Transcription
It's great to be here! I was looking at the overall agenda and thinking, "Wow, they gave me the real tactical meat-and-potatoes topic."
I'm not gonna pretend; actually, this topic is a hard one. It's quite easy to tell you what great meetings are, but it's not easy to do this stuff because meetings take work.
The first thing we're gonna do is talk a little bit about the fact that I know there are a bunch of people in here, but I'm not afraid to facilitate a session with a little interaction.
If I could just understand, you all probably do have staff meetings that you run with your leadership team. Give me a one-word description of what you think they're like today.
How would you describe it in one word?
- Updates.
- Messy.
- Alignment.
Okay, any other one words?
- Decisions.
- Priorities.
How do people feel about your staff meeting? One word, honestly.
- Great.
- Tired.
- Taxing.
Alright, how do people in the room feel?
- Hit or miss.
If there were two things that you took away from today's session that you think would help you, what would they be? You guys have read books about this; you've tried to run these meetings. What is the root issue here?
Does anyone want to venture a guess?
- Cognitive overload.
- Insufficient conflict.
- Unclear decisions.
Alright, perfect.
So, first of all, my objective is to share that meetings do take work. Meetings are actually a really important team-building tool, yet they are never treated as such. Therefore, they become complete energy sucks that expose poor dynamics in your team.
People end up playing 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 issue. Whatever it is, we all fall into these traps.
We're going to talk about how to improve staff meetings, and I'm gonna focus on two agenda items here:
1. Unclear decisions.
2. Insufficient conflict and lack of listening.
The first thing we're going to discuss is groundwork, which will address insufficient conflict and lack of listening. This will tackle some behavior issues that you're having.
Then, we're gonna talk about running the meeting, and we'll go for about 15 minutes. This is mostly gonna be me talking and updating and aligning with you. But at the end, we're gonna set a stretch goal: we're going to make a decision, and that decision is one thing you will each do 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.
When we're talking about staff meetings, it's really important to understand that there are humans involved. Humans need to form relationships with one another, or they will behave in their worst selves.
This is gonna sound a little Dilbert-like, but honestly, it's not. It's something we invest a lot in at Stripe. You have to lay groundwork with your leadership team by taking them off-site, ideally multiple times a year, but definitely whenever there are new people or new dynamics. You have to reset the whole group.
That off-site experience should ideally include some mutual understanding. There are tons of work style analyses you can take, like the Big Five personality test. I don't care what you do, but you need to put everybody through some mutual vocabulary they can use about different preferences.
People have personal preferences. I am borderline extroverted; I'm actually not that extroverted. But there are people you're going to work with who are very introverted and would prefer to have the agenda ahead of time and everything laid out.
You need 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, based on the work of Jung. Essentially, it categorizes people as being oriented toward tasks or people, and whether they are extroverted or introverted.
Where do you fall in that quadrant, and what preferences does that mean you have? If you're very task-oriented and extroverted, you might be very "red" in the Insights wheel, which is very direct and directive. This can be a little hard to work with sometimes when you're trying to get things done.
On the other part of the wheel is someone who's "green," who is more facilitative and collaborative, asking how to bring everyone along. You want all those people in your meeting.
I actually put our CFO at Stripe through one of these assessments before we hired him. I had a suspicion that he was going to be the complement we needed in our wheel, and I was right. It made a big difference to the company to have someone in that quadrant.
I know you guys think I'm a little crazy, but you have to understand each other. Once you have that foundation, when you meet again, you can give each other feedback. You can say, "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?"
You need to complement each other and know each other.
The other groundwork you need to lay is how you're going to use your meeting. What's the reason for this group to exist? Is it a decision meeting? Is it an alignment meeting? Is it for us to give each other updates? Are we making decisions or setting priorities?
I think meetings often get messy because they encompass all of those things, and you're not declaring it transparently. So decide ahead of time what your staff meeting is going to be like.
What norms are you going to have? Norms could be that we send agendas ahead of time, we agree on who a note-taker is, we agree on who the facilitator is, and if anyone makes a request of the group, they answer within a certain time frame, etc.
You actually need to do the work to set the expectation of what "good" looks like in the meeting.
My favorite norm is that you actively decide what kind of decision you're making. Is it an autocratic decision? A consensus decision? A democratic decision?
The thing with the most votes? Who's the decision-maker?
