#530: How to Design Meetings that Drive Results, with Matthew Homann

Episode Notes

Transcript

Zack Glaser (00:12): 

Hi, I’m Zack. 

  

Stephanie Everett (00:14): 

And I’m Stephanie. And this is episode 530 of the Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today, Zack’s talking to Matt Homann about meeting, sucking, maybe making ’em not suck, how to make them successful. Yeah. 

  

Zack Glaser (00:27): 

Yeah. Today’s podcast is brought to you by Tabs3, so stick around and you’ll hear my conversation with them pretty shortly. But Stephanie, before that, we have on December 11th, A KPI webinar coming up on. Okay. I’m not the greatest with KPIs. I try to hit my KPIs. I know that, but I am not the person that has read all the KPI books. What’s this going to be? 

  

Stephanie Everett (00:56): 

Yeah, so just because sometimes we still get this question, so there’s no bad questions around here. KPIs are key performance indicators, and it’s just data, right? It’s numbers, but it’s important numbers. The numbers that we want to be using to make decisions and see if we’re moving are firm in the right direction. So it’s the end of the year. This is going to be December. It’s a great time. Everyone should be looking at your business, looking at how you did this year, setting some goals for what you want to do next year. And now’s the time to really think about what numbers should you be looking at each week, each month to see are you on the right track? How are you making decisions? Do you know things Like if somebody stopped paying you tomorrow, how much cash would you have before to operate your business? How long could you run before you ran out? Not that we want that to happen, but that is something you need to know. The idea of cash, your profitability. So we’re going to dig in, we’re going to dig into financial KPIs, we’re going to dig into marketing KPIs, client KPIs, team KPIs, like you name it. If there’s a number, we’re going to talk about it, but we’re going to do it in a way that we make it easy and so you can execute. 

  

Zack Glaser (02:14): 

And so just again, for people a little bit more like me that don’t live in the KPI world and haven’t, what is it? Is it measure what matters? That kind of starts that. I guess that’s the thing. KPIs are what matters. We’re not talking about just measuring arbitrary stuff here. What drives your company is what we’re looking at. 

  

Stephanie Everett (02:37): 

And for some of you, if you’re just getting started on this, we’re going to keep it simple. Maybe five numbers you have to know now because sometimes people get a little excited once you start digging into the data. It’s easy to be like, oh, I could measure all these things. And then you almost overwhelm yourself. You get excited about it. So we’re going to keep it simple to execute for people who are just getting started. But if you’re in the camp of like, no, I’m ready to go deeper, we’re going to do that too. So it’ll make sense. I’m going to make this work. I have a couple months, I still have a little time. 

  

Zack Glaser (03:10): 

Put it all together. Yes. It’s December 11th. 

  

Stephanie Everett (03:13): 

Yes. 

  

Zack Glaser (03:13): 

And it is $49 a person. We will put the link to sign up in all of the show notes and places that you see or hear the podcast here. 

  

Stephanie Everett (03:26): 

Yeah, join us. We’ll make it worth your while. 

  

Zack Glaser (03:28): 

Absolutely. Well now here is my conversation with Tabs3, and then we’ll lead right into my conversation with Matt Homan. 

  

(03:36): 

Hey y’all, it’s Zack, the legal tech advisor here at Lawyers. And today I’ve got Bruce Policky with me from Tabs3, and we are talking about some of the moves that they’ve made recently to make Tabs3 and its Family of Products, it’s suite of products. A little bit more available to the modern attorney. Bruce, thanks for being with me today. 

  

Bruce Policky (03:59): 

Great to be here, Zack. 

  

Zack Glaser (04:01): 

So I think one of the things that’s been on a lot of tabs, three users minds over the last little bit has been getting Tabs3 accessible in the cloud, being able to connect with all the feature sets that Tabs3, Tabs3, the accounting, the billing, and then also now the practice management aspect of the Tabs3 suite. So talk to me a little bit about that. What does this look like? We’ve got Tabs3 cloud now, right? 

  

Bruce Policky (04:34): 

That’s correct. On tab three. Cloud offering does give you that access from anywhere at any time through just any browser connection. So anywhere you’re connected, you would’ve access to the full tab three suite of products. 

  

(04:52): 

We still do offer on-premise. We’re a little unique in that respect, but we do offer the tab three cloud suite as well, so users have a choice. And if you were an existing tab three on-premise user, the transition to the cloud is very simple and it’s all handled by our tech team. And that’s the thing with tab three Cloud. It is something that we manage. So in addition to getting that anywhere, anytime Access, we actually manage all the updates for you as well and keep the software on the latest release. And if there’s anything you’re dealing directly with our robust US-based support team. So it’s a one-stop shop for everything that you have going on, just like it was with the on-prem system. 

  

Zack Glaser (05:42): 

Yeah. Well, so one of the reasons that we’re here specifically today, because Tabs3 cloud has been, y’all kind of made this move over the last year or so with the accounting portion, the billing portion, but now we’ve got Practice Master in that cloud environment as well, right? 

  

Bruce Policky (06:03): 

That’s correct. And there were some changes we had to make to have those features available. Specifically when you start talking about some of the integrations that the system supports and making sure those were all available, still moving forward in our own internal document assembly and document management and our integrations with the other DMS, like a hot doc, I’m sorry, not Hots, NetDocs and all that was functional. The internal capabilities of product were always available. It was that third party interaction with the Microsoft Suite and those types of things that needed some additional work to get that all to work together in that environment. 

