Mamie Kanfer Stewart and Tai Tsao: Episode 75

Transcript

[0:00:25] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with Mamie Kanfer Stewart and Tai Tsao, co-authors of the book Momentum. Bad meetings are the worst, they’re a waste of time and they feel like a distraction from real work. But thankfully, Mamie and Tai are on a mission to make meetings more effective, meaningful and enjoyable. Since 2013, they’ve offered coaching, training and even developed mobile apps to help teams support more effective meetings. In this episode, you’re going to get their blueprint for successful meetings, including actionable tips that you can immediately implement with your team. Now, here is our conversation with Mamie and Tai.

[0:01:35] MKS: About four years ago, I started the company Meeteor and we actually started, not with meetings as our focus but with a strategy tool for project management, which if you’re giving yourself a blank stare right now, that’s what I was getting from everybody who I talked to and I said, “I’m building a product and trying to help teams with more effective strategy for their project management”. In the process of trying to figure out how to sell this tool, I was speaking to some consultants and one of them said to me, “This is really interesting and I see how it’s valuable but this little meetings thing that you’re doing, that’s really what people need help with. I couldn’t sell your strategy to all my clients but I could totally sell them a meeting’s tool because their meetings are terrible.” That was like a wakeup call for me because I had never realized how bad meetings were until I started talking to people about meetings. And when I would go to networking events or just kind of in my daily life talking to people about what I was doing and I say I’m working on tools and trainings to help people have more effective meetings. Instantly, everybody had a story to tell me of a bad meeting they attended at least that week, if not that day. It was so clear that this was a problem that needed help with, that people needed a solution for and I felt like, “I know exactly what I got to do here.” We shifted Meteor to focus 100% on helping people have productive meetings.

[0:03:01] Charlie Hoehn: That’s great.

[0:03:02] MKS: Yeah, from that came our blog and eventually our book.

[0:03:05] Charlie Hoehn: Excellent. Before we get into the book, let’s talk about why meetings are so bad. I mean, I’m pretty fortunate that I don’t have to go to too many meetings but what makes them so awful and why is it such a big deal across the board with so many? Why are there so many bad meetings?

[0:03:26] MKS: Well, it’s like for leaders, if you work in the bigger company or small companies. Most of your time are spent in back to back meetings. That’s what we heard from a lot of our customers. Sometimes it’s not that meetings are bed, it’s like, the meetings, how people run meetings are, if they’re not productive, they’re wasteful, you just invite everyone to the meeting instead of make sure that people who come to the meetings are really the people you want them to be there or critical to the success of the meeting. You just gather people in the room but you really don’t know what you want to achieve at the end. Without like a purpose, without a clear objective for your meetings, you just waste everyone’s time and people feel like, meetings are taking me away from my real work so if I spent one hour in meetings, I took away one hour for me to actually focus on my own work. That’s one of the biggest pain points we heard from our clients.

[0:04:26] Charlie Hoehn: It’s really – whoever is leading the meeting, they think they’re doing a service to the company by including all these people but really, they’re hurting the productivity of the company because they’re pulling everybody away from their work, that seems to be the biggest problem.

[0:04:44] TT: It’s interesting you said that because we don’t think it’s just the meeting leader’s problem, it’s part of your company culture. If your company culture is encouraging people to participate in meetings, and then we heard from some of our clients, If I’m not invited to a meeting, maybe that means I’m not important. That, fears of missing out, that kind of culture, it brings forth this kind of behavior. But everyone could do it differently, about meetings, yeah.

[0:05:15] MKS: Picking up on that, many times we don’t allow ourselves to say no to meetings or we’re not in a culture in which you can turn down going to a meeting if you were to say, “I don’t want to go to that meeting because I have something else that’s more important”, that’s just not acceptable. You have to kind of go to meetings if you’re invited and secondly, if the only way you can be informed or be part of the decision making process is to be in a meeting then of course you want to be in every single meeting and you want to invite everybody to every meeting so that people can stay aligned and they know what’s going on and you got their input. Which is a whole part of your culture, that’s not just one meeting leader. That’s what can change, is you don’t actually need to be in meetings to know what’s going on, you don’t need to be in meetings to give input or be part of the decision making process if you take the right steps and create the right culture and have the right processes and tools to support good communication practices in other ways.

[0:06:06] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, let’s talk about these things. Your book, Momentum. I totally understand why you wrote it and I understand the need for it but if you could sort of distill all of the wisdom contained in the book and if you had to choose the most unique or useful idea that listeners can remember for the rest of this year, what would you pick?

[0:06:35] MKS: The one thing that we tell people, before you ever go into a meeting, is to know exactly what it is that you want to accomplish and a meeting is not just a planned meeting where you have an agenda hopefully beforehand, a meeting is anytime that two people get together to where more people get together and kind of connecting in real time using their voices, right? Not chat or email or texting or things like that. If you walk down the hallway and grab a colleague or you call up a colleague on the phone, that’s a meeting. Even though it’s an emergent or kind of impromptu meeting, you should know exactly what it is that you want to get out of that before you pick up the phone. Same thing with a meeting.

[0:07:13] Charlie Hoehn: Even if I turn my chair and I spin and talk to the guy sitting next to me is that that’s a meeting?

[0:07:21] MKS: For us, we consider that a meeting.

