Why Your Weekly Meetings Don’t Work

Cole Abbott

[0:00:06]

Meetings are typically not a thing that people enjoy. They kind of suck.

Mark Abbott

[0:00:12]

True statement.

Cole Abbott

[0:00:13]

Yeah. I think most people feel that way. I'm sure there are some people that enjoy the social aspect maybe of it, but I don't think that that's the same thing as. It's probably more like smaller groups. We can get into that. But I don't think anyone goes into a meeting of 20 people and it's like, oh boy, am I excited for this. I don't know if that's a recurring thing or if it's just I need to get this thing done and voice this thing or be seen in this group. Maybe that's a whole other dimension we could go into.

Mark Abbott

[0:00:40]

Well, I, you know, we just did the State of the Company yesterday, which we do four times a year and I look forward to that.

Cole Abbott

[0:00:47]

That's not a, that's not really a meeting.

Mark Abbott

[0:00:50]

It is a meeting.

Cole Abbott

[0:00:51]

Sure. It's, it's a very different type, like. Cause there are, we could break down the different types of meetings.

Mark Abbott

[0:00:55]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:00:56]

And that sounds good. I've. I've laid out or I've really clear. But yeah, right. There are the meetings where you're going into problem solving. There's meetings where you're going in to sort of share with the group.

Mark Abbott

[0:01:04]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:01:05]

And there's a Q and A. And I think that those things are helpful to have live as opposed to just sending out a recording. Yeah, I don't think that's the right way to do that for a lot of those things.

Mark Abbott

[0:01:14]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:01:14]

Especially with something as infrequent as the state of the company.

Mark Abbott

[0:01:17]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:01:19]

But I think for this we're going to focus on the problem solving meetings. The weekly meetings are your L10s. And having a 130 person L10 would

Mark Abbott

[0:01:32]

be, obviously that would be a shit show.

Cole Abbott

[0:01:35]

That'd be really fun. I think everyone would, would love that.

Mark Abbott

[0:01:38]

We know that Even, even a 17 person, you know, weekly level 10 meeting can turn into a shit show.

Cole Abbott

[0:01:44]

I mean it'd be, it'd be a hard 90 minute segue as an example. Yeah. So everyone's got a minute, personal, professional basket, rapid fire. You know, one person's gonna take five minutes in that.

Mark Abbott

[0:01:59]

And no matter what you do, right, no matter what you say, it's like, hey, right, 30 seconds max. Someone. Well actually multiple people. I would say 10 to 15% will just violate the rule. Not because they're bad people, but just because they just start going.

Cole Abbott

[0:02:16]

So if anyone has a calculator handy, do you do the math on that?

Mark Abbott

[0:02:19]

Not a Fun thing.

Cole Abbott

[0:02:20]

No.

Mark Abbott

[0:02:21]

There goes your meeting.

Cole Abbott

[0:02:23]

There goes a lot of time and energy and. And you know, this is your businesses. This costs money. So think about that. Right.

Mark Abbott

[0:02:30]

A lot of money.

Cole Abbott

[0:02:31]

But now you know how everyone's doing personally and professionally, which is great. That could have been done asynchronously in that case.

Mark Abbott

[0:02:38]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:02:39]

Back to the. The core here.

Mark Abbott

[0:02:41]

Do you.

Cole Abbott

[0:02:42]

So I just like, probably funny to start or fun to start with. Just a stupid story. Do you have a meeting from whenever. Doesn't have to be recently at 90 or even coaching, but just was like the worst experience. Just fumbling everything. Complete waste of time. Everyone left worse off.

Mark Abbott

[0:03:02]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:03:02]

And it was shockingly bad.

Mark Abbott

[0:03:03]

Yeah, lots of those. If everybody isn't aligned on the purpose of the meeting and how to run the meeting, and you have someone, whether it's CEO, the visionary, and it typically is, you know, one of these types of characters who just like, refuses to play by the rules. And, and, and you quickly find yourself, you know. You know, we just talked about the beginning of a level 10 meeting is professional best. And you go into scorecard and all of a sudden like, the meeting just gets taken over by the visionary. Just railing on shit in the scorecard. And the worst is when they're railing on shit, when it's actually green. That one really just like, oh, my God. And you just wanna. And then you start getting into fights. It's green. We've all agreed this is. Okay. Why are you thinking now is the time that we gotta start working? We got so much going on and you're sitting here haranguing us on the fact that you think we can get 2% more productivity out of this particular seat. And so all of a sudden you start arguing about. You're not just argu, you were arguing about the system. Because, hey, we said we're gonna, you know, if this is an issue, we're gonna put it on the issues list. Right. So you're arguing about the system. You're arguing about something that's already been settled. You got different people. It just, it turns into a shit show right there in the scorecard. And then of course, peoples get their feelings hurt. And now it makes its way through the entire meeting. And yeah, I've seen a bunch of those as an example.