  

Zack Glaser (06:47): 

And I think that’s not necessarily something that people think about when they’re questioning whether to go to a, let’s say, web app based cloud environment or an app streaming based cloud environment, which would be here in this scenario, is that to me, what I’ve found with my on-prem software is that if you upload a Microsoft template into the cloud, a lot of times it kind of loses, I’ve always just called it that Microsoft magic, it loses some of its capabilities, but if you’re using a product that is on-prem, you can get a lot more robustness out of that Microsoft integration. And so I know you guys didn’t want to lose that robustness by just saying, well, we’ll just take all this stuff into that web app based cloud. 

  

Bruce Policky (07:38): 

That’s correct. And that’s where some of the delay maybe was what we’ll call it in getting practice management fully available was making sure that functionality that was up to the standards that we would expect in our existing user base would expect. 

  

Zack Glaser (07:53): 

Well, and I’ve gotten some demos of this. I’ve seen the functionality, I’ve kicked the tires a little bit, and it’s there. It’s the same platform, just servet in the cloud. 

  

Bruce Policky (08:05): 

That’s correct. So if you were an existing user, the transition is very simple because it’s going to work and function and look and feel exactly like it does if you’re new to tab three software. I think the thing that we like to state is, again, the robustness of the product. It’s always been designed for lawyers, especially when you talk about some of the financial stuff we do and accounting stuff we do. There are other products out there that are more generic, but this is designed for law firms. And when you talk about just the ability of the product to just work, I mean, that’s what it does. It gets the job done, does it very well, has a lot of flexibility to expand with law firms or meet a lot of their individual demands that they might have as far as billing rates or realizations or comp plans, et cetera. 

  

Zack Glaser (09:02): 

Awesome. Well, if anybody wants to learn more about all of those things and see how they can either move their current Tabs3 installation into the cloud or check out Tabs3 themselves, they can always go to Tabs3.com. Bruce, thanks for being with me and help me work through this. I appreciate it. 

  

Matt Homann (09:21): 

Thanks a lot, Zack. Hi, I’m Matt Homann, founder of Filament, recovering lawyer, and someone who thinks way too much about meetings. 

  

Zack Glaser (09:30): 

Matt, thank you. Thank you for being with me. I had run across, well, you have been in the Lawyerist sphere and frankly lawyer innovation sphere for a tremendous amount of time. But personally, I ran across you and a lot of what your work is around 2020 in the pandemic when people were, I think belatedly getting to how are we thinking about connecting with our offices in a different way? We were having to connect with the people in our office virtually and try to be productive in that way, but now we’re out of the pandemic, but still not necessarily meeting with people productively are we? 

  

Matt Homann (10:18): 

It’s funny you talk about meetings and it’s where we spend so much of our time. It isn’t just how we show up to our clients often. It’s how we get work done. It’s how we engage with our teams, it’s how we collaborate. It’s where culture is fundamentally built in organizations for the most part. And yet we spend so little time thinking about getting better at it. We will ask people who will visit us at Filament to think about the amount of time they’ve spent in their career getting better at Excel, and it’s dozens if not hundreds of hours for some of them thinking about the constant training, the learning new features, et cetera. And I’ll ask that same group of people, oftentimes senior executives that spend 60 or 70% of their time in meeting, how much time they’ve spent getting better at meetings. And it’s almost always a big fat zero. And so not only is there a really unique opportunity to think differently about meetings and how you work, quite frankly, but the ROI on some simple fixes and changes is off the charts, especially when we think about how bad most of our meetings are. 

  

Zack Glaser (11:17): 

I mean, I think we can all at least point to and agree that most of our meetings are bad, but how in the hell do I get better at meetings, Matt? I mean just, well, for me, they’re all virtual, but I mean, they’re just a bunch of people sitting together. We have an agenda, we go through our agenda. People ask questions. What more is there? How could I get better at meetings? 

  

Matt Homann (11:43): 

Well, there are so many pieces. One thing I’ll share with you all to put in the show notes is a meeting design canvas that we built that literally has just some thoughtful things to ask yourself as you plan a meeting. One of those things, and you said this agenda, people believe that agendas are in fact the guide of the meeting, but it is the most optimistic sense you have of what you can all cram into the hour of time that you’ve scheduled. And so an agenda isn’t anything that’s particularly real or meaningful. It’s your best guess. It’s your Christmas list. 

  

Zack Glaser (12:11): 

Yeah, that feels right. Yeah. 

  

Matt Homann (12:13): 

And so one of the things to think about, even on the agenda is that instead of just saying, here’s what I hope we can accomplish, and here’s when is to answer these questions in your invite, we’re gathering to accomplish talk about what you’re gathering for. It’s important for us to do this together and at the same time in person because, and by the end of this meeting, we will. And even if that in person is virtual, so oftentimes we just automatically throw meetings on calendars because we’re really good at making it seem like they’re important. But it is where we procrastinate best. And I know this was true when I was practicing. I said there were times I probably could have dictated a long complex letter, but it was always easier for me to tell my secretary at the time, my admin, Hey, I’d love to meet with them. And you look inside most organizations, and the moment you say, I’ve got to put this on the calendar as a meeting now I’ve bought myself a week or two or three of time before, we can all be together. And so this idea of, it’s important for us to do this together at the same time because is the crucial reason why people should care about your beating and show up. And if you can’t answer those questions, if you find it difficult for any one of those three prompts to be easily answered and compelling for your attendees, then it probably didn’t need to be a meeting. 