This is my favorite problem in staff meetings: you 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 you can say, "We have a decision to make. I want to know what all of you think, and we're going to generally agree, i.e., pretty consensus-wise, because this is a tough one."
That's the kind of decision we're making today.
Or you come in and say, "This is just a meeting where we're going to 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 going to meet? Then you've got to blow up the thing every 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.
You have to reset the groundwork.
That mutual understanding and 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. What's up with that?"
But you can't police people for their bad meeting behavior if you're insufficiently able to call each other out.
My favorite thing is to set norms around things like "no undiscussables" and "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. You love them; they're so creative.
But no, we are going to nominate your idea into the parking lot because today we have to make a decision.
So have that vocabulary of how you want to run this and those norms. That's the groundwork.
The other thing to be aware of, back to your creative friend, is that different people have different work styles. 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.
We have to balance. We have an operator mode when we've got an agenda, and we've got to make decisions. There's pre-work, and we have to have creator mode meetings, or else the founders of the company are going to go insane.
We've learned that we have different styles, and we have to decide which one we're in. 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's really good energy for them, and I think that's what I've learned the most since I've been at Stripe.
So you lay your groundwork. People know each other, people know what the meeting is 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 ultimately have 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.
One of your norms should be, "We will all make this a great meeting. We will not all rely on me." But you do have to work to make it work.
Guess what? If it's not working, your team is probably not working. That's the thing that I think people overlook. They say, "Oh, it's a bad meeting, but we're awesome." No, usually those things are correlated.
Alright, running the meeting.
First of all, a lot 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.
Running the meeting doesn't have to be you, but someone has to do it. If they don't, it will become basically anarchy.
So, running the meeting: guess what? Here's what we did: purpose, agenda, limit. This is a very easy construct.
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? It doesn't have to be extensive. How long are we gonna spend roughly on each topic so someone can facilitate it?
Most meetings, by the way, don't spend enough time per topic, and then it gets really frustrating.
What are we making decisions on today? Yes or no? And what type of decision are we making?
Again, back to the decision type. It seems sort of basic, but a lot of people forget to tell others what's going to happen.
I'm really comfortable with someone else running the meeting. I run one of our weekly Stripe leadership meetings because I like running a good meeting, and it doesn't take energy from me the way it takes from Patrick.
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 going to be held accountable for it.
So that's just some ideas on the structure of running the meeting.
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 if there's one thing that anyone here is now going to do differently.
Anyone come up with one thing you're going to do differently?
- Yes, someone else is going to run the meeting.
That's totally fine! Make sure everyone agrees that that's okay, and then do it.
Anyone else? Any other tactical things you're going to do differently?
- Get a note-taker back.
I think meeting notes are important. 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 what happened. It creates an asymmetry of information, and people get weird about it.
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, don't disagree and commit. They disagree and then go against the decision. You can go back and say, "No, no, no, remember on March 30th we decided this."
It's really valuable to have decent meeting notes. They can be short, but get your note-taker back.
Any other things people took away that you're going to do differently?
- Great, who is the decision-maker?
- What type of decision are we making on this one?
It varies. By the way, it can also be at the beginning of a meeting. You can say, "You know what? We don't have any decision to make today. It's just to get aligned on a few things. Let's give each other some updates."
But if you are making a decision, who is it, and what kind?
Any other things people are going to do differently?
- 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.
- The Insights 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 it 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 takeaways?
My key here is that I would ask all of you: this is a big commitment. Can everyone agree to do one thing or try one thing differently?
Yes?
Can you raise your hand if you agree?
Alright, that's pretty good. That's near 100%.
So I made a decision!
Alright, 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. It's a little weird to end with, but I believe that all meetings benefit from a check-in.
I stole this from Fred Kaufman’s book, "Conscious Business." It's a good book; you should read it. I don't like most books, but I like the concepts in that one.
A check-in can be very much a work check-in, like, "What's the most important thing we got to get done today?" or "What are you guys waiting for from this meeting today?"
It 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 one top of a Stripe thing and one top of a personal thing because remember, they're humans, and they need to share.
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 going to 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 they want out of the meeting.
I'm a huge believer in check-ins. You can do them very efficiently, or you could take your time with them.
You can also do a check-out, and the check-out can again be one word.
The problem that happens with meetings—final problem—you guys know this: back to our work styles, some people enjoy meetings and participate in them more than others.
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 working on inclusion. I think it has a benefit that it's more inclusive, but really what I care about is whether everybody has skin in the game in this conversation.
If you're not talking, I'm going to ask you to talk at least twice. At the end, if you haven't, during your check-out, I'm going to say, "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."
It's a way to hold people accountable for their participation.
So we're going to do a quick check-out. You guys had one word.
Something—you're looking a little tired; you've been sitting here since like eight or something. You guys work these folks hard!
One word: how are you feeling right now?
One word over here?
- Energized.
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.
- Questioning.
Not sure you're bought into this whole meeting thing?
- Questioning what's happening when you're here.
I used to say to my team, "Don't have parties without me!"
Alright, other structure can matter.
That was a quick check-out.
I think we're almost out of time. I can take a few questions if it's useful.
I've been in sort of all sides of the spectrum of meetings. My question is: if there's too much groundwork done, like if someone's put out a document and there's a lot of information in there, is there even a sense of having a meeting?
Because if there's so much prep work done already and someone has so much more information about the topic, what are we actually meeting for?
- Sort of.
When I talked about this groundwork, I meant groundwork on your team. That's not something you can read a document for. You have 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.
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 anyone disagree with doing the thing?"
A lot of people will say, "No, we're doing it."
Then the meeting can be efficient.
But I'm all for asynchronous decision-making. If someone is 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 work product to stop that decision probably."
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 meetings: how frequently do you run them, as well as the off-sites? What's the general E-team alignment cadence?
Sure! I mean, it's evolved over time, and I think you'll find it has to. You have to reinvent it pretty frequently.
Today, currently, a smaller group of us—sort of the core team, if you want to call it that—meets Monday morning, kind of first thing. We make sure we all put snippets in a document by Sunday night of what's on our mind and what things people should know about.
We get the updates done asynchronously, back to the point about being more efficient.
Then we spend a couple of hours making sure we're all comfortable with some of the things going on and making a decision if we have to.
That's a little bit of a more structured meeting.
Then on Thursday night, we gather and do much more of a personal creator meeting where there's not an agenda. We just sort of check in with each other on stuff going down or things that often end up being a little bit about personnel or sometimes about org stuff that's going on, if I'm going to be honest.
But not always; it can also be about partnership deals and flight acquisitions in flight.
We have those two, and then we meet—used to be, as I said, every six to eight weeks. Now it's roughly quarterly.
We actually go away together. We go Thursday night, usually part day Thursday, Thursday night, all day Friday, Saturday morning.
We either rent a place or go to Sea Ranch, whatever it is. You have to get out, and we do much more big picture, more creator time.
We do a little bit of pre-work; we check in on the financials and the company performance. People really value that because you guys know this: it's like "Thinking, Fast and Slow."
I have no idea what Patrick and Condiment did yesterday, but you do have trouble thinking slowly as an E-team.
If your company is moving at the speed ours is, you have to stop yourself and stand back and really think. If you don't create that time, I think you're in trouble, in my opinion.
Yes?
When there's bad behavior against the norms that people have set, there's sometimes value in calling it out so that others see that it's not appropriate.
But sometimes there's a lot of value in discussing it more privately, one-on-one.
How do you balance that?
That's a great question. I used to work very closely with Sheryl Sandberg, who I'm sure you guys know of. She used to always say, "Praise publicly and criticize privately."
I agree with that, but I have a couple of rules I use.
One is—and people conflate this; I don't know why—there is criticizing an idea, and there is criticizing or constructing a person or a behavior.
You have to know in your mind if we're talking about this. This is where I get worried about this insufficient conflict thing, which is, "Let's fight it out in public and say we disagree with each other about an idea or an action we're going to take."
That's not a personal criticism.
If you're talking about a behavior or a person's 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 a little bit red here. I think we're deciding too quickly."
Just give a little meta observation, like, "I feel like you're rushing me right now on this decision."
This is a dynamic that 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."
It's a great dynamic that we can actually go 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."
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 talk 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 judgment. You guys are smart; you can do all this.
Just think about what the criticism is and put it in the right lane.
But I think the most powerful leadership teams can give each other feedback openly. We do this at our off-sites. I make us do this; we do a feedback session in front of each other, and it's become quite productive.
But it was very awkward in the beginning, I'm just going to be honest. You need a really good facilitator for that.
I think we're at time, so I'm going to close the meeting. Hopefully, I did the thing and talked about this thing at the same time, but we'll see.
Give me feedback afterward, but thanks for your attention!
[Applause]