Cole Abbott

[0:04:41]

It wasn't really a story. Give a story.

Mark Abbott

[0:04:45]

It's a story.

Cole Abbott

[0:04:46]

Oh, there's no story there. No, I'm sorry, that. Did that happen? No. You just walked through it.

Mark Abbott

[0:04:51]

No, no, it didn't.

Cole Abbott

[0:04:52]

I know, but just like one thing that was funny and Memorable in. It's.

Mark Abbott

[0:05:00]

Do you have one? I don't. I don't have one.

Cole Abbott

[0:05:02]

I mean, I have. I don't really want to go in because all my stuff's at 90 years. I don't really want to. Right. It's not as interesting as other experiences,

Mark Abbott

[0:05:09]

but you got to remember, I don't sit in weekly meetings, often at all with my clients. That's.

Cole Abbott

[0:05:13]

I know, but like in your past as an investor, what?

Mark Abbott

[0:05:19]

I don't have a good story. I am.

Cole Abbott

[0:05:20]

So this is. This is great. We should have planned this one ahead of time, huh? Okay, so to go back to the. The. The core issue there is when you go into a meeting and a meeting doesn't have a purpose. Yeah, I guess. How often is that a problem? And what do you think the actual. Right. Because we. We say that a bad meaning is typically symptomatic of a misaligned culture in a way, and other deeper issues within the company. So what are those core foundational cracks that lead to people consistently not even just like one meeting that somebody set up at an L10 with that weekly cadence, people are going to that with unclear objectives, or sometimes it's just, we need a meeting. Why would we not have a meeting every week? And then you go in and you have a meeting, but they're not clear on what that objective is. What do you think leads to that issue?

Mark Abbott

[0:06:14]

Well, disagreement, sometimes not articulated. Right. That even within the idea that we're going to have a relatively structured meeting. Right. That we're going to run on an operating system that's, you know, relatively, you know, clear. And so, you know, a lot of times people are just fighting the idea of, like, running on eos. I've seen that. You know, lots of times they just don't want to do it. So, you know, they're, you know, I don't know if it's passive aggressive or it's, you know, it's just aggressive. They're just fighting the meeting at its core. Right. They're fighting the need for the meeting. They're fighting the structure of the meeting. They frankly. And I. And I'm talking about sort of the more extremes here, right? They just. They. They want to do whatever they want to do. They're like, level three. I need to control. I don't care about anybody else, or this is mine, mine, mine, mine, mine. I don't want to do this. And like I said, sometimes it's passive aggressive, and sometimes it's just like they're just sitting here and they don't want to play. And when you in, when you say, hey, we agreed to do this, and I feel like, you know, you're, you're not living up to your agreements. Well, I, you know, I don't need to sit for this and get up and walk out. I mean, it's crazy, right? So fundamentally, you know, first things first is, you know, is the bigger game that's being played, are we all on the same page? Are we aligned that, you know, this is a good way for, for us to run our organization, and if we're not aligned on this is a good way to run our organization. You know, the weekly meeting is going to constantly reflect that there's going to be a fight. There's a fight.

Cole Abbott

[0:08:10]

Do you typically, because there's a couple angles to go here, both from a leadership perspective and from a coaching perspective. Do you see that sort of stubbornness typically, what level in the organization it's in?

Mark Abbott

[0:08:24]

It's a senior leadership team.

Cole Abbott

[0:08:26]

So at the leadership team, or is it a visionary integrator thing? Do you see any correlation there?

Mark Abbott

[0:08:30]

I, I, I think it's almost always, to be honest, the visionary, right? It's almost always the visionary. The visionary is like, they know that they've got pain, right? Whether it's people pain or alignment pain or structural pain or inability to see what's working and what's not working. But, you know, there's, you know, we talk about, I think, sort of five core types of pain that drives

Cole Abbott

[0:09:12]

a

Mark Abbott

[0:09:12]

team to want to adopt an operating system. And what'll happen a lot of times is the visionary totally feels the pain, but they're not willing to commit to the disciplines associated with relieving the pain. They just don't like the structure. They don't like the reveals that come out of it. And so some will, I call it passively sort of work against the discipline. And so you'll see that some will, you know, you know, the big idea is this is a weekly meeting, right? And you know, you're gonna, we're having it every single week except for when we have our quarterly planning or our annual planning. So 12 out of 13 weeks, we need to get together come hell or high water. Right. Death and vacation. Right. Are the two excuses, as they say. But obviously, you know, we know that it's death or really being fucking sick. Sorry for swearing.

Cole Abbott

[0:10:26]

Or I guess that was the first time you did it in this episode. Yeah.

Mark Abbott

[0:10:30]

Or vacation. Right. So it's gotta happen every single week. And if you're not willing to, that's Discipline number one. Discipline number two is the structure of the meeting.