  

Zack Glaser (13:32): 

Could have been an email, could have been an email, 

  

Matt Homann (13:34): 

Could have been an asynchronous place to collaborate, could have lived in Slack, could have lived in teams, could have lived. I mean, there’s so many other places. The other thing about meetings is that we oftentimes are not in the same one, even though we’re in the same room. And I found this and we talk about, there’s four categories of meetings. There’s the dreaming meeting, there’s a debating meeting, there’s deciding and there’s doing, and oftentimes people think the meeting they’re in is in a different phase of those things. And it’s even better if you don’t try to mash them together in a Swiss army knife sort of meeting. But the dreaming meeting is brainstorming. It’s come with ideas. The debating meeting has come with a point of view. The deciding meeting may come with a vote, but the deciding meeting may be the boss decides, right? It’s advice and consent. You’ve got to be clear on how you’re deciding the decision you’re making, why the people are doing it, what the consequences are, et cetera. And then finally, the doing meeting is just that. It’s like, Hey, we’re talking about next steps. We’re talking about tactics, we’re talking about status updates, all of those sorts of things. Again, 

  

(14:40): 

Many that could be done inside of an asynchronous workspace. But what I find, especially in my world, we work with lots of cool, interesting clients in the legal space a bit, but most of ’em are outside of it. And so we have really senior leaders in lots of our meetings, and those senior leaders who might be the CEO O of a Fortune 100 company, they don’t always appreciate the thumb they put on the scale when they’re having a conversation with their team members, especially if those team members are three or four or five layers below them in the org chart. 

  

(15:14): 

So that water cooler conversation where the leader’s like, Ooh, how about this? To someone who’s relatively junior to them, that person thinks, oh my goodness, you just redid something and now you’ve changed my entire month of work because I’d been doing something different. And what we’ve learned, and I’ve found this the hard way with my team, is that I didn’t realize that when I would just ask a dreaming question, what about this? Or could we try this? They viewed that because the lens through which they articulate things is they’ve already decided they’re introverts versus extroverts and so on and so forth. And so being clear on even the kind of meeting you’re having and when you shift from one part of that meeting to the next 

  

Zack Glaser (15:58): 

Is crucial. I think having an idea of what you want from the meeting, clarifying what it is for that meeting, what it is we’re going to get. And it sounds like you’re saying you can have multiple goals for the meeting or multiple kind of phases of the meeting if you need to. I think the biggest thing though is thinking about what is it you want from the meeting? I’m going to be honest, I kicked a can down the road five minutes ago. I sent an email that said, Hey, let’s have a meeting on this. I have some questions. Let’s have a meeting on this. And they’re like, could you articulate your questions in an email? And I’m like, ah, let’s meet at two o’clock. I mean, 

  

Matt Homann (16:47): 

And Stephanie right now is pretending to be delayed in travel, which is why you and I are talking. 

  

Zack Glaser (16:52): 

Yes, yes, that’s exactly right. But man, let’s have a meeting because I don’t want to deal with this right now. I don’t want to think through it right now. I want to buy myself some time. I mean, that speaks to me of yeah, I have done that many times. And how do we get out of that culture? Because a lot of times it’s the person at the top or a senior person, somebody that controls that meeting, the ability to have a meeting that says, I do not have the time to think about this right now, so I’m going to set aside the time to think about this with you, and I’m going to take up your time. 

  

Matt Homann (17:31): 

And when they’re the leader, that’s their prerogative and that’s their privilege. I mean, let’s be honest that the challenge that they have as leaders is they have 37 projects or engagements or conversations that look like this one, and it is the default. And it doesn’t mean that they’re procrastinating as much. It means that they just don’t have time for deep thinking about stuff. So where do you find time for deep thinking? You schedule fewer meetings. This is the thing you can’t unsee, Zack, is that an eight person meeting for an hour is an eight hour meeting 

  

(18:06): 

You have by putting that eight person meeting on the calendar to save yourself an extra hour of deep thinking in writing cost your organization an extra six. And so for one of those things is as you start to think about whether it should be a meeting, whether it shouldn’t be, is to start to understand the cost to that, the cost of that kind of challenge to your organization. So if I say for example, that as a leader, and I’ll try and do the math, I’m still pretty close to being a lawyer when it comes to my math skills. At least they’ve atrophied and not improved at all. But if I have a meeting that is really just designed for people to update me on things, the taking turns meeting, if there’s 10 people in that meeting, it’s 10 hours worth of meeting time. Everyone gets their six minutes, they’re sharing, I share six minutes. But if I have one-on-one conversations with each of those people for six minutes. So it’s a 12 minute conversation, six minutes and my six minutes, but 10 of those are dramatically less. It’s two hours worth of time versus 10. And so paying attention to that a little bit. And then also starting to think about how most organizations, and I think about this in corporate America, it takes someone who’s new inside an organization years to be able to spend $5,000 without eight layers of approval, even on a P card. They get their credit card, they get their procurement card, and they get to, but it takes lots of approval. But that same person, their second day in the office can put a million dollars worth of beatings on the calendar. And so I’m not suggesting you need to have those kinds of controls, but if you just start paying attention to what that time cost is for you in an organization, it causes you to think about meetings differently 

  

(19:56): 

because they are, in many ways, if we say that the highest cost in our organizations are people, which is usually true, it certainly was, unless it’s a big capital expense sort of company, we work with a big public utility. The people are not their most expensive thing. They’re nuclear planets, their most expensive thing. I mean, you would think so. Yeah, people are close second, right? 

