NOEL: Hello, welcome to the Meetings Done Right podcast. This is a podcast about having better meetings in your organization using the Table XI Inclusion Cards Deck. Each episode of this podcast focuses on a specific card in that deck and a specific behavior to be encouraged or discouraged. Today, we are talking about the Beating a Dead Horse Card which is something that you play when somebody in your meeting has made their point and continued to make it over and over again. ASHLEY: [Chuckles] And over and over. NOEL: And over and over again. It's something when somebody has made their point, is what I'm saying, and continues to go on. ASHLEY: Continues to go on. NOEL: And I'm going to stop that because that's going to get really irritating. ASHLEY: [Laughs] NOEL: We have a guest here. We have Joe McCormack. Joe, would you like to introduce yourself? JOE: Yes. I'm the author of a book called BRIEF: Make a Bigger Impact by Saying Less. And I'm the Founder and Managing Director of The Brief Lab where we teach professionals how to become lean communicators. ASHLEY: Outstanding. It's wonderful to have you on the podcast. JOE: Pleasure. NOEL: It sounds like you have expertise to bring to bear on this topic. First of all, what is important about making your point and getting off the stage, so to speak? JOE: If you look at a meeting, I think it's really important that people that go to meetings speak. Everybody should have some type of a time to talk. Some people take that as a permission to keep on talking. And what I talked about I think is the big issue is talk to talk. They're just speaking to speak. They've said what they need to say and they just keep on talking because they feel like, "I'm going to come up with something better," or to look good. There's a million different reasons why people do it. But it's the talk to talk syndrome that I think becomes a big detriment to meetings becoming productive and efficient. NOEL: Yes. The problem there is that if one person keeps talking, obviously you're preventing other people from contributing. So, I guess, first off, as a facilitator, what can you do? What can you look for to try and keep things moving in the meetings that you're running? JOE: You want to set some rules without being too over the top. But when I facilitate meetings, I say, "I want everybody to talk, not everybody at the same time." And while people are talking, you just give people the kind of the ground rules. In my meetings, I want everybody to talk. And when you're not talking, listen to what the person is saying. Not to wait your turn to agree or disagree but to listen to what they're trying to say. Because I think one of the times that people keep on saying things over again is because they feel they're not being heard. And if you set those ground rules early on, you start to generate participation, but it's balanced participation. The quality of the listening gets better and the quality of the conversation gets better. There's different techniques that you can use to balance that out. But if you set that up in the beginning, people become aware of it. And know when they're breaking the rule, it becomes more noticeable. ASHLEY: That's so interesting because it seems like an obvious tenet of any meeting, "We expect you to participate and we expect you to talk. And when you're not talking, listen." And it sounds like putting that front and center changes the timbre of the meeting. JOE: Yeah. One of the things that's broken about meetings why people -- we ask people in the courses that we teach is what would be the first response if you find out the meeting that you were invited to was canceled? And the unanimous response is joy. ASHLEY: [Laughs] JOE: Nobody's like, "Oh my, gosh. I didn't get invited. That meeting was canceled. That's so depressing. I need a moment." If you go back to like why are they so, just most of them so poor. And if you go back to the root cause is there's not a clearly stated point of the meeting in the first place, so that the agenda, the topic is poorly worded or it's just generic. When people go into meetings and they don't know what the point of the meeting is, then they'll just assume that it's something else and then you have these conversations that are going on where they're not all having the same conversation and chaos ensues. Good agendas lead to order, poor agendas or no agendas lead to chaos. When you have chaotic meetings, what you have is nobody knows it's chaos in the moment. At the end of it, it's just like, "Wow! What did we just talk about?" Everybody is talking but you don't know about what and to what end. It all goes back to the leader of that meeting having an agenda that's published. "This is what we're talking about. This is why it's important. This is who's here. This is what we're going to talk about," and how much time. And then you set the ground rules. "OK. So, we're all going to talk but we're talking about this topic to achieve this end." And I think the absence of that makes the thing just inherently chaotic. You don't get order from chaos. You just get chaos from chaos, and the lack of an agenda, I think, is a root cause. NOEL: What sort of advice do you give to people who are participating in the meeting to keep sort of an eye on their own comments and read the room? JOE: When people are talking, they have to be thinking while they're talking. Is this helping advance the conversation or do I like the sound of my own voice? And many people are not asking that question because they're not self aware. Everybody else is thinking the same thing like, "Why are you talking?" And the person doesn't even -- there's no self-awareness. So what I would coach people and suggest to people is constantly asking yourself, "Is what I'm saying helping advance the conversation? Or am I just falling in love with the sound of my own voice?" And there's a trigger. There's a moment in that that you can actually -- it's in the book BRIEF. It's when you hear yourself in your head start to say, "Wow! I'm really sounding interesting now." It's time to stop talking. ASHLEY: [Laughs] Oh, no! NOEL: Oh, that hurts actually. ASHLEY: We're hosting a podcast right now. You don't do that because you don't love the sound of your own voice. JOE: Everybody does it. Me too. Nobody's immune. That's why it's a problem. ASHLEY: [Laughs] JOE: And