Cole Abbott

[0:10:44]

Right.

Mark Abbott

[0:10:44]

And, and, and how you run each section and respecting that, you know, and then, of course, the next discipline is getting down into the IDS and running that in a disciplined manner and then checking out in a disciplined manner. So we can say, hey, how'd we do during this meeting? So, you know, you can start to see whether it's, whether it's, whether it's passive aggressiveness or genuine aggressiveness. It shows up right there in that weekly meeting. Are we having it every single week? Are we respecting the disciplines associated with running that meeting? Including at the end, is it at least a 9? And if it's not, why wasn't it at least a 9? Right. That seems so simple to me. But, you know, I'd say 20% of the visionaries, when they get into, you know, as an example, an operating system like Eos, they call no joy within the first 60 days because they're not willing to do it. They're not willing to do it because it reveals something that I think that they're just. My, my personal experience, it reveals something they're unwilling to deal with.

Cole Abbott

[0:11:59]

The exposure in terms of what it highlights and what it illuminates can be overwhelming for a lot of people. And you just sort of have that, that inflection point of if you're a healthy company and things are running well and you just want to have that shared discipline with others in adopting an operating system like Eos, that's good for your team and it's, oh, now we look at the other little problems, and those little things are much more manageable and approachable. Now if your company is not doing well, and a lot of companies adopt EOS because of that. It's good for that, right?

Mark Abbott

[0:12:28]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:12:29]

It gets you back to baseline pretty quick. That exposure is going to be overwhelming. There'd be a lot of things that you've been. You or your team have been hiding.

Mark Abbott

[0:12:35]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:12:36]

And the worse it is, the harder it's going to be. And then you can also unpack that more of what kind of person who's going to react that way is probably going to be the kind of person that the team is not going to want to share things with.

Mark Abbott

[0:12:47]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:12:47]

And that's going to hurt.

Mark Abbott

[0:12:49]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:12:50]

That healing process is not going to be smooth for those leaders. Yeah.

Mark Abbott

[0:12:53]

And so, you know, once again, you know, the, the first step in the journey associated with building, you know, a really exceptional company, a company that's healthy, where people genuinely love working together, where Everybody's on the same page in terms of, you know, where the company's going and what's, you know, what's important for right now, what we know we're going to work on next, but not right now, what we know we're going to work on later, and what we know we're not going to work on because it's not. We don't have infinite resources and there's a bunch of stuff that just doesn't make sense for us to work on. So let's just call that never. Right? So that weekly meeting really enables you to see whether or not first at the senior leadership team, but then cascading weekly meetings all the way down, you just, it, it gives you basically the core signals that you need to know, need you, that you need in order to understand whether things are evolving, you know, relatively well.

Cole Abbott

[0:14:06]

And if you can get right, because thinking about just what, from the leadership perspective, what you need to do just at the minimum to make this stuff work and make it stick and make it as painless as possible, if you can just commit to 90 minutes a week, you're gonna get through it. It's okay. It's not gonna be fun at times, but you will see the benefits of that very quickly. Right?

Mark Abbott

[0:14:29]

There's so much that comes out of the weekly meeting, right?

Cole Abbott

[0:14:32]

Just 90 minutes.

Mark Abbott

[0:14:33]

Just number one, it's 90 minutes, right. Number two, you know, back to your, I think the, you know, the opening discussion here. If you're dreading your weekly meeting, like, that's a huge signal, right? Because fundamentally, you know, we've talked about this before on this podcast. I deeply believe we're social creatures. I deeply believe we want to work and we want to matter. And I deeply believe we want to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. And for a lot of people,

Cole Abbott

[0:15:19]

work

Mark Abbott

[0:15:20]

is a huge part of that. Right? And there's a lot of studies now about the whole concept of retirement evolving into some really cool places, right? Like there are younger people who are retiring, but they're not really retiring, they're just doing different things, right? And then you have older people who are like, no, 89, even 90 year old people who are like, I, you know, I like working because I like the social aspects. It brings me, you know, some money, I can do with what I want. We've talked about this before, but you know, fundamentally, we're social creatures who want to matter. And you'd like to be a part of a tribe where you like, you know, you enjoy showing up and being together, you Know, we've talked before about how one of my things when I started the company is I really, really wanted to and was looking forward to two things I was looking forward to. You know, back before I envisioned us as a work from anywhere company. You know, I was really looking forward to having our offices, to having communal lunch, to having my clients come in on occasion and joining me and our team for a communal lunch. I thought, you know, that was just part of my dream. So that social aspect of it, looking forward to those, those things. And if you don't look forward to your weekly meeting, there's, there's something, there's a, like I said, there's a big signal there. Is it, Is it because people aren't respecting it?

Cole Abbott

[0:16:44]

Number one?