  

Zack Glaser (20:16): 

Yeah, they’re probably right There. 

  

Matt Homann (20:19): 

And if you’d say, your people are your most expensive cost and the most important investment you make, and they’re spending 50% of their time in meetings that may not need to have happened, think about the millions of dollars the average organization is throwing away. And the other piece of it is just how much of us spend our time thinking about, oh, I finally get to do work after my kids are in bed. Or for me, I’m a super early morning riser because I get three hours every morning with no meetings on the calendar to deep dive into something. And so the gift that you as a leader can not only give your team, but give yourself is to find some ways to shorten, to eliminate, to rethink what it means to meet. Because what you’re getting to exchange isn’t generally more meetings. It’s some time to think about stuff that we never give ourselves. 

  

Zack Glaser (21:12): 

So one of those ways that you’re suggesting kind of take some of the meetings, some of the in-person, let’s make this 15 hours of the company’s time to take that away, is to kind of interact asynchronously on some platforms. Talk to me a little bit about that in a way. Explain it like I’m five. What do you mean by interacting asynchronously? And then what are the ways that we can do that? 

  

Matt Homann (21:41): 

I’ll give a couple examples. One of the things that we do on my team, we have a small team, but we do a check-in every morning. We live in Slack for all of our internal communication, so we don’t email one another. So everything is inside of Slack. Could be teams, could be any of the tool that you choose. But every morning at 7:00 AM a prompt goes out that ask everyone to answer four questions. We call ’em our vitamin Cs. I’m happy to, I’m sharing ’em with your group. But there are four categories in our Vitamin Cs. One is commitments, the things I’ve done, the things I need to do, the things I’ve said, I’ll do. A second one is collaboration. The help I’ll need. The third is curiosity, something I just would love to know. 

  

(22:22): 

And the fourth is celebration. Something nice about someone else on the team. And so we do that check-in every morning. It takes me two minutes to enter it, but I get the pulse and everyone sees it. So I get the pulse of everyone on my team, but they’re checking it in five minutes here versus us scheduling that 30 minute standup. So there’s just one simple way you start to think about not what meetings you have, but what you hope to accomplish. Some of it is writing, some is having a persistent document or a place where a project lives, where the q and a can happen there. It’s effectively, in many ways what our students, our children saw during the pandemic is it’s flipping the classroom we want to do in the room together, things that require us to be together to do, 

  

(23:10): 

And the things that are just updates that, here’s what I’m working on, or here’s my top three things for the week ahead that could all live somewhere where you can review it on your own time. And then once you’re together, you’ve got a chance to dig in and ask the questions, pull on the threads. It doesn’t mean you’re getting rid of meetings completely, although some organizations are really good at that, but at least you’re saying, when we’re together, it’s clear that we are together intentionally to do something versus just to hear other people take their turns talking, 

  

Zack Glaser (23:40): 

Right? Well, because if I’m in a meeting where I’m just hearing other people take their terms, talk, take their turn talking, you would think I’d talked before, I might be telling on myself, I’m probably doing something else. I’m probably answering email. I’m not listening. Anyway, 

  

Matt Homann (23:59): 

You’re answering email, you’re waiting your turn, you’re thinking about what you’re going to say. You’re rarely listening. Well, 

  

Zack Glaser (24:05): 

Right? And the collaboration aspect, oh, that’s what they’re working on. I could potentially help them with that. That can come from that asynchronous check-in as well. So just for people that don’t know exactly, slack is an internal communication platform that lets people talk in what they call threads and channels, and it lets you organize it, but all of this requires a little bit of organization, a little bit of forethought. That’s not always the attorney’s strong suit. And I say that being an attorney that ran an office, that wasn’t my strong suit, was that forethought. What are the things people need to have in place, or what are the first things that people need to think about having in place in order to be able to take advantage of this? Because if there’s not a place to write this down, there’s not a place to go look for it. 

  

Matt Homann (25:03): 

So the bigger challenge, in my view, Zack isn’t find a place to write it down to narrow all the places you’re writing these things down into one place. So there’s no one right now who’s listening, who doesn’t have access to some sort of collaboration tool. It could be as simple as a Google Doc. I mean, it literally could be a Google Doc or project or a team update Google Doc. It doesn’t have to be complex, I think. And the challenge I had, and I always joke about having Idea surplus disorder, which is why I call my newsletter that 

  

(25:34): 

Is that it wasn’t the here’s, I can’t figure out a way to do it. It’s like, ooh, every week I wanted to try a new way of doing it. And knowing your Lawyerist crowd, and frankly, having been one of them, having been that solo lawyer for a long period of time, that was the pain. And so the thing that I would advise is think about the problem you’re going to solve. Find a way to solve it and stick with that way for 90 days and give your team permission to say, stop, you said this. Because when I would come back from meetings and conferences when I was practicing, my secretary would just hate that next Monday when I would walk in the door because it’d be like, oh, here’s all the cool things we’re going to do. And then a month later, we’d be doing a couple of them, and I’d have more cool things. And this isn’t really a meeting tip, but I built this thing where I called it my idea quarantine. And I literally, when I’d had an idea, she’d give me one of these sheets if I didn’t already fill it out. And this was old school. We had the tickler file. 

