[music] What color do you think that you are, for what combination of colors? [sniff] [sniff] [sniff] I don't know, it's a tough one, it's a... It's a combo of all of them. Every idiot's got a color. See what I mean? Maybe I'm the colorless idiot. [laughter] You got to have a color. What color do you... We've been trying to figure out your color, it's a consultant background that you got, we can't read you. It blends the color. Yeah, you thought you were red, right? Do you think you were more red? I'm more red, now you don't see that as much, because I'm more red in meetings that you're not... Gotcha. Because you're the red in the meetings that we're in together. Gotcha. Gotcha, so it's just situational awareness. It's situational, I don't necessarily... Because I don't necessarily... I see you have some blue skills, but I don't see you as a blue. Yeah, definitely not a blue, but the skills are developed in the blue area. Yeah, you're definitely not a yellow. No. So I'll throw a creative thing out every once in a while, but I'm not a yellow. All right. So yeah, I think it's red, but it's situational. So there you go. All right, so you got to go back and read "Surrounded by Idiots" if you don't know what we're talking about. Yep. Well, welcome. This is Unleashing Leadership. I'm your host Travis Moss, CEO of Seed Playing Group, our co-host Dave Nerty, Chief Operating Officer Seed Playing Group, and this podcast all about how we read books like "Surrounded by Idiots," and we take takeaways and literally implement them into our business app as being one that we make over new hires read, because they got to understand who they're working with. And today we're actually, we're going to a different book that we're doing the book "Build by Tony Fidell," I think "Surrounded by Idiots" was the third or fourth season that I did. So you go back and there's a good handful of episodes to listen to on that. And our takeaway, well, we're starting anyway, I don't know if we're going to sit on this takeaway, but managers are responsible for human beings who are in turn responsible for the work. It just kind of goes with some other stuff that we've been talking about. Yeah. Unless you have something specific there, we probably can move on. We're going to blah, blah, that one. I made that up. I don't know what that means. We're just going to squish that one. All right. Always have agendas for one on one's. I like this one. So they don't turn into friendly chants. You talked about this too. Let's talk about that. As always, do us a favor. Like or subscribe to us wherever you are listening or watching. We really do appreciate it. We do have a daily sponsor today. And that sponsor is... I just changed my screen so I can't figure it out. That's the Suits Podcast, 2023 Podcast of the Year in all categories by Queel Podcast Agency, where we focus on helping you get more out of your money and life. Check it out. Ditchthesuits.com or wherever podcasts can be found. All right, Dave. So you like this one because you were talking about a couple of episodes ago, how one on one's turned into like friendly fireside chats. Yeah. All right. So what you got, man? This is your five seconds of fame. Oh, you're giving me five? I gave you a whole five today. Yeah, I like this one because it's something that as I think at least in my own experience at seed and with our management team has gotten a world better as we've developed agendas and what we call scrumless internally. And I know there's an actual scrum term and people run scrum meetings and all that. I'm aware, but we call scrums a little bit different. And we have these lists that we use, right, for kind of things that happen and action items, update, status, whatever you want to call it. And since we've started implementing these, the conversations- Really loud. Sorry. The porn. What'd you pour it in there? As we've been implementing these scrumless, which is essentially an agenda for the meeting, they stay on task and you get what you need to accomplish because you don't get caught up in the, you know, how is the weekend, how you doing, how is the stat, which is that's important to have those conversations, but that's a lunchtime though. Yes. It's not. That's not what the one on one is about. Right. People use 10 of your 15 minutes talking about that and then you try to cram in the important things. You start with this agenda or whatever you want to call it and you have your items, right? And the important thing, I think, with that and what's worked well for us is it's a, it's a two-way agenda, right? It's a, you know, both parties can contribute to it, should be contributing to it and be prepared ahead of time. It shouldn't be something that you're opening up as the meeting starting and you're caught off guard by what's on there or you're surprised and you don't even think prepared. You should be looking at it, you know, a day or more in advance depending on what, what the subject of the meeting is. So you can be prepared with thoughts or you can be adding, you know, something in there as well to make the conversation more productive. Yeah, I think that it's very, very easy for one-on-ones to become bitch-fest or, you know, gossip circles or stuff like that. And it's very easy for any meeting to be worthless. And so when you think about a meeting and this is kind of a newer frame of thinking, but this is how you should think about it. When you have a meeting at your office, let's say we have a team meeting and there's four of us on the team and we all meet, it's not a half an hour. It's two hours because we're each there for a half an hour and there's four of us. So it's two hours. So we've lost two hours of productivity, which is X percentage of the total productivity of the company, which costs X percent of money. I mean, that's what it comes down to. If we measure things and how much time they took instead of just how much money they took, you'd add up a key meal, a good amount of time and say, wow, that's expensive. So every meeting really ought to have a serious agenda. If you don't prepare a serious agenda for a meeting, why are you having the meeting? Exactly. And we've learned this the hard way, you know? People do not come prepared to meetings, they don't have an agenda. And I really do think and we've worked very hard on this is pulling back the time that the agenda is prepared ahead of the meeting. When you have somebody preparing for a meeting, the day of the meeting and they're putting that agenda, the other day of the meeting, they're not prepared. When you're rushed and you're just scrambling to shove things together, number one, the other party can't get prepared because they don't have a clue what you're doing. And then, number two, you're not prepared because you're just trying to get an agenda together. So when we first came out with the thing, I said, look, if you're going to run