Mark Abbott

[0:16:45]

Is it because, you know, fundamentally there's a lot of tension in there because you do not have people, the right people in the right seats on your senior leadership team. Right. And then back to the 20%. I personally have felt that a bunch of those 20 percenters, the people who basically bail on upgrading their operating system within the first 60 days, they're not willing to deal with the fact that there are people around the table who shouldn't be there. Whether it's cultural or competency. Right. They just. Or connection as well. Right. Because you got some people who are sitting around the table that, you know, for all practical purposes don't really care about the company. They're not truly, you know, providing their fair share. They're not truly, you know, doing the work they need to do to make sure that their organization is, is, is well run, that it's that, that the people within the organization are pulling their fair share, whatever it is. And you know, the weakest LinkedIn kind of concept, but there are a whole host of reasons that you don't look forward to that and you're just not willing to deal with them.

Cole Abbott

[0:17:54]

One of the root causes of a lot of these issues is there are things you don't want to deal with. Yeah. And you can put your head in sand. Right. Or it could.

Mark Abbott

[0:18:03]

Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:18:04]

I think that it is scary to do deal with these things that you've either never dealt with before, which is going to be a lot of cases. Because even if you do have a lot of experience, there's will be new versions of that experience.

Mark Abbott

[0:18:15]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:18:16]

And not everything is the same. So you try to apply the same formulaic approach each time, you're going to find yourself overwhelmed.

Mark Abbott

[0:18:23]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:18:24]

Another good thing about having an operating system is that it gives you a decent structure for how to go about

Mark Abbott

[0:18:30]

doing those things, for seeing those things,

Cole Abbott

[0:18:32]

for seeing those things, for surfacing those things. And then also, like, how it gives you a good way to sort of remove yourself from that and act accordingly.

Mark Abbott

[0:18:41]

Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:18:42]

Saw this as, like you said, it's a social thing.

Mark Abbott

[0:18:44]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:18:45]

It is. For the social benefit, a lot of times of making sure that this meeting is running well.

Mark Abbott

[0:18:49]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:18:49]

This team feels good. They trust each other. They can have honest conversations. And if we're just. If we say, hey, what do we need to do at this. At this weekly meeting? How many of these things we need to solve? Because if everyone just brings up their whole thing, it's just gonna be a flood. All of the issues they have. It's like, no, let's just. I don't know if you have experience with guiding people through this, through this sort of situation, but just bringing in, like, what. What is the most that we can tolerate right now in terms of the issues. Let's go there and let's just, like, work proximally.

Mark Abbott

[0:19:21]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:19:21]

Just get better and better every week so we're not overwhelmed. So we're not just flooding the system and. And getting emotional. Because once we reach that tipping point, then it. It becomes unproductive.

Mark Abbott

[0:19:30]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:19:31]

And destructive.

Mark Abbott

[0:19:32]

Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:19:32]

In terms not only that meeting, but also those connections in that room.

Mark Abbott

[0:19:36]

Yeah. And I think that's back to, you know, this whole, you know, concept of proximal. Right. Is huge.

Cole Abbott

[0:19:44]

Right.

Mark Abbott

[0:19:44]

And. And so part of. Back to, you know, as goes the leadership team, so goes the rest of the company. You know, if you, if your leadership team's not aligned on, let's just call it now, next, later, and never, then that's going to show up in so many places, as you just, you know, pointed out. Right. People are going to be bringing issues or ideas. Right. Those. The ideas are actually as bad a indicator as issues are. And what I mean by that is we've agreed now and next and. And later and never. And someone brings up an idea that they want attacked now. And we've already filled our plate for the next quarter, and we don't have any capacity for this idea. And, you know, and there's. There's. There's tension there because they're like, but this could work. And you're like, yeah, it could work, but we don't have the capacity to do this right now. And so, please, can we just push this into, you know, a discussion for our next quarterly. So, you know, the, There's a lot of, you know, the weekly meeting, you know, will reveal A lot in terms of whether you're all aligned on what's. What the priorities are. And then, you know, if that's all going well, then your issues list will be lower. Your ability to say, hey, this one here, we gotta talk about it today. This one here. And we call those fives in our system. This one here, the four is. I want to talk about it if we have time. But I, you know, but the five's gotta go first and then the threes are, you know, if we have time. And so in my mind, one of the big measurables for a healthy meeting is you get through all the fives and the fours, right. You know, every week you're getting through 100% of the time, you're getting through the fives and then maybe 80% or 85% of the time you're getting through the fours, right. And then the threes are whatever they are. And, and obviously if the threes become more and more important, they get stacked, turned into a, into a four or five. So you know, I think that's a hu. That's a huge way of measuring how healthy them. And of course you do that and then you rate the meeting. And if your meetings, if you're hitting your fives and 85% of your fours and your meetings are at least a nine or higher, you know, that's a great signal that your businesses, your leadership team is probably performing reasonably well together

Cole Abbott

[0:22:24]

and then that's helping the rest of the organization in terms of the spoke meetings that come off of that.