  

(26:43): 

She had a file drawer with one through 31 folders, and then every month, and she’d put in the tickler file for 90 days. And if it came back in 90 days and it still felt compelling, we’d do it. And I found if I was losing sleepover it, if it kept on coming back, then that was maybe a signal to do it more quickly. But the challenge is finding a simple way to do it and trying it for a while, because there aren’t many scientists who do multi-variable experiments with any success, right? So if we’re going to try a process, let’s use this simple tool we already use to see if the process works. And once a process works and we’ve baked it in, now we start thinking about the tools that we might want to try to make it a little bit better. 

  

Zack Glaser (27:32): 

So we could kind of say, let’s do something simple. Let’s get a Google doc. Let’s start to put these stuff in. But also that you’re admitting what we all kind of have to admit is that a lot of attorneys have just a ton of ideas, a ton of ways that they want to do these things. And so sometimes it’s easier just to go back to the standard of like, well, let’s have a meeting. Let’s talk about it, get everybody in the same room and talk about it. But which may be beneficial when you have your lawyer hat on, but isn’t necessarily beneficial when you have your, I’m running the firm hat on. 

  

Matt Homann (28:12): 

And the other thing our clients have shifted to this, shifted us to this way is there’s those of us who were in age that remember I would get a letter and I’d have a chance to think about it now, I wasn’t necessarily put on smooth jazz and sitting in a Herman Miller chair with a dim lights and a small drink and just deeply thinking about that three page letter, 

  

(28:31): 

But there was such a thing where was a three page letter, and I would dictate it would come back to me. I would have a chance to review it, and they wouldn’t expect an answer for a week. And so one of the things the meeting does is it at least it gives us the illusion that we can solve something in a given slice of time when we’re all together. Yes. Yeah. Even though that may or may not be true, we talk about so much in meetings that you think about a decision meeting or even a debate. There’s this myth of alignment, Zack, where people say, I want to be aligned at the end of this meeting. And then the boss who’s leading the meeting, who’s putting too much of a thumb on a scale because the team’s just going along with what they’re going to say anyway. But the boss’s like, Hey, any objections? Are we all good? Any objections? Right? It’s kind of like at the end of a wedding where the preacher’s asking, Hey, should anyone raise your hand? The problem is that they assume that silence means we’re good sent. 

  

Zack Glaser (29:37): 

Yeah. 

  

Matt Homann (29:37): 

Right. Any objection? Oh, I’m fine. I’m quiet. And then the meeting is after the meeting happened, right? Then everyone goes off and pairs and triads and starts to say, I can’t believe they did that. And so even in those kinds of meetings operating under this framework that silence means no. Right? Do you agree? Yes. Yes, yes, yes. And if you say no, or kind of, I’m not so sure, we unpack it, we see where you are. But then I’m going to say, I know you disagree, Zack, but do you commit, because there’s nothing more damaging to an organization than leadership coming out of a meeting. And then each leader saying, the meeting happened differently and they fought for their team, but they got overruled. And now everyone’s like, oh my goodness. Well, we’re all getting fired, or This is going to be terrible, versus the leadership team saying, this is what we’ve decided, and here’s the story we’re taking out of this meeting to bring to the rest of our team. 

  

Zack Glaser (30:30): 

I like that. I, again, we’re going back to intent. What’s the point of this meeting? The point of this meeting is to have made a decision and go. But I also think that meetings in-person meetings where you say, this is a decision meeting, that time period that, okay, well, we can only find an hour on everybody’s schedule, or we can only find 30 minutes on everybody’s schedule or whatever. Well, now we have 30 minutes to think about this. We have 30 

  

Matt Homann (30:59): 

Minutes. We have 30 minutes to maybe decide, not 30 minutes to start from scratch every time, 

  

Zack Glaser (31:06): 

Right? 

  

Matt Homann (31:08): 

And so when there are big decisions, instead of setting them for an hour meeting into perpetuity for now until the end of time, because Outlook allows us to do that, it’s like we’re going to spend a day on this decision if it’s important enough. 

  

(31:23): 

Because then you can go through the phases. You can think deeply about it, but even when you can’t get to a decision, and there’s lots of reasons why there’s power that’s not in the room. There’s a budgetary choice that you don’t have insight from. There’s a permission you need from someone else. Research to do is that when you’re having those meetings, you need to capture the decisions we made with clarity. So everyone knows these are the decisions we made, but the other piece is you should capture the decisions you need and assign it to people to go get those. Because that’s purgatory in the modern organization is us coming to the same meeting again and again, and not being able to advance this project because each time there’s someone not there, there’s something we don’t know, but we never are clear to say, well, we need to go find out, do we have a million dollars or do we have $2 million? Do we have a thousand dollars? Do we have $2,000? Right? The scale doesn’t matter. And I say, Zack, your job is to get that decision. And then you come back, whether asynchronously or the next time we meet, and now we have it, versus waiting again and again in this kind of waiting for gado sort of world that we end up in lots of these decision making meetings. 