I'm happy you guys are trying to fix it because meetings could be a great ground for great conversations. Who doesn't want to have a great conversation? ASHLEY: Agreed. JOE: I heard somebody challenge, why have a meeting in the first place? One of the things that really helps me a lot is when you're organizing a meeting is asking yourself this question and the agendas - what's the risk if we don't have it. And state it as the risk, "The reason we're getting together is so we don't meet this, something bad will happen." ASHLEY: Oh, that's interesting. NOEL: Yeah. Often, there's status that needs to be shared. And if we don't have the meeting, then we run the risk of tripping over each other, duplicating work, or blocking each other or something like that. But you should know in advance. ASHLEY: I've heard it phrased the other way - at the end of a meeting, asking yourself if this could have just been an email. And I like the idea of calling out the risk of not having a meeting a little better than that. Because the question 'could this have been an email' is a little salty. And so, for that reason, I've never really used it. NOEL: Especially at the end of the meeting. "Did I just waste your time?" [Laughter] JOE: Let's see what happens. Give it a shot. You're absolutely right. It's so true. When I think of a horror story that happened to me -- and again, the business I'm in it's called the Brief Lab. So it's sort of in the name that we'd teach people tenets of this. But there was an offsite that we had and the organizer, the client organizer had a conference call. There were nine people on the call and it was completely purposeless, other than just to introduce the people that were going to be in the offsite. It was a half hour. I thought it was a joke because we're going through the whole thing, and I thought that there was going to be some substantive discussion. It was literally just to have everybody introduce themselves to each other. And I started thinking like, "Wow, the person was…" I started losing respect and credibility of the organizer. And at the end, I'm like, "This should have been done in an email." It really needed to just be an email. And I think one way of getting around that in a meeting is -- most meetings should be for discussion and decision, not for information consumption. If you're just disseminating information, it should be a pre-read for the most part. ASHLEY: Yeah, absolutely. One of the horror stories that I have in my past is that we used to have very, very early morning meetings. At some point, I had a boss who would start, I think she was probably presenting the quarterly reports. And so, what she would do is at 7:00 a.m., she would have everybody arrive, get into a room turn, on the PowerPoint and then turn off all the lights and then read off what was on the screen. So, you were just being read to in the dark too early. And then of course, I can't imagine what would happen if you actually fell asleep. But it was the worst. JOE: It happened to everybody. They're not even supposed to speak. You're really supposed to just listen and absorb. So, what ends up happening is people start to talk. They're not supposed to talk, they're supposed to listen and absorb. They should have just read that. They don't need to be in a meeting for that. ASHLEY: Brutal. JOE: Yeah. NOEL: Joe, do you make a distinction between the kind of meeting where it's sort of -- I think of a meeting that's like a discussion to determine an outcome potentially more focused, versus a meeting that is maybe more of a brainstorming meeting where you actually are trying to get as many crazy ideas as possible? Are there sort of different rules or guidelines as to how to participate? JOE: If you're facilitating a brainstorm, that's a little bit of a different skill set to be a good facilitator and how you take notes and ask questions, especially like creative brainstorms are a little bit different but they're still the same. If you think about like -- this is how I like to describe it is when you set an agenda, the point of a meeting, write in eight to 10 words, no more. What is the point of this meeting? In a brainstorm, it would be to identify the 10 best ideas to launch a campaign. So now, you've got a finite number that you're working toward or to finalize the 2020 budget. That the framing of the stating of that objective. It's not like have a brainstorm or talk about the plan because they call that narrative, like a narrative frame. It's too broad and you can't land that plane in an hour. So, the first thing is write an eight to 10 words, what is the specific objective in the time that we have together. And that helps too, in either brainstorm or just discussion, to direct the conversation toward a specific outcome. ASHLEY: Joe, you are very fascinating and I have more questions than our little podcast will hold. But you have a podcast too, where people can hop over and listen to even more of your advice and tidbits. JOE: Yeah, it's called Just Saying and it's on iTunes and can also be found at TheBriefLab.com. What I have in the podcast, one of them is around meeting agenda design - how to specifically design a meeting agenda. A lot of the things that we're talking about here right now drive people crazy. I think it's one of the big issues of our day is how poorly run meetings are. And I think that people will find what you're doing here super important because it just sucks the life of the time out of people like none other. That and email, I suppose. NOEL: Yeah, but nobody ever sends an email around that says, "Could this have been a meeting?" [Laughter] JOE: Please! Make this a meeting. Please! ASHLEY: That's not quite fair because occasionally, someone will say like, "All right. Asynchronous communication for whatever reason really isn't helping us. Let's get together and talk about it in person." I think I will stick up for meetings here and say that occasionally. JOE: You know what's funny is when you teach people to think the skills that you're talking about in your podcast? When people start to do it, what ends up happening is people want to go to your meetings because they stand at such huge contrast to the status quo. I've heard of many cases like, "I love going to this person's meetings because there's a point, it's well run, the conversations are balanced, people listen