Mark Abbott

[0:22:28]

Exactly. If you imagine that you can, and this is where we're going with, you know, obviously with our software. Right. Imagine that you can the leadership team, the department, leadership teams, the teams, individual teams. Right. All that is, you know, scoring nines and above, including, you know, the fives getting hit 85% of the fours as a leader. Right. If I could just see that.

Cole Abbott

[0:22:58]

Right.

Mark Abbott

[0:22:59]

And we will give this will happen this year within 90 the software. Right. If I can see that happening consistently, 90, 85, 85% of the time, you got a damn well run business. It's pretty cool, right? Just that signal, I think.

Cole Abbott

[0:23:18]

So on the idea topic, I think ideas are good, but understanding that if we're just introducing whatever into the system, what does that mean to bring an idea like that into the group? It's like, well, if you own the thing and it's an idea of how to do something better in the thing that you own, well then just go do it. And if it impacts anybody else, let them Know, talk to them, have that discussion with them, don't need to bring that to the whole group. And if it's just been you own, then just go do it. Right. You don't need the approval. You own the thing. You are the accountable party there.

Mark Abbott

[0:23:52]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:23:53]

Now what we. So when we say ideas that are not healthy to bring into that situation, it's typically a, I don't know how to do this better or I've exhausted my resources there. And instead of acknowledging that and trying to have a discussion around what does that look like, what can I control in my domain and what are the things that I work with or parties I work with and how, how can I help them or how can they help me? And being open and honest there, it's how can I introduce something new in an attempt to fix the thing? And I think that most businesses don't have a shortage of new different ways possibilities to do with something or tax something.

Mark Abbott

[0:24:32]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:24:32]

But they do have a apprehension to deal with the hardness of or the difficulty of doing something that they've been doing and doing that better. That's just. Can be a grind.

Mark Abbott

[0:24:45]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:24:46]

But I think that if you just do that and you focus on that over time, that will compound and you will get better and better and better at the things that, you know, work.

Mark Abbott

[0:24:55]

Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:24:56]

And I think it's just important to clarify that. What. When we say ideas.

Mark Abbott

[0:25:02]

Well, yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:25:03]

What does that actually mean in terms of. Right. If you are a leader and you're seeing that come into the room and it's like, all right, is this something that we should discuss? Because some new.

Mark Abbott

[0:25:11]

Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:25:12]

Things happen in industries and teams and need to be brought up fair. But is this a thing of someone's abdicating responsibility for something, trying to tell someone else how to do their job, or are they just scrambling? Right. Or trying to seem like they are being mentally productive in a way? Right, Right. Because perception is a thing in the meetings and that's not what we should be working towards. Right. We don't want the rest of the org rating all their meetings attend so that everyone gets off their backs. Right. That's not good.

Mark Abbott

[0:25:40]

No, but, but that ultimately I don't think would happen.

Cole Abbott

[0:25:45]

So depends on the culture of the company.

Mark Abbott

[0:25:47]

Right? Yeah. Yeah. So there's, there's two, two things to discuss. One is that. But I want to go back to what I meant by ideas. Okay. So your, your example is a, is a really, really good example. But if we're talking about a senior leadership team, what I'm talking About is, are the visionaries coming in with new ideas right in the middle of a quarter. Right. Chasing some shiny new thing. Right. That they just woke up in the morning. That or like, like I did last night, I shared with you. I had this big idea. Right. I'm all excited about it, but I know sometimes my ideas turn into. They're just stupid. Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:26:21]

And you understand that it's good to sit on these things.

Mark Abbott

[0:26:24]

Yes.

Cole Abbott

[0:26:24]

Let them marinate and then figure out how to integrate it into the things that you can control that are relevant for this moment. For this moment, which is, for us, the quarter. And then it's like, okay, well now we can sit with that. Use it there. And then if it does impact how we go into quarterly planning next time. Awesome. Right? And it's taken you a good bit of time to mature to that level.

Mark Abbott

[0:26:45]

Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:26:46]

This, it is hard even when you are aware of, when you do have the map in your hand.

Mark Abbott

[0:26:50]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:26:51]

It is hard to have that discipline, to be like, you just feel all good inside. Oh, I sorted something out. I want to share this with people. And it's like, no, no, no, no. Don't overwhelm them. Right. We're working well, Things are okay.