a meeting, they're better being an agenda for every single meeting, it was this thing like, oh, my gosh, you know, all of a sudden everybody's scrambling last minute to the agenda. Then we came up with the scrum meeting agenda, which is basically like a running list of talking points and kind of the status of the talking points. And anybody can add to the list. So if you and I have a weekly scrum, if there's stuff you want to bring up, you can put it on the list. The stuff I want to bring up, I can put it on the list. And then there's a bunch of stuff. They're just ongoing that we're consistently working on. And that's been implementing that and fine tuning in and it's nowhere near a finished product. But we've been using it now across the entire business and that's been hugely effective, I think, because you know exactly what we're going to talk about when I come in. Yeah. Like we're going to talk about these issues. And I have a way that I could actually put notes in before the meeting and say, "Hey, the thing you want to talk about, here's where I'm at with it." And so you have more of an interactive type of agenda there. So I think that there's two ways to look at agendas. I think that there's the standardized bullet points agenda. And then there's kind of the living agenda like that scrum that you talked about. But the big key is that both parties have to be involved. Both parties need to be prepared to make the meetings successful. One on ones are any other meeting, for that matter. And every single meeting needs some kind of guiding agenda type of apparatus to keep it on tracks. Otherwise it does kind of, you just don't get value out of it, right? I love the point about the cumulative time, right? It's not just a half hour, but so you think about some of these meetings, if it's like a whole team meeting or a company meeting and you got 10 people in there. What are you doing? If it's an hour, right? You're talking about 10 hours a company time, so you better have something that is worth that. And this has also happened, I think, at a seed that I've noticed, where people, a lot of times there's just a recurring meeting to have a recurring meeting, right? It's on there. Right. Weekly year. Yeah, monthly. It's on there. And you see, okay, I have my weekly meeting with this person. What are we going to talk about this time? And it's like, what are you doing with that? Actually, a great example is me and Bill, Bill's our CFO at Seed. We had a weekly meeting that we would have, but because Travis, the three of us now meet weekly, we ended up not having much to talk about on that, or it would just kind of go off in something like that either didn't need to take up both of our time or down a rabbit hole that both of us don't have to be involved. And we noticed that and we turned it into more of a status update type of thing where we don't even call it. We don't have to have a call anymore unless there is something urgent or pressing. So that's another good way to look at that is just because something's been on the calendar or it's a recurring meeting, you could remove it if there's not a necessity there. As long as you're not missing anything now and you still have some way to track things, don't just put it on there to put it on there. We also used to do some stupid meetings, you know, and that was more historical. Like, okay, I'm going to meet with this major shareholder or this at the time where we used to have partners and we used that terminology, this partner or once you and Bill were installed, I'm going to meet with Bill separately and then I'm going to even use separately and then we're going to meet together. And this goes back to the honesty part and the open transparency part and stuff like that. What we did a while ago now, I think it's almost two years now. Yeah. As I said, look, I'm having meetings with Bill, then I'm having meetings with Dave. So I'm spending an hour with each of you. Then me and Bill would have a meeting to kick you and Bill would have a meeting and talk about whatever I talked about, you know, and then a lot of those meetings I was repeating myself to each of you. Yep. And so what do we do? We said, look, let's just have the meeting together. And if it needs to be said, that's a meeting where everybody is an equal footing and whatever needs to be said can be said. And that way everybody understands what's being said and where everybody's sitting on everything and we don't have nearly as much duplication. And that made it just so much more effective and fluid and it just erased so much redundancies and stuff like that. You know, we've had people who are nervous about those kinds of meetings. You know, we used to do a shareholder meeting separate. We have control shares and not control shares. And the control shares get in a room together and talk about what we're doing. And then we'll talk to the other shareholders. It's like, what are you really doing? If you're going to keep that, you know, if you're afraid to tell everybody else what you're doing. Yeah, there's some things that are private, like there's some personnel things and that's pretty much it that are private. And that's an exception, right? It's not the return, like to the point. But there's, there's, you know, professional acumen within the organization to understand those situations. Right? Right. But the rest of it is why other than to kind of prop up your ego or because you're not trusting. Well, if you run a company and the company is full of people you don't trust, what are you doing? That's a problem. Yeah. It's a bigger problem than meetings. Yeah. Like you got, you know, you got some, you got some house cleaning to do. Well, what happened? So I kind of, I relicked at the point and what we're not even near the point. Yeah. We get off the, we are. But I think what we've discovered through the conversation is it, it shouldn't or doesn't always have to be a one on one, right? Like your example with, right, you and I had a one on one, then you and Bill did, that me and Bill would. What happened there too was it was so inefficient because it was hard to actually make a decision or no, when the decision was actually made, right? Like you, we might have had a conversation that I might be mentioning that to Bill for the first time or so what happens now when we're all together in that weekly is that you get everyone's perspective, you know, appropriately in that or the decision. It's just like, okay, now we know how to move forward and it's done. We don't have to have a decision. You make decisions. You assign responsibilities and you check in next week. Yeah. How do we do? Yep. Yeah. So maybe another point to this is check on who's, check the audience, right? Is there, are you having multiple one on ones or different, you know, meetings that either should be combined or eliminated, right, one or the other? [MUSIC PLAYING]