  

Zack Glaser (32:28): 

Oh my God, I’ve been that guy so many times where we come back into a meeting and I mean, when I owned my firm, come back into a meeting and it was Zack, did you contact this person? Yeah, I’ll do that this afternoon. And now I’ve kicked the can down the road again, and we’ve got a meeting on this matter in perpetuity, and I’ve just bought myself another week to deal with this thing, but I’m the boss’, so nobody can tell me that I’m an idiot. Although they’re thinking it, 

  

Matt Homann (33:03): 

Nobody, they’re telling each other that 

  

Zack Glaser (33:04): 

A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And I 

  

Matt Homann (33:06): 

Deserve it. And their spouses and their friends, right? 

  

Zack Glaser (33:09): 

And thinking back on that, I deserved it. But I can think of a ton of times where I came into that meeting and hadn’t done the pre-work on there because we didn’t write it down. The reason it’s not because I was just looking at it and going, I don’t like these people. I don’t want to deal with this. And we go, it’s that we had a meeting, we decided that I was going to do some pre-work, and then we didn’t actually assign it to me in any tangible form. 

  

Matt Homann (33:41): 

The pre-work is important in meeting. There’s a handful of ways to think about it. One of the ways is like what are the carrots and the sticks? So when those assignments are, and Zack, if you don’t do this, are we canceling? Are we canceling this meeting? Are we adding some teeth to it? The other rule that I really like is that when you assign pre-work in meetings to multiple people, you ask them at the beginning, and there can be a commitment mechanism at the end of a Google doc, put a little checkbox and everyone read this. I do a message to my team every other week, and I has a little framework that I’ve built, but there’s a little box in it. We use Notion as our kind of shared space where everyone checks the box that they read it. But in those meetings, if you build the commitment mechanism, I need you to read this document, and then someone rolls in and says, oh, just catch me up. You’ve now lost. All of the ones who did the pre-work are just minimized. And they’re, well, I don’t need to do pre-work if you’re not doing pre-work. And so one of the rules I like is that if you didn’t do the pre-work, you can’t talk about that part of the meeting. 

  

Zack Glaser (34:48): 

So I would be there as the attorney in my office meeting on a matter, and I haven’t done the pre-work and I can’t talk, which I think is the appropriate That’s right. I agree with you. That’s correct. 

  

Matt Homann (35:09): 

But it requires effectively your team to say, thank committed this. Are we going to push this meeting? You’re the boss. We’ll do what you need and want. But we are being less effective as the team members that you have hired and are paying for and expect because of these things. And there’s ways to soften the blow a little bit. But I always think about when we look at the time that we spend in meetings and the cost of that time, it’s shocking to me that we’re not more intentional about them on a regular basis. 

  

Zack Glaser (35:42): 

Yeah. Well, I’ll give you an example. Oh, go ahead. Just kind of thinking about that specific scenario. Nobody’s actually in my office going to tell me that I can’t talk in the meeting, but now they get way to approach it. They get away to be ha about it and kind of slap me on the wrist some without. They’re given an entry into getting onto me for that, at the very least. And I’m the boss, 

  

Matt Homann (36:07): 

And there’s a language, and this will sound silly, but this is on our meeting canvas, and it is really powerful as we talk about in every meeting when you’re planning it, that there will show up for creatures. There’ll be elephant zombies, squirrels, and porcupines. And so the elephant in the room is a term we’ve all heard. It’s the thing we dare not talk about. It’s the challenge. We’re all nervous about whatever it is, but the elephant in the room, we all have heard. But then the other ones are the squirrels are the things that distract us, 

  

(36:37): 

Right? Say, Ooh, shiny. Shiny. The zombies are the issues we have never seem to kill. They come back again and again, I’ve seen them. And the porcupines are the things that are prickly. They might be hard to talk about, they might be individual, but the magic isn’t that the creatures are these great names. It’s that you’ve now given them language. So to use your example, Zack, that’s the third time you’ve brought that zombie into this meeting. We should schedule a deep dive time to kill it once and for all, or, Hey, boss, that sounds like a squirrel. It wasn’t on the agenda. The plan for this meeting that you’ve discussed, can we put that in the cage and see if we’ve got time to come back to it? But what we found is that even saying those words, and almost by definition each of them would be hard to discuss, especially as an underling in a hierarchical organization. People raise their hand like, oh, I think this is a squirrel. Or I think this is a zombie. Right? The names make it, you’ve given language to something that is otherwise hard to share. So to the same point about you’re not keeping the homework covenants, we’ve agreed to this now it’s okay, but you get three strikes and the four strike you give us a day off or a four strike is Friday afternoons. Build some of that in that is fun and interesting. It’s the same reason why I love the idea of the proverbial curse jar in a meeting, but instead of when you drop the F-bomb, it’s when someone says, we tried that before and it didn’t work. 

  

Zack Glaser (38:13): 

The should on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

  

Matt Homann (38:15): 

Gotcha. Put five bucks in and gamifying just some of these little things that drive you crazy, makes them easier to talk about and call out when the behaviors aren’t the ones that you expect and have agreed upon. 