Mark Abbott

[0:27:01]

Yeah. But you know, just to finish up on this so, you know, you'll have your typical. You know, typical is right. It's not uncommon, I'll say, for visionaries to have mid quarter ideas and all of a sudden share those ideas. And then sometimes they just share the ideas because they just, they're excited about it. They want to talk about. They're not asking to actually execute against the idea. But, you know, then you've heard the stories a thousand times. People think, oh, you know, Mark said, we got to go focus on this. And it's like, no, I never said that. I just wanted to talk out, you know, think out loud with you guys about something and figure out whether or not we should even put it on the long term issues list. But that's me. That's us. There are other visionaries who are like, you know, every single quarter, they're. They're changing the game in the middle of the game. And I've had those clients. I literally have had those clients. It took me two years, two years to get him to truly control himself because he had all these ideas and because it became a whip every single quarter. When I got with them to do their quarterly planning, I would ask, how is XYZ done in terms of. Well, he's getting better, right? Two years for him to truly respect the discipline and to see why, because, you know, sometimes, you know, it takes you two or three times to get hit over the head. And if you think about it, you know, that situation was eight times. Ish. Right. Eight quarterly meetings.

Cole Abbott

[0:28:40]

Assuming that nobody did anything outside of the court, that he never did anything outside the quarterly meetings, which I doubt did he. Did they have an integrator?

Mark Abbott

[0:28:47]

Yes. Right. A whole nother conversation. Right. But the point is, is that every single quarter, we would go into it committed to controlling, you know, Joe, I'll call him. Right. And then at the. And then the next quarter, we would say, okay, so it's, you know, how did Joe do? Well, Right. And. And. And I could literally see, you know, all the things that had changed in terms of what they were working on. And so it's like, we got to do better. Right? We got to do better.

Cole Abbott

[0:29:13]

I mean, it's hard. We have, what do we agree to the quarterly. And then the next word, what did we do? And if those are consistently different, it's hard to hide from them.

Mark Abbott

[0:29:21]

Yeah. Sometimes you have ideas that shouldn't have been brought there in the first place. Right. As an example. And sometimes it's, you know, it's. In a lot of situations, it's a visionary. But as you pointed out, sometimes it's others who are pushing something that they want done in the quarter that they never asked for before the quarter started. Right. But now all of a sudden, it's like, oh, I need this and I. And I need it now, and here's the reasons why. And they have their. In their own mind. Right. It's really important that we work on this thing now. But the reality is, no, we. All right. And you can have a conversation around, should you have, like, 10% excess capacity in the system to go attack certain things. But, you know, the. The reality is that's easier said than done. We've talked about this for years and years.

Cole Abbott

[0:30:16]

Depends what your industry is, what your market is. Because there are times where it's like, we need to be more adaptive and. And have that, but you need to be disciplined in what you throw into that 10%. Now, if we just have 10%, because, oh, we're going to get some ideas mid quarter that that's not a good use of that, because that's just. You're planning to then adopt a bad habit.

Mark Abbott

[0:30:33]

And then. And then there are times, though, when something fundamentally changes in the middle of a quarter.

Cole Abbott

[0:30:39]

Right.

Mark Abbott

[0:30:40]

Obviously, Covid's a great example of that. And so it's like, nope, right.

Cole Abbott

[0:30:44]

We're gonna stay in office till the quarterly. We are disciplined.

Mark Abbott

[0:30:51]

Yes.

Cole Abbott

[0:30:51]

They will drag us out of here.

Mark Abbott

[0:30:53]

And then you need to call a timeout. Right. And basically, you know, kind of have a mid quarter quarterly and do a reset. Those things happen. Not often, but they do happen.

Cole Abbott

[0:31:06]

On the visionary side, the. The filters for the rest, like SLT versus the visionary. I think those still apply.

Mark Abbott

[0:31:12]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:31:12]

In terms of. Right. What is the. What are your roles and responsibilities as a visionary? Are these things that you want to do? Awesome, go do them. Do they have a team? Cool. Is it at your job as leader, are these things that will help your people or are these things that will throw off your people? If you are throwing out ideas, you understand that how hierarchies work. And when you throw something out, what is the expectation on the team? I just be like, well, I know this was just me, you know, speaking out loud or thinking out loud and trying to spitball some things and see what sticks. But they just see this as, oh, my gosh, I have. I'm already drowning. I'm trying to keep up, you know, good appearance here. And this is just overwhelming. And that's never good.

