meetings

244: Elise Keith: Unveil your system for successful meetings

Intro: Welcome to the Fast Leader podcast where we uncover the leadership life hacks that help you to experience, breakout performance faster and rocket to success and now here’s your host customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach. 

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Jim Rembach:    Okay, Fast Leader legion, today I’m excited because I have somebody on the show who is really going to help you to understand that something you thought you were good at you’re really not but then she’s also going to help you fix it.

Elise Keith was born in Eugene, Oregon. Despite moving over 15 times before the age of 20, she ended up settling in Portland just over 100 miles to the north. She’s the eldest between two to four siblings depending on how you count it all up and happy that her family’s pre-delection for multiple marriages resulted in a generous extra helping of loving grandparents for her children. Growing up Elise did well in school but had an incredibly difficult time staying awake in any of her classes except for band, theater and gym. This inspired her to get a degree in the performing arts after which she embarked on a post-collegiate quest to live out a real-life pancake house waitress turned superstar fantasy. 

When it became clear that the waitressing part of the story was going to last a bit too long for comfort, Elise swapped her acting dreams for another kind of fantasy world. She joined an Internet startup. There she discovered plenty of real-life drama, intrigue, and opportunity every day often in meetings since then she worked to understand what makes meetings work well and what happens when teams run consistently successful meetings. Elise discovered that nearly every business expert leadership, coach sales executive marketer, and influencer has a chair set of meeting hacks that power their success. That’s when you look at these practices in aggregate, you find a clear pattern emerging. She captured some of these insights in her book, Where the Action is: The Meetings That Make or Break Your Organization. Today she leads the team at lucid meetings as they work with organizations worldwide to help them implement a system of successful meetings that drives performance and brings teens joy. Elise lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, two of their five kids, and a curly-haired Lagotto puppy named Mabel. Elise Keith are you ready to help us get over the hump?

Elise Keith:    Let’s do it. 

Jim Rembach:    I’m glad you’re here. Now I’ve given my legion a little bit about you but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better.

Elise Keith:    So my current passion is unveiling that underlying system for successful meetings. It’s this ability that they have in the best of the best teams to know when they’re going to talk, what they’re going to talk about, and do it in a way that brings out the strength and the joy for everybody involved.

Jim Rembach: Now you say that with such grace and simplicity that hides all the complexity underneath. One of the things that you’re talking about very early on the book is this Doom loop which was not reflective in what you said your passion was. So you need to tell us what the Doom loop is.

Elise Keith: So oftentimes when people find out that I am a meeting expert, they will immediately say to me, oh, my gosh, you should see our meetings. I’m in meetings back-to-back. Oh! What a terrible waste of time… they have this really ugly reaction and it’s almost like sort of a Pavlovian conditioned response and you bring the meeting bell and people get upset. That belief center, that when you start to talk about this topic, you’re talking about something that’s frustrating and negative and a drain on your time and your will to live, gets in people’s way of understanding and taking action that they can take to really uncover what a wonderful opportunity we have in our meetings. So when you get in and you dig a little bit deeper, tell me about a meeting you had, talk to me about what it was like to be interviewed, talk to me about what it was like when you had a chance to sit in the room where they made that big decision and you can see people light up there’s joy there there’s connection there. So the Doom loop, and what we talked about in the whole first part of the book is how that initial mindset creates

this belief that meetings are a waste of time which oftentimes leads people to fail to prepare for them, fail to take them seriously, thereby leading many, many ineffective meetings that are a waste of time and then reinforcing that loop, they’re stuck in their own perpetual cycle. When you can break that, when you can see what’s actually happening and what that opportunity looks like, then you’re in a place to make great change.

Jim Rembach:    Okay as you’re talking I started thinking of taxes. Taxes, it’s like misery. However unlike taxes there is hope that there is an opportunity to actually have that better outcome like you’re talking about. You talk about mastering two different things. One is you talk about mastering in meetings and then mastering the meetings at work. So if you could start with what do you mean by mastering in meetings 

Elise Keith: So, if you go out and you read like “Hey how do I run better meetings?” on the Internet, you’re going to find a million articles and they all have three to five tips about coming prepared and understanding what the purpose is and keeping people on task and all of that. That’s not wrong. So there are skills to be had and skills to master when it comes to running meetings themselves, any given meeting there are some basics and that’s what mastering the work in meetings is about. So one of those core skills that apply across the board, how do you learn them? How do you apply them?