  

Zack Glaser (38:30): 

I think that’s the key there is that you have to remember that these are the things that you’ve agreed upon. And so every 

  

Matt Homann (38:42): 

That we’ve agreed 

  

Zack Glaser (38:42): 

Upon, and so everybody should be able to hold everybody accountable for that, just like they should be able to hold everybody in the organization accountable for the values of the organization. But we as a group agreed upon these standards, these ways of working. And so it doesn’t matter who it is that’s not abiding by it, it shouldn’t, 

  

Matt Homann (39:04): 

Right? I’ll give you another, a relatively simple hack. And the thing I love about our work, so in rooms of super smart people, helping them think about things, we don’t have to be the experts in their industry as much as we need to be good at helping them engage. And we were helping a big client here in town. We did a meeting design summit. So we did three days with them about, because they had this massive meeting that was thousands of people, hour for the executive leadership. It happened, nearly everyone dialed in. The cost of that meeting was in the millions of dollars a year. And we did that. And then we said, let’s take a look at some other recurring meetings. And there was a status meeting they had that was every Monday morning, maybe 15 to 20 people. Not gigantic, but it was a taking turns meeting. It was, here’s what I’m doing, here’s what I’m doing. And so we found a way with a mix of asynchronous work and a common framework and some norms to shrink it to 45 minutes. I was like, Ooh. So that’s 450 minutes a week that we’re saving this team, right? 45. And what they did is all of a sudden I get these looks on my face like, oh, we can be done earlier. We can start later, is they said, well, this meeting will just get replaced with other meetings with people we don’t like as much. I like this. And so because they were a high performing team, and so what we did is we said, okay, let’s take the 90 minutes. It’ll still look like that 90 minute block on your calendars, but here’s how they reimagined it, which I love. We follow this model internally is of from that nine to 10 30, Monday morning meeting, nine to nine 15 is optional social time. 

  

Zack Glaser (40:48): 

Okay, 

  

Matt Homann (40:48): 

Show up, chit chat, have your coffee, talk about the weekend, talk about your football team. Shoot the breeze. But if you’re coming in hot or you don’t want to deal with that nine 15, the meeting starts. And so at nine to nine 15, then our team, we’re mostly there, but if someone rolls in five minutes late, no big deal, 

  

Zack Glaser (41:11): 

Fine. 

  

Matt Homann (41:13): 

From nine 15 to 10, it’s effectively that 45 minute block. It is things I need help with. There’s a bit of, there’s a little trivial sort of question for people to connect. There’s a chance to give feedback to one another, which we use a lot, a few updates kind of status of the company updates where everyone needs to be in the room to hear and engage, not just the, and here’s our next three meetings sort of thing. But the most important part for them and for us is that once that core of the meeting is done, and that core of the meeting follows the same framework so you can hand off facilitation to different people, each week is the last 30 minutes that are left on that calendar. People just agree to be in the same room at the same time with their laptops. And so what happens then is all of those kind of, Hey, do you got five minutes? Can I grab you for a few minutes? The things otherwise would cause you to punt to two weeks out whenever one’s back together in the room. And so they still have the 90 minutes, but they’re able to knock off so many small little tasks and questions and sidebars that they couldn’t do otherwise. And that works really well. Virtually in the same vein, you just have to have an air traffic controller who’s throwing people into breakout rooms and zoom or teams Absolutely. Or whatever. 

  

Zack Glaser (42:30): 

Absolutely. We do that all the time with the lab. Yeah, I think that’s wonderful. So thinking about extrapolating out of getting back time from a meeting and then what does that get filled with? One of the ideas theoretically is that we’re focusing a little bit more in the time that we’re supposed to focus a little bit more, and that hopefully will make our meetings a little bit more effective. I was going through your idea surplus disorder.com, your blog, your weekly newsletter, and I saw this, the most recent one has Grand Canyon Focus. I wanted to touch on that. This may be way too big for the end of the podcast here, but the idea of Grand Canyon Focus was fascinating to me. Honestly. I was reading it and I’m like, oh, crap, I can’t do that right now. I can’t because I’m going to go into major focus here. Would you mind explaining that a little bit? 

  

Matt Homann (43:34): 

Yeah. And it’s not my idea, the newsletter is me sharing all the cool ideas that I find the previous week, but the reason I put that at the top, the really hit me is that the idea is that there are moments in your life where you are extraordinarily focused and Grand Canyon Focus isn’t looking at something super deep or looking at something super wide. The thought is, and maybe this might not even be the snippet that I shared, is if you’re on the edge of the Grand Canyon, you are really focused on not falling into it. Everything. All your senses are attuned to one thing, You’re not worrying about what’s for dinner that night. You’re not thinking about the three client calls to change. And then the point of the article was really that whether you’re able to achieve that kind of focus or not, you could if you wanted to With just a little bit of intention to say, and again, so this is language, right? Whatever you’d want to call it, you could say to your team, Hey, this is Grand Canyon. Focus for me for this hour. I’m putting it on my calendar. This is me on the precipice of accomplishing something big, of thinking deeply, no, this isn’t one of those. Stop by my office, ping me on Slack, et cetera. There’s a moment that I’m thinking about this in this way. And so when I shared that it wasn’t just the fact that I’m more capable of focus than sometimes I think I’m, because I liked that visualization totally brought me into that moment. 

  

Zack Glaser (45:05): 

Yes, same here. 

  

Matt Homann (45:06): 

Totally brought me, it totally brought me to that moment. But it also like, here’s some language to use that you can’t put on every open block on your calendar Grand Canyon Focus. No one would believe that, oh, another 45 minutes, here’s 15 minutes of Grand Canyon focus. I don’t have the energy for that. Yeah, I don’t have the energy, but here’s what it takes. The other piece that isn’t so much in the article, but that I think a lot about is that the only way you can deeply focus is by doing a little prep work to deeply focus whether it’s the same spot you work from, whether it’s the apps that are turned off, et cetera. And so just saying, I’m going to focus is a lot different unless you do the warmup. 