Mark Abbott

[0:31:53]

Right, right. And then you have, you know, the

Cole Abbott

[0:31:55]

weekly meeting,

Mark Abbott

[0:31:57]

as I said earlier, it's a discipline which, in my opinion, if you. If you want to have a decent company, you just have to. Right. You. You. You have to honor it, number one. Number two, and I'm speaking specifically to visionaries right now, you. If you don't love the meeting, you need to reflect on why. And, you know, is it that you, you know, it's revealing things that you're uncomfortable with and that, you know, you have to deal with, but you've kind of put your head in the sand. Is it because you have people in the room who you deep down inside know shouldn't be in the room? The right people. Right. Seats at you. So obviously competency and. And character. You know, is it that you actually have great people that you love working with, but, you know, from a developmental perspective, they're not where they need to be for you, for the company and for you. And that's hard, right? Where you got someone who's sort of. Maybe they're not thinking at the right level. Maybe their time span of capacity is not sufficient for the responsibilities they have. Maybe their level of ego is such that, you know, they're, you know, we'll just go and do the obvious one where they're incapable of receiving genuinely constructive criticism, because from an ego development perspective, they just feel Attacked. Right. And so, you know, that meeting will reveal a lot of things. And now the question is, once again, are these, are these things that, you know, you need just work on developmentally, you know, with each of your leaders? Is this, are these things you can't prioritize right now because, you know, you're focused on, on the current quarter and then, you know, ultimately figure out why. Why is it you don't like the weekly meeting? And then the question is, is it something you can deal with right now? Not when I say now in this quarter. Or you know, is it something that you can like? Okay, there's an issue here, but I'm okay working, working through it over a number of quarters. And when you say that, you need to not only think about it from your own perspective, but, but the perspective of the team and the team and

Cole Abbott

[0:34:23]

the team's health and that will help you developmentally too. Sneaky thing there, right?

Mark Abbott

[0:34:29]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:34:29]

What role does an integrator play in both the visionary and also sort of managing the rest of that leadership team?

Mark Abbott

[0:34:38]

Well, a really good integrator is going to be responsible for making sure that that weekly meeting. Right. Achieves all those things. I said it's run every single week.

Cole Abbott

[0:34:56]

Right.

Mark Abbott

[0:34:57]

It's run properly. Right. We do our segue, we hit the scorecard, no discussion other than is there an issue. Right. We work our way down to very efficiently having if it's a 90 minute meeting, having our 65 plus minutes for, you know, IDs, ING if it's a level 10 meeting, so to speak. Right. And then walk out of there once again with a hundred percent of the fives done, 85% of the, at least 85% of the fours done, and with at least a nine out of ten score on that meeting, if they're doing their job really well, we'll get back to what I said earlier, which is up and down and throughout the organization, we're having great meetings at least 85% of the time. And I'm talking about, let's just say for the sake of this conversation, A company has 30 weekly meetings, 20 weekly meetings. Right. That 85% of those 20 are well done. Right. In using that simple criteria I said earlier. And if they're not, then what is the issue? Is it process issue? Right. Is an alignment issue? Is it a priority issue? Is it a, you know, is it that a bunch of the rocks were not really well thought out and there's a lot of consternation within the organization in terms of people feel like they're working on similar efforts. And there's not just redundancy, but there's actual conflict in terms of the end game. And, you know, our latest advancement in terms of mass. Right. Our AI bot, which is in alpha right now, but will be in beta within the next two weeks. You can go in and ask Maz, hey, take a look at the leadership team rocks and see if there's anything in that collection that shows some issues in terms of really clear who's working on what, as opposed to it looks like two or three people are working on the same thing. I had this instinct coming out of our last quarterly that we had a bunch of people working on kind of very similar things. And so I asked Maz. Hey, Maz. Right. Take a look at all of our rocks. And we have 32 for this quarter in the senior leadership team. Take a look at all these rocks. Do you see any duplicative work, redundancy, or conflicts? And literally it found five different instances which blew me away. And in each of those instances, there were three different rocks that were sort of in conflict. Right. And four out of the five of those rocks were held. Three different rocks held by three different people tackling very similar issues. And one of them had one person having three rocks that tackled kind of the same issue, which was interesting. Right. So then I said, hey, Maz, that's awesome. Thank you. Please turn these five observations into issues. And it created issues on the issues list, which was like, this is so cool. But imagine now you being able to do that up and down and across the organization and take that level of sort of strategic coherence. Strategic priorities. Right. Taking it from a. You know, I would say if you looked at that exercise that we just. That I just did. Right. You're talking 5 times 3 is 15 out of 32. Right. So in theory, you could say we were 17 over 32. In. In. In. In terms of a coherence score for the efforts that we had underway right now. So that's not a good score.

Cole Abbott

[0:39:19]

Well, it's good that we have a way to reduce the friction of.

Mark Abbott

[0:39:22]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:39:22]

Associated with having that conversation. Right, right.

Mark Abbott

[0:39:25]

And now, now imagine that happening up and down and across the organization. That is. Right. And, and so, because if that's. If you go into a quarter, let's just say that your organization has a, you know, whatever that is, let's just call it a 65% quarter coherence score, you're going to have a lot of issues, right. That are going to.

Cole Abbott

[0:39:51]

Well, you're going to write A leading indicator that you are going to have problems at the end of the quarter.

Mark Abbott

[0:39:55]

Yeah, yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:39:56]

At the latest.