Jim Rembach:    Okay. So you talked about, in that chapter it’s broken down it says “The core competencies, the function reading structure, helping up perceived meeting quality, the spectrum of meeting engagement, designing for a net positive impact, and then the game changers. So if you could kind of walk us through when you, cause for me it’s like when you start saying mastering in it’s not a clear picture. So walking through that a little bit will help.

Elise Keith: So essentially when you zoom back from it a little bit there is an underlying structure to every effective meeting and that structure is designed to help a group of people who are coming in as individuals. Duh, we’re all human. Walking in to this room from whatever it is we’ve been doing before. And we all have our own things in our own cares and our own worries, into a room where we’re meant to be thinking together about whatever the topic it is in the same way at the same time. So let’s take a really simple example, you call a meeting because an emergency has come up and you need to know what to do. You get five people in that room. You say, hey, Jim there’s an emergency, what are we going to do? And your initial reaction might be, well, we definitely need to call these people and rally the troops and whatnot. My reaction might be, “Well, what is the emergency? Let’s understand it better.” Fred’s reaction might be “You know what I don’t even think there’s an emergency, you guys are a bunch of

Ninnies.” We’re talking about the same topic but we’re not thinking about it in the same way. So effective meetings get everybody thinking about the topic in the same way at the same time so that they can actually build on shared understanding together. That’s what all of those skills are about.

Jim Rembach:    Well even as you’re saying that, I start thinking about the whole human dynamic and getting in the whole cognitive sciences and unconscious biases and all the baggage that we have from that, like you say, in that previous meeting component and what my reaction “Oh gosh! Not another emergency.” All of these factors, I start thinking of the difficulties and being able to just start appropriately, start correctly, so that you have that desired outcome. So when I start thinking about the skills and the competencies, and so one of the things I also think is important is a lot of times is we have to clarify is that you have competencies and then skills are derived from those competencies.

Elise Keith: Right.

Jim Rembach:    So when I start looking at the competencies, what’s one of the critical ones that you often find people need to develop?

Elise Keith: Clarity of purpose. How do you have a very, very clear understanding of why you’re getting people into the room and what that conversation is meant to achieve. That’s absolutely the starting competency period, it’s actually much more difficult than we think it is because our innate sort of human interaction style which we learned in school and in our families is “Hey show up and we’ll talk and we’ll see what happens.” Which is completely ineffective in a business meeting perspective.

Jim Rembach:    Well as you say that, one of the things that I like to follow up with after that is intent. So, clarity of purpose and then you run into talk about the intent.

Elise Keith: Yeah. That’s exactly it. So here’s why we’re getting together, that’s purpose is why it’s verb and then intent or outcomes. Literally what are we creating? Because meetings are an investment of your business resources. We all know that and that’s part of what gets used to argue to cancel them or make them shorter. It’s like we’re spending time and money here but they’re also a powerful tool for creating tangible outcomes. There’s nobody in a customer situation which says “You know what, every meeting I have with a customer, I want to keep it short as possible. That’s my key value I’m going to get out of that relationship.” It’s like you’re going to get contract signs, you’re going to create trust you’re going to get goodwill, that’s what your key relationships are. So having clarity of that intent helps which skills to bring to bare and how to design that conversation.

Jim Rembach:    I think that’s a beautiful starting point. Then we start getting into the whole mastering the meetings at work. So what is the difference?

Elise Keith: So oftentimes when we look at “How do you get better at meetings?” We do in fact stop right where we just took it. There are some core skills you need to have. You need to understand that. It’s a good use of time and run a good meeting. Well who here has a business where there’s only one meeting? Okay, that’s not our case. We have lots and lots and lots of meetings and oftentimes when people come to me they say “Elyse, We really need you to come in and work with our organization. We absolutely need your help. We’re in terrible meetings all the time.” and I say “Okay, great. Let’s schedule something for next month.” And they said “Oh no, no, no, we can’t do that. We’re in back-to-back meetings, we have no time to think.” So right there you know that there is no way they have time. So sit back and go “How do I make each and every one of these back to back to back to back meetings an effective use of everybody’s time?” It doesn’t exist. The organizations that have broken that cycle have done so by having designed upfront, how each of those meetings needs to run in a way that is transferable, It’s easy for everybody to pick up, they learn by doing, and they end up with this underlying system of expectations and support and training and models that break that cycle.

Jim Rembach:    Well as you’re saying that too, I start thinking about what I often see as something that

Occurs. If you are more effective and you have these frameworks is that the reality is, is that your need for meetings goes down dramatically.

Elise Keith: Dramatically. Yeah. It’s fun when you put in a system that takes and organizes the conversations into clear different distinct conversations. So we know we’re doing strategy here. We know if a problem comes up we’ll deal with it there and then. You do the math and you can see that both performance goes up, engagement goes up, and the time spent in meetings goes down dramatically. So it’s a quadruple bonus win for everybody.

Jim Rembach:    Most definitely. I think also that gets back into where we initially started to close the loop is that you know people don’t have that doom feeling again. It’s like they feel like this burden has been lifted and that’s so much more is getting accomplished and that they will actually come to those meetings and you don’t have a lot of unconscious and also conscious biases that actually you have to now get over.

Elise Keith: Yeah it’s actually one of my favorite. We have a process we call red velvet roping. Where we decide who we’re going to work with and who who’s not really ready to work with us from an organization perspective and my favorite litmus test question is to ask an employee “Tell me about your meetings” because if you want to get at what their work experience is like and work experience as we all know is just another synonym for culture of their organization. That question is entirely revealing and then there are some organizations where they will say “Oh yes what the rumors are true. We do do that and I love it.” or they’ll say things like “Well, rich ones. Because my meetings like this are we run them this way and I know this process.” They’ll get very specific in detail. The most common answer is “Meetings, I hate them. What a waste of time.”

Jim Rembach:    Well I think there’s a couple of words that you’re hinting on here and we’re going to get on just a second, is that you talk about types of meetings and when I started actually looking at the book and what are your parts in the book is just part four it talks about sixteen types of meetings that work and I’m like sixteen of them and as I started reading through I’m like oh I never really considered some of these meetings. So we have informal, we have formal, we have things that are like you say unplanned, we have all kinds of different meetings. I just want to run through this list of sixteen real quick so that people can get proper context and then we’ll come back and talk about two of the biggest opportunities that you often see as far as the meetings are concerned. 

So you talk about the Cadence meeting, Team Cadence, progress check, one-on-ones, action reviews, governance cadence, the catalyst meetings, idea generation, planning, problem solving, decision making, workshops, the learn and influence meetings, sense making, introductions,  issue resolutions, community of practice, training and broadcast. So that’s a pretty extensive list and we’re not going to go into all these that’s what you get the book for or at least one. If you’re talking about those two big opportunities where do they exist?

Elise Keith: So the two big opportunities is, there are two places where they exist. One is right up front there in the skills portion where you do some basic agreements within your company about what kind of foundational expectations you should have for your meetings. As a team what is our working team agreement around meetings so that we can have a framework where we can begin to develop competencies, expectations, respect. It’s really all about respect. So this is how we’re going to use our time together. With that in place what you find is that teams then start to open the door to getting to the next big opportunity and that’s understanding those different kinds of meetings and how to put them together into systems or processes that achieve business goals. 

So let me give you an example of what one of those systems looks like. In my company we run service projects and software projects and often some of those involve sort of a long term pilot. We’ll do like a four month pilot to onboard a new client. As that pilot progresses, my team knows which meetings they will run at each stage of the process to make sure they get the clients to the outcomes that they’ve bought from us. So they know when they’re going to do a kickoff. They know how the decisions will be made. They know what the larger vision is. They know how they’re going to address all of the things that will inevitably come up because something always goes a line in any event and they know exactly how to run each one of those

conversations in advance. So when my team pulls on a client like that they are calm, they’re confident, and they’re prepared. They don’t have all the answers, they don’t know how it’s going to run but they’ve got a system that’s going to make all of those conversations run smoothly. It’s a huge enabler, it’s a huge enabler and those kinds of systems are available for every team trying to achieve a business goal.

Jim Rembach:    We kind of started at this talking about the human element, started talking about the differentiation between folks and all these different dynamics and so when I start thinking about getting every single person on the same page through all this. You talked about some of the organizational agreements this any other ultimately what you work up into the book is called so it’s something called a communication of architecture. So there’s two things. If you can kind of explain what that means and then also how you get that individual commitment because I’m always thinking about that person that does one or two things, maybe always takes us off paths like “No, no, o reel back it up pull them back in” or that person who just like really doesn’t contribute. So if you could kind of tell us a little bit about the architecture and then addressing those types of characters.

Elise Keith: So the architecture really is, it’s a combination of three elements. It’s those performance criteria. So the shared agreements about how we as a team and we as a company are going to meet. It’s the specific meetings we’re going to run. So how we do our check-ins, how we do our kickoffs, all of that kind of thing. Then it’s the support, so how do we make sure that we have the training and the infrastructure and the buckets of sticky notes. Whatever it is that we need to make that go. So that’s like a communication architecture is the intentional design of how your teams are going to collaborate to achieve your goals.