  

Zack Glaser (45:45): 

Yeah, I like that. Yeah, I’d like getting that out of this is okay, well, we do deep focus with intentionality. We don’t stumble across deep focus. And so in this conversation, I like to think about, okay, well, if I get some time back from a meeting, but I can keep that on my calendar and I can do some deep focus there, some intentional deep focus. I treat it like a meeting with myself almost. 

  

Matt Homann (46:15): 

Right? And to that point, I think about those lawyers who are listening to this who have staff and team members 

  

(46:22): 

Is if you are the boss, put that 90 minute chunk of time and call it a meeting, throw it on there, and then when your team gathers and you say, Hey, what’s the top of mind thing for you that feels like you’ve been kicking the can down the road, or you just haven’t had a chance to do some deep work? Oh, here’s mine. Here’s mine. Okay, well, the gift I’m giving you is these 90 minutes, we’re all going to work on that one thing and come back with five minutes left in that 90 minute slot and just talk about the progress you’ve made. Because we trust our team members to do their work, but we don’t always intentionally give them the time to do it in the way that we hope that they would. 

  

Zack Glaser (46:59): 

That makes a lot of sense to me because I know, again, running my firm, my team members would do the thing that is on fire or just is the lowest hanging the thing that’s right there that they know they have to do, but they’ll don’t allow themselves time to think deeply because they feel like they have to be on all the time. That if I walk out of my office and look at them, they can’t be sitting there leaned back thinking, which is, honestly, I do that a lot, but in that scenario, I was the boss. I could kick back and think deeply about a case and they should be able to too. I love that scheduling that and saying, here is permission to think a little bit deeply. 

  

Matt Homann (47:48): 

One of the thing that I’d add to the mix is that we oftentimes are afraid or our teams are afraid of failure. We had a client say this, it’s one of the more profound things that I’ve ever heard a client tell us in a room. She says to her team, she says, we’re not going to call it failure anymore. We’re going to call it tuition. She says, I’m willing, and we should be willing to pay tuition to learn a lesson, but we’re not going to pay to take the same class twice. And that second piece was so powerful because you saw our team, and these are all senior high performing executives, we’re all looking around like, Ooh, I get to fail. But if I don’t share that or I try something without asking others what lessons they’ve learned, we’re all in trouble. I think about how we can make, especially with our teams failure, smaller, there’s some delegation, non-decision making hacks that are fairly easy to implement, but one in particular is to think in this idea of experiments. What are experiments we can try? 

  

(48:47): 

How Do those experiments turn into pilots? How do those pilots turn into projects? And so on and so forth. And the idea behind an experiment is that it’s small enough that it takes a modicum of permission and very little money to try. And then I think about this, and I wrote about this back when I was writing the non-billable hour blog 20 plus years ago, is then how do you engage with your clients to say, what experiments would you suggest that we do? And then how do you get those clients like, Hey, this is our innovation room. These are all the experiments we’re trying. We’d love your input. Here’s the one where we’re redesigning our bill. Here’s the one where we’re rethinking the way that we do X, Y, or Z, and you can’t do a thousand of them at once. But those things now, that’s where the meetings are worth The time. 

  

(49:35): 

Let’s think about experiments. What’s it going to take for us to do this? Let’s plan this out. Let’s try some things. And now what you’re doing is that’s where the time can come that we’ve been hopefully giving back through some of these other models. 

  

Zack Glaser (49:50): 

Yeah, that resonates. That really resonates. I like that a lot. Well, Matt, unfortunately, we’ve only got a certain amount of time for this meeting, so we’ve got to wrap up here. If people want to learn more about your ideas, they can obviously go to idea surplus disorder.com. I love the name of that. By the way. You’ve got the company Filament. They can find you on LinkedIn. Where else could they connect with you? 

  

Matt Homann (50:24): 

It used to be Twitter. Now it’s just a of just Terribleness. 

  

Zack Glaser (50:30): 

Yes, 

  

Matt Homann (50:31): 

It’s the newsletter. It’s meet filament.com. It’s LinkedIn, and then I’m around, I live here in St. Louis. We’ve got our own 10,000 square foot space where people come to us for meetings, so we design, we facilitate meetings all without PowerPoint, which is fun. We have an illustrator who draws live in every session, so law firm retreats. We’ll do that kind of stuff on the road, but we do a bunch of it here. But it’s really the challenge for when I think about how people connect with me is just reach out and ask my email. We can share the email inside of the the show notes as well. I’m happy to help, even though I’m not practicing law anymore. The beginning of my career was helping first myself and other lawyers kind of think differently about practice, and I have such a soft spot for the work that lawyers do because it is so freaking important and we make it too hard on ourselves to do all the time. The stress of helping people through their hardest time in life is enough to also add all the self-imposed challenges we throw in front of ourselves. So if I’m ever able to be helpful to anyone, I would love to do so. 

  

Zack Glaser (51:36): 

I appreciate that. I appreciate that. Well, I’d also love to hear anybody’s thoughts on their meetings or ways that they do meetings differently or better, or ideas or what they think about what we’ve talked about in the wherever you find this podcast. Matt, once again, I really appreciate your time. Thank you for being with me. 

  

Matt Homann (51:59): 

Thank you, Zack. 

 

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