Mark Abbott

[0:39:57]

Yeah. And it's a leading indicator that you're probably going to have more issues up and down and across the organization. That's another way of scoring and thinking about it. Right. How many issues, how many fives and fours am I having in a really healthy, well run organization? Obviously having that number come down and down and down. Right. And having your, and having your weekly meetings all in 35%. You know, with 35% of the time to spare. I mean there's a. Weekly meetings are such a huge reveal. It's such a huge reveal.

Cole Abbott

[0:40:29]

No, I think there's a. If you want to like apply algorithm to weekly meetings in terms of.

Mark Abbott

[0:40:35]

Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:40:35]

Simplify, like narrow the scope. Narrow the scope or narrow the scope, have less things, run it faster then therefore you increase the capacity. Okay, now what do we want to take on? Right? And you're just sort of growing that thing with, you know, sort of a pendulum in terms of.

Mark Abbott

[0:40:50]

Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:40:51]

Capacity. Capability. Capacity. Capability. Capacity. Capability.

Mark Abbott

[0:40:54]

Throughput.

Cole Abbott

[0:40:55]

Yeah, it's like, I guess that's when you wait, what are the, what are the things on either side where you then switch the thing?

Mark Abbott

[0:41:00]

Right?

Cole Abbott

[0:41:00]

Because like okay, wave capacity. Now we can be more capable, now we get more throughput. Now we can go back to refining that, that system and just keep evolving that. Right.

Mark Abbott

[0:41:08]

So yeah, so the weekly meeting is going to actually be a huge reveal, especially if you get it up and down across the organization on, you know, how you can make the organization more efficient, more effective, more efficient, more effective. And once again, obviously that increases the throughput. And I'm not talking about low quality throughput. I'm putting talk about high quality throughput, quality work product.

Cole Abbott

[0:41:28]

But also there's like, there's a social component of that too. Right. If we are doing that, we are leading by example there, we are getting, building that momentum and then that is cascading to the rest of the teams. We could talk about. Right. Well we just, we started with what's a crappy meeting look like? What is just miserable. Right. And then okay, now let's just work proximate. Let's get from there to all right, this is tolerable. Now we're at the point where it's like this is functioning. We have all of our fives and our fours going, okay, now it's, let's really work to get that throughput. We're working together, we're trusting. Right. And it's going to, you Want to be just proximately stressing the system. Yes. To the point where if we are all doing this and everyone's working hard in the right seats, bringing their best to that 90 minutes a week.

Mark Abbott

[0:42:10]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:42:11]

And we're getting through it. We're getting through it faster, we're getting through more, we're going stronger, we're getting more capable, we are increasing that quality throughput.

Mark Abbott

[0:42:17]

Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:42:17]

That is going. You are going to build a strong culture with just that alone. And that will echo throughout the company. And ultimately, it's like, that's where you want to go.

Mark Abbott

[0:42:25]

Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:42:26]

Because from there, then it's just. You're just operating that system.

Mark Abbott

[0:42:29]

Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:42:29]

You're operating at that cadence and you're operating at it as well as you can.

Mark Abbott

[0:42:32]

Yeah. And I think that, you know, you brought up culture now. Right. And so, you know, to the extent that you have cultural issues, Right. Those are going to show up as issues. Right. And so, you know, once again, if you get to a place where people genuinely look forward to the weekly meeting and you're hitting that, you know, those simple metrics I just talked about, and because now we're increasing the quality throughput, you're celebrating more.

Cole Abbott

[0:43:04]

Right. You've earned that celebration.

Mark Abbott

[0:43:06]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:43:07]

Just like, oh, we need to feel good. It's like, no, no, you feel good and that's cool.

Mark Abbott

[0:43:10]

It's not for shit. This is like, look what we're doing. Look what we accomplished. Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:43:14]

And you're.

Mark Abbott

[0:43:14]

And you're calling it out, and you're calling it out, and you're calling it out. All of a sudden, that's a, you know, that's. That's an amazing company.

Cole Abbott

[0:43:21]

Anything you want to hammer on, reiterate, emphasize, before we close out, the

Mark Abbott

[0:43:29]

punchline of this conversation, in my opinion, is helping people understand that as goes in some regards, you could say, as goes the weekly meeting, so goes the entire company. Now, the weekly meetings. For the weekly meetings to go well, right, you need a leadership team that genuinely enjoys going to the weekly meeting. Does it really? Well knows how has confidence that each of their colleagues helping their organizations have great weekly meetings. And so, you know, if you had to pick one sort of core competency or. Yeah. Core competency to master. It's the weekly meeting. It's crazy, but it's true.

Cole Abbott

[0:44:20]

It all comes back to that.

Mark Abbott

[0:44:21]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:44:23]

All right. Thank you.

Mark Abbott

[0:44:25]

You're welcome. Thank you.