Jim Rembach:    Well I would dare to say that even when you start thinking about that, if I’m going to put that in place for an organization maybe I even want to start now to include that in my whole candidate review process and interview process and on the process and start making it part of your DNA.

Elise Keith: Absolutely, absolutely. In fact when we work with clients who are making that transition, we’ve actually recorded five levels of performance maturity in terms of how robust those systems can become and there is no reason for most organizations to go to the extremes. You can be entirely effective at different levels with different kinds of groups but as you grow in scale you do need to put more of that in place to avoid basically what we call the metastasizing meetings. The meeting cancer problem. A lot may eat your calendar. So, yes absolutely. Starting with sort of the key processes.

Now there’s a fascinating bit of research being done by ADP and Cisco. Where they were looking not at the problem of meetings but they were looking at the problem of employee engagements and team performance. So here’s an example of how they started to implement that system. They were like, they found that all the work happens in teams, some teams perform better than others and they wanted to look in practice what’s going on in the teams that perform better than others and what they found was that in practice those teams had more occurrences of positive energy exchange. So positive attention going between people. They put in a check-in process at a Cisco. They put in a check-in process that they were able to track with technology because they’re a big tech firm and they found that in the teams where the employee checked in with the manager and the manager gave back that attention, engagement went up, but they found, getting to your earlier question about the human dynamics that not everybody did it. Some employees didn’t check in, some managers didn’t reply. So they got much, more clear, much more explicit about that expectation and started to make meeting performance part of job performance. How the percentages of check-ins that the manager replies to directly became a part of how they were measured. They started replying more. What gets measured gets managed.

Jim Rembach:    Well and also it’s what you expect you must inspect.

Elise Keith: Absolutely, absolutely. And, engagement scores went up, performance got went up. There was a direct correlation between, “No we are in fact going to talk to each other positively about things we mutually care about regularly” and we perform better. 

Jim Rembach:    So Elise, I dare to say that when I started looking at all this work that you’re doing and the absolute sheer demand for it that you have a lot of things that you’re attempting to focus in on and I want to get to those in a second. Before we get that talking about the frustration element, talking about getting on the other side, a lot of times we have to just stay focused and persevere through all of this because we’re talking about transformation. Transforming the way that we’re actually interacting or working with one another and a lot of times we focus on quotes on our show to do that. Is there a quote or two that you like that you can share?

Elise Keith: One of my favorite quotes is “Discipline is simply remembering what you actually want, what you really want.” I think that’s key for those transformational moments. How do I put in the processes that help me remember? How do I make it simple for me to remember what I really want and stick to it?

Jim Rembach:    Going back to what you had talked about before, being able to set that expectation, being able to talk about the visioning, doing all of those things, that is a great quote for that. 

Elise Keith: I think one thing that’s really important to add to that while we’re talking about it and with the expectation setting, oftentimes as leaders that feels so burdensome. I have to tackle and take on these behaviors like the opting out or the interrupting or all of these things but if you step back and you look at it and you realize meetings are not an individual performance event. We never meet alone. Meetings are things that teams do. So simply saying these things out loud, inviting your team to participate with you in the monitoring of time and all of those things is actually a much faster way to transformation and it means you don’t have to do that by yourself.

Jim Rembach:    Well it’s kind of interesting to me because even looking at your bio and talking about where you came from and where you are now, really what you’ve been really engaged in are things that require you to practice and prepare before you have a performance. That’s what you’re talking about doing from a meeting perspective. You need to do all of those things in order for you and everybody to perform in meetings.

Elise Keith: You do but I think another great parallel to that is that if you’ve ever went to a parade and watch the military band go by, they’ve played Stars and Stripes forever, nine hundred million times. They don’t need to do a lot more rehearsal to make that exquisite. The guy on his hundredth run of cats is not like studying his lines real hard the day before. That’s why having a System, having some sense of how it’s meant to go and then practicing up into that makes that in a powerful enabler for the organizations that have those systems because then they can bring people in. The third cat and cats leaves, the new guy who comes in can see exactly how that runs they learn by doing. That’s the same is true in these high performance organizations. You go to the Navy SEALs and you go to an action review and this your first time in an action review, all those other seals have been through that thing a couple times. They know how it runs, they’re going to get you on it.

Jim Rembach:    That’s a great point. Well I would dare to say also too when you start talking about being able to come to the position that you are today and going through all these learnings and and all that as well as working with these organizations that there’s a lot of humps that you have to get over. So as far as your concern, do you have a time where you’ve gotten over the hump that you can share?

Elise Keith: So well I think actually a great example of transformation for me there is in how I start meetings. So I used to be, I’m very impatient, I’m very direct, and I used to be the kind of person who would walk in and say “Okay, this is on the agenda. Here’s what we’re going to do. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.” I found myself leading teams that would fall apart. The more I got into this work I went and visited with a coach and started learning about how to run agile meetings and I was sort of shocked and aghast to find that they all started with icebreakers. I’m like what is going on, aren’t these professionals? Why are we talking about our favorite kind of breakfast? But what I saw in practice is that the teams who took that moment to connect personally we’re able to then clear their extra baggage, come into the room and have the conversation. So learning that skill was an incredibly hard skill for me to learn because I wanted to be very professional and serious and get the things done but it has made an enormous difference in not only how we practice and share what we do with others but also how we succeed as a company ourselves.

Jim Rembach:    Well I would dare to say what you just talked about right there is actually a common thing that you probably run into because of many factors. One being you’re sharing where you were coming from, from a positioning perspective also another factor meaning “Hey, I’ve got five more behind this one, let’s go.” 

Elise Keith: Yeah.

Jim Rembach:    So how common is that particular issue, an opportunity present with the clients that you’re working with?

Elise Keith: You know I find it and I don’t know if this is transitioning but I find it to be incredibly common in the places where they have no good process. The meeting to meeting to meeting thing and they’re all stressed and rushed. I also find it to be more common when I meet with women leaders and I recognize this in myself as well. So I as a female employee, I came into an internet startup as one of the only female employees on the tech side and we were working so hard to be taken seriously professionally that often some of these softer skills which are now being called power skills correctly weren’t welcomed or we believe they weren’t welcomed. Getting to the place where you can unlearn that bad lesson take some courage and some time and some commitment to the larger result. 

Jim Rembach:    I would dare to say that what we think is what we should be doing, oftentimes is not going to help him benefit us and you’re exactly right. When I start thinking about this work, start thinking about the book, I started thinking about the opportunity, I started looking at a whole slew of opportunity even for those of you who are having the opportunity to watch this particular podcast versus listen to it. Elise has tons of masks on her back wall that are full of colors so I know there’s a lot of things that you had that feel your passion including we talked about your brand new puppy. When I start looking at goals, what would be one of your goals?

Elise Keith: One of my goals, vision wise, big vision wise we would love to see this whole conversation change and to have the recognition of meeting systems become a more common thing working its way into teams. On a personal goal level I would love to help create a center where people could come and experience and experiment with some of these practices. A meeting lab basically. A meeting invasion Center, wouldn’t that be exciting.

Jim Rembach:    Most definitely, and the Fast Leader Legion wishes you the very best.

Elise Keith: Thank you.

Jim Rembach:    Now before we move on let’s get a quick word from our sponsor.

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Alright here we go Fast Leader Legion it’s time for the Hump day Hoedown. Okay, Elise, the Hump day Hoedown is a part of our show where you give us good insights fast. So I’m going to ask you several questions and your job is to give us robust yet rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. Elise Keith, are you ready to hoedown?

Elise Keith: Let’s do it.

Jim Rembach:    All right. So what is holding you back from being an even better leader today?

Elise Keith: Impatience.

Jim Rembach:    What is the best leadership advice you have ever received?

Elise Keith: Say thank you more often.

Jim Rembach:    What is one of your best tools that helps you lead in business or life? 

Elise Keith: Zoom.

Jim Rembach:    What is one of your secrets that you believe contributes to your success?

Jim Rembach:    Every other morning, remembering that mindsets a choice.

Jim Rembach:    And what would be one book that you’d recommend to our legion. It could be from any genre. Of course we’re going to put a link to where the action is on your show notes page as well.

Elise Keith: Liminal thinking by Dave Gray.

Jim Rembach:    Liminal thinking. Okay Fast Leader legion you can find links to that and other bonus information from today’s show by going too fastleader.net/elisekeith. Okay Elise this is my last hump day hoedown question. Imagine you were given the opportunity go back to the age of 25 and you can take the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you but you can’t take it all you can only choose one. So what skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

Elise Keith: Vivid visioning. That’s what I’d take because the ability to create a detailed vision of where you’re trying to go makes getting there so much easier.

Jim Rembach:    Elise I had fun with you today but can you please share with the Fast Leader Legion how they can connect with you.

Elise Keith: They can find me on our company website, which is at lucidmeetings.com 

Jim Rembach:    Elise Keith thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom and the Fast Leader Legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump.

Thank you for joining me on the Fast Leader show today. For recaps links from every show special offers and access the download and subscribe if you haven’t already head on over the fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster.

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