

there is there even a sense of doing a meeting like because there's all but if there's so much prep work done already and someone has so much more information about the topic yeah what are we

actually meaning for yeah sort of yeah so when I talked about this groundwork I meant groundwork on your team right and so that's not something you can read a document for you got to have the

conversation about people's work styles and what you want to be as a leadership team and how you want to hold each other accountable for making good decisions and for running the company together so I that's not that's not something you

can do asynchronously in my opinion however if you've got a meeting where you need to make a decision or there's something and someone's written a really good document about it there's nothing

to prevent you from sending ahead the pre-work and saying do we need to have a meeting or is everyone comfortable with the recommendation I think there are sometimes very inefficient meetings where everyone's talking about the thing

they've already decided sometimes I'll use the check-in for we've all been working hard on this we've all been looking at the decision does everybody does anyone disagree with doing the thing and a lot of people like now we're

doing it so then and the meeting be efficient but I'm all for asynchronous decision-making or someone being by the way that goes back to who's the decision-maker someone's the expert call them that say

this person has done the most work you've all seen the memo someone's got to really have a good case against that that work product to stop that decision probably and you might as well call it

out but asynchronous decision-making is always good if you can pull it off about the cadence of your et meetings how

frequently run as well as the off sites the general e team alignment caters yeah sure I mean it's evolved over time and I think you'll find it has to and we have to you have to reinvent it pretty

frequently today currently we meet a smaller group of us sort of the quarry team if you want to call it that meets Monday morning kind of first thing make sure we all actually put snippets in a

document by Sunday night of like what's on our mind what are things people should know about we we get the updates done asynchronously back to the point about being more efficient so then we spend a couple of hours

making sure we're all comfortable with some of the things going on making a decision if we have to then we have and that's a little bit of a more structured meeting and then on Thursday night we

gather and do much more of a personal creator meeting where there's not an agenda and we just sort of check in with each other on stuff going down or things that often ends up being a little bit about personnel sometimes about org

stuff that's going on if I'm gonna be honest but not always it can also be like partnership deals and flight acquisitions in flight so we have those two and then we meet used to be as I said every sort of six to eight weeks

now it's roughly quarterly we actually go away together so we go Thursday Thursday night usually part day Thursday Thursday night all day Friday Saturday

morning and we go to sometimes we've been here actually but like we either rent it we go to Sea Ranch whatever it is you got to get out and we do much more big picture more creator time we do

a little bit of pre-work that usually we check in on the financials on the company performance and that people really value because you guys know this it's like The Thinking Fast and Slow I

have no idea what Patrick and condiment did yesterday but but you do you do have trouble thinking slow as an e team because if your company is moving at the speed at least ours is you have to stop

yourself and stand back and really think and if you don't create that time I think you're you're in trouble my opinion yes yep

when there's bad behavior against the norms that people have set there's sometimes value in in calling it out so that other people see that it's not appropriate but sometimes there's a lot

of value in discussing it more privately one-on-one and so how do you how do you balance that yeah so I would say that's a great question I used to work very closely with Sheryl Sandberg who I'm

sure you guys know of and she used to always very Huey closely to praise publicly and criticized privately I

agree with that but I have like a couple of rules I use so one is and people conflate this I don't know why there is criticizing an idea and there is

criticizing or construct a person or a behavior right and you got to know in your mind if we're taught this is where I get worried about this insufficient conflict thing which is know let's fight

it out in public and say we disagree with each other about an idea or an action we're gonna take that's not a personal criticism and then if you're

talking about a behavior or a person's sort of style you want to be really careful about doing that in a public way however if you have done the groundwork

if you do know about work styles and you've developed some vocabulary in the team I think you can get a little bit closer to being able to say hey you're acting like a little bit remember I use

red as an example you can say you're acting a little bit red here I think we're deciding too quickly and like just cut like give a little meta observation which is like I feel like you're rushing me right now on this decision this isn't

a dynamic it HAP's what happens with us some of our executive team is like off with their heads and some of us are like whoa whoa that is organizationally very

dangerous you know no and it's a great dynamic that we can actually go up above it and say I just want to observe we're doing that thing again where a couple of you decided 20 minutes ago to fire

someone and a couple of us are not comfortable and I love that because we've laid that groundwork but if it's really someone personally or if it's meeting norms and someone's acting out I

think that's fair to call out it's just like hey do you have an urgent thing going on because I see you're on your laptop no big deal but if it's really something where you're like hey that didn't go well I talked to someone right after I just say

hey I noticed you seemed really frustrated or angry talk to me about what's going on because it was showing up in the meeting but you can use your judgement you guys are smart you can do all this but just think about what is

the criticism and put it in the right lane but I think the most powerful leadership teams can give each other feedback openly we do at our off sites I make us do this we do like a feedback

session in front of each other to each other and it's become quite productive but it was very awkward in the beginning I'm just gonna be honest you need a really good facilitator for that I think

we're at time so I'm gonna close the meeting hopefully I did the thing and talked about this thing at the same time but we'll see you give me feedback afterwards but thanks for your attention

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