to each other, we get stuff done." The difference can be super noticeable. NOEL: It's also the thing. There's this sort of joke that one of the worst things you can do to somebody is teach them to recognize bad typography, bad kerning because then they see it everywhere and it just drives them crazy. And I do think that like once you get the hang of what a good meeting looks like, your tolerance for bad meetings drop. JOE: So true. I actually taught this meeting agenda design too. I do a lot of work with Special Forces based in North Carolina and near Fort Bragg, which is the headquarters of U.S. Special Operations Command. If you think that they run really great meetings, it's just as bad as corporate meetings. And so, I was teaching these guys. It's a quick half hour how to run a meeting. And this guy goes, "Thanks. Now, I'm beginning to notice all the bad meetings and why they're so bad. You've just made my life worse." ASHLEY: [Laughs] JOE: It was an unintended consequence. I didn't mean it. NOEL: One thing that we're asking people about these meeting techniques is how they operate differently in remote meetings when people aren't in the same room. How does this sort of straying from the point play out differently if people don't have the full range of communication tools that they might have if they were face to face? JOE: Some of this you're seeing change with things like Zoom where it's becoming pervasive where you can see people. I'm seeing right now, we use it. I see now people use it where you can see people and that helps a lot because I think when you're not seen, it's difficult because it's easier to multitask while you're in a meeting. "Well, nobody's seeing me and I'm going to be doing something else." So, you don't have a person's undivided attention. If it's a strict conference call, I think that sort of the rules of engagement to the setup needs to be even more explicit, like, "During the course of this meeting, please don't look at your cell phone or write notes," because it's very easy for people to get kind of get up and make yourself a cup of coffee. And then giving people a role in that meeting, that they can't just sort of just passively participate where they're doing something. There's a trick which I don’t know if you should do it or you shouldn't. But I've kind of joked with people like in those kinds of settings, one way of doing it is tell people on the call like, "I need somebody to write the meeting notes for this call. I'll tell you who it is at the end." NOEL: Laughs] ASHLEY: Whoa! JOE: Exactly. I'm like, "Wow!" Then I'll get people to listen. NOEL: We do these podcasts audio-only without video and one of the things that I often find myself doing to concentrate is I just close my eyes, which is not something that I would do in a normal meeting. But in this kind of case where I'm very focused on trying to do a certain kind of active listening, I will close my eyes to focus on what is being said. JOE: That's really good. Yeah, that's really good. ASHLEY: I will shout out Zoom for my single favorite remote meeting hack which is that they have an image smoothing feature so that you can be more confident in what you look like. It's like a filter out of old Hollywood and it makes everyone look so young and beautiful. There is literally no excuse not to be on video. JOE: Fabulous. NOEL: It's amazing that it took so long for that feature to be added to video meetings. JOE: That is awesome. ASHLEY: I think you can also put yourself in the tropics or something but that seems frivolous. The idea that I might look like a fetus, I think I like a lot better. [Laughter] JOE: That's awesome. NOEL: Joe, we're asking all of our guests to share their best and worst meeting stories. So, do you have a story of a particularly good or bad meeting that you'd like to share? JOE: I shared a bad one which is the conference call which should have been an email which was a half hour. But the really good one just happened to me this week, actually. I was on Fort Bragg and I was meeting at Womack Medical Center which is a huge hospital on the base. The guy that was organizing the meeting was referred by a person to take one of my courses. He had never taken the class, but he was listening to the podcast and reading the book. And he had a really nice agenda in advance that I read. So, I was reading what the agenda was laid out, beginning to end. He figured out the amount of time it would take to have that discussion with an objective stated. He opened the meeting saying, "OK, we have this much time together. We have a hard stop at four o'clock. These are the things," and he summarized what was going to be covered. And then he kept track of the time. And we finished three minutes early. But he was clearly the ringleader. I think he felt like, because I had written the book and I had talked about it, that he was sort of like being evaluated but he was treating his role as the facilitator or the meeting leader seriously. Like, "I've got four people in the room. How do we best take advantage of the time?" It was a really good meeting. It was excellent. ASHLEY: Awesome. Joe, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. NOEL: Yeah. Joe, thanks. This was great. JOE: Absolute pleasure. I'm really happy that you're doing this. This is a really important thing for people to start feeling a relief from all the painful meetings they have to endure. Hopefully, this will make a huge difference. ASHLEY: Thank you, Joe, and for all of your good work and insight. JOE: Thank you. NOEL: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Meetings Done Right podcast. If you would like to learn more about the Inclusion Meeting Cards, order a set of your own. To find out about other episodes of this podcast, go to MeetingsDoneRight.co. You can also find out more about this podcast by searching for Meetings Done Right wherever you listen to podcasts. Leaving a review on Apple Podcasts will help people find the show. The Inclusion Meeting Cards and the Meetings Done Right podcast are produced by Table XI. Table XI is one of Inc. Magazine's Best Workplaces and a top-rated custom software development company on Clutch.co. Learn more about Table XI at TableXI.com. Meetings Done Right is hosted by Ashley Quinto Powell and Noel Rappin, and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening.