Ch. 6 Why Do We Have To Have Meetings?

Chapter 6 – Why Do We Have To Have Meetings? page 91.

Meetings are not a waste of time.
It’s what you do in meetings that is a waste of time.
If all you do is talk endlessly without solving issues, then yes, you are wasting your time.
The unfortunate reality is that your team can’t fully function at its best without productive meetings.
Imagine a meeting where:
- It starts and ends on time.
- You contribute to solving the most important issue(s).
- Your entire team walks out committed to solving the issue(s) once and for all.
- That one meeting eliminates the need for other meetings that week.

End Procrastination

Most human beings by nature procrastinate; they wait until the last minute to get things done.
People delay acting until the last minute – until just before the next meeting.
If you only meet once a month, you will only get one spike of activity per month.
Therefore, to the degree you increase the meeting frequency, you create that spike of activity more often.

Weekly Meeting Pulse

We recommend a weekly meeting pulse.
That way you get a spike of activity 52 times per year (as opposed to 12 times with monthly meetings).
We’ve found the best interval and length of meeting pulse for most teams is a 90-minute meeting every week.
These weekly meetings:
- Are on the same day at the same time.
- Have the same agenda.
- Start on time, End on time.
This type of meeting is called a Level 10 Meeting or “L10” for short.

Level 10 Meetings

The L10 is designed to be a time management tool that saves you time by helping the right hand know what the left hand is doing – avoiding train wrecks and bottlenecks that slow things down.
It also helps by ending interruptions during the week from issues that can be solved in the meeting.
Two important things:
- During this meeting, you will be creating an Issues List:
  - A place to put all unresolved issues that need to be discussed.
  - These are any ideas, opportunities, problems, concerns, or barriers.
  - You address these issues during the IDS (Identify, Discuss, and Solve) section of the agenda.
- The meeting must always:
  - Take place on the same day at the same time each week.
  - Start and end on time.
Level 10 Meeting Agenda
- Segue (5 min)
- Scorecard (5 min)
- Rock Review (5 min)
- Customer/Employee Headlines (5 min)
- To-Do List (5 min)
- IDS (60 min)
- Conclude (5 min)
Link – YouTube Video on Running Effective L10s

Segue

A chance for your team to transition from working “in the business” to “on the business.”
Each person on the team shares one piece of both personal and professional good news from the past week.
Allows team members to get to know one another and start the meeting off with a positive vibe.

Scorecard

A chance to make sure your Measurables are on track for the goals you’ve set.
You review each Measurable as a team and confirm if they are on track or off track.
During the review of the Scorecard, there should be no questions, no color commentary, no excuses. Fight the urge to discuss anything.
If a Measurable is off track or if anyone on the team has a question, it gets dropped down to the Issues List.

Rock Review

Here you are making sure each team member’s Rocks are on track for the quarter.
All Rock owners will take a turn simply saying “on track” or “off track.”
During the Rock Review, there should be no questions, no color commentary, no excuses.
If a Rock is off track or if anyone on the team has a question, it gets dropped down to the Issues List.

Customer/Employee Headlines

The 5-minute section allows anyone to bring up good or bad news about customers, employees, or both.
These should be quick, 1 to 2-sentence headlines. If anything is more than that, drop it down to the Issues List.

To-Dos

These are the commitments you made to each other in your last L10 meeting.
Usually, these are actions you agreed to complete based on how you decided to solve an issue.
The team will review each To-Do to make sure they are “To-Done.”
To-Dos are typically 7-day action items.
The goal is to complete 90% of them each week.

IDS (Identify, Discuss, Solve)

This is the meat of the L10 meeting; this is where the magic happens.
Start by reviewing your Issues List, which you’ve been building during the first part of the meeting, as well as any issues that carried over from last week’s L10 Meeting.
3 Types of Issues on an Issues List:
- Decisions
- Information to Share
- Information Needed
From the Issues List, pick the top 3 that need to be resolved this week.
When issue number 1 is solved, move to number 2 and then to number 3. If you still have time left, pick the next 3 most important issues and repeat.
The goal is to solve the most important issues well, not to solve all the issues.
The goal is to solve an issue once and for all – so it never comes back.

IDS’ing

The process you go through to solve an issue is called IDS’ing:
- Identify – Look beyond the symptom to the real issue underneath; find the root cause.
- Discuss – Everyone gives their input on the issue.
- Solve – Once all the views are on the table, you must move to solve.
The reason most meetings are a waste of time is that teams spend all their time discussing an issue, never identifying the root cause, and as a result, never solving the issue.

Conclude

With 5 minutes left in the meeting, stop whatever you are doing – even if you are in the middle of an issue.
You still need to do 3 things and end the meeting on time:
Recap the new To-Dos that came out of the meeting:
- Make sure everyone is clear on their To-dos.
- Make sure everyone is committed to their To-Dos.
Decide if there are any Cascading Messages:
- Important messages to communicate to others inside or outside the company.
- Quickly decide who is going to communicate the message.
Rate the meeting:
- Everyone rates the quality of the meeting on a scale of 1 to 10.
- Rate the meeting on the following criteria:
  - Did it start and end on time?
  - Did you follow the agenda?
  - Is everyone on the Same Page?
  - Did 90% or more of the To-Dos get done?
  - Did you solve the most important issues?
  - Rating the meeting will help the team improve
- If someone rates the meeting below an 8, ask, “What would have made the meeting a 10 for you?”

Questions to Ask Your Manager

Predictive Index