[0:07:23] Charlie Hoehn: Wow, okay, that is a unique definition and I would have to say I’d agree with you. Wow, I’m going to have to really reign in my self-control then. Okay, fair enough. Before I turn and talk to this person, before I gather people, I have to think in my head what exactly do I want to accomplish by talking to this person, right? Instead of just blurting things out.

[0:07:52] MKS: Exactly. When you know exactly what it is that you want to accomplish. Do you need advice? And if you do need advice, what advice is it that you need? If you need feedback or you need a decision to be made, whatever it is. Once you know exactly what it is, you can then shape your conversation appropriately, know exactly who you should be talking to because you might discover, as you’ve heard from some of our colleagues and from our clients that you start a conversation and you realize, I’m talking to the wrong person about this. Or “I actually didn’t need to talk to you at all, I just needed to sit and think for a minute and I could figure it out on my own”. When you know exactly what it is that you want to accomplish, you can figure out, “Is a meeting the right next step? Is this person the right person to be engaging?” And then shape the time you have with them to accomplish that objective as fast as possible.

[0:08:41] Charlie Hoehn: Mamie and Tai, I want to play a little bit of devil’s advocate here, right? We have a guy that works with us, I won’t name his name but he’ll know it if he hears this. Who loves to talk to everybody and sometimes it gets carried away but sometimes, those conversations are really fun and enjoyable. They kind of lift up each other’s spirits. It’s more spontaneous in nature when he does this. What would you say to him that if his goal really is to make a deeper connection with his coworkers and to have a sense of camaraderie and fun when he starts those conversations but the other people aren’t necessarily in that modality. What would your advise to him?

[0:09:30] TT: I think this is a really good question because I think one of his goals, like you said is to connect with people and sometimes it’s just whether it’s the right timing and right moment to do this thing and as a recipient of this kind of interruption, how could you do differently? If you’re in a zone, you’re trying to figure out something, you’re in deep diving in your work and you don’t want to be interrupted, there are a couple of different ways you can do it. You can signal them that I’m in the zone, I want to focus or you just tell them, “Can we pick up the conversation later on? In an hour, or like wait for us for a coffee check”, or something like that. If you feel like your work is interrupted by other people.

[0:10:16] MKS: You’ll see in our book, we talk about the six reasons to have a meeting and one of them is to connect, it’s absolutely a legitimate thing to just say, “I just want to build relationships with my people, with my team internally or with customers or potential customers externally. I want to have a meeting where we just get together and chat.” Or, “I want to interrupt somebody and see if they want to walk down the hall with me to refill our coffee cup.” Totally fine to have meetings around connection. You just, as I was saying, want to make sure that it’s the right time for that kind of interaction so that you’re not interrupting someone else’s important work.

[0:10:50] Charlie Hoehn: Beautiful, I love it. How many different types of meetings are there?

[0:10:55] MKS: There are six reasons to have a meeting, is how we describe them. There are probably lots of different types of meetings which we don’t really get into in the book but the reasons, we go through them, let’s see if I can name them off the top of my head here. So we just talked about connecting which is really about building relationships with people. Brain storming or idea [inaudible] where you’re coming up with lists or information or ideas and kind of generating content. Producing, in which you’re kind of, more like a working session where you’re actually digging into some material together. Planning, which could be planning out tasks or work plans or strategies. Decision making, where you are making a decision and aligning. Where you’re kind of trying to make sense of information and get buy in and come together so that everybody leaves on the same page. Which I want to be really clear is different from presenting. Presenting information is not a good reason to have a meeting. The only reason you want to have a presenting type of meeting is if the information you’re sharing is really complicated, which gets back to making sure everyone has the same understanding of it. Or you really need buy in from the people. You want to make sure that they’re hearing it from you with the energy that you can share that you couldn’t otherwise kind of communicate with, that you're answering their questions and you’re really engaging them in that kind of leading format and it’s not just one way. I could have just sent you an email with this.

[0:12:23] Charlie Hoehn: Now, I know the goal of your book is not this but I think if we’re not to have presenting meetings, does that mean, does school technically qualify as presenting meetings?

[0:12:36] MKS: This is so interesting. My kids are in a Montessori school. There’s not a whole lot of presenting that happens because I don’t think that a lot of learning, I don’t think presenting is the best way for everyone to learn. For some people, it’s great. Some people are auditory learners. They need to kind of see what’s on the screen, hear what’s being said and it totally soaks in. For many others, they need to read the content or they need to experience it firsthand. There’s so many different ways that people learn. Schools are kind of hard because they’re designed for the masses. You know, I’m not in education so I’m not an expert on any of this.

[0:13:15] Charlie Hoehn: I know, I’m not asking you to dig in and get controversial about something that doesn’t need to be. I’m just curious. Stuff like that, it falls into the category of a meeting which I guess it does. Yeah, I won’t push you any further on that but I appreciate you answering it. Let’s talk about these different types of meetings and what the perfect meeting would be under the momentum formula that you lay out in the book. Let’s talk about a brain storming meeting. I’m going to guess, the goal of this is we want to come up with as many ideas as possible for this particular project that we’re working on. Because I’ve read studies on, that Stanford did, that brainstorming meetings are best to be had while moving around, while having some motion in place and having a safe space where anything can be presented and ideas are not going to be criticized. That’s all I know. What else do I need to add in to this? How do I make this meeting perfect?

[0:14:21] TT: So, backtrack a little bit. When you decide you want to hold a brainstorming meeting, like maybe mention earlier as what do you want to accomplish at the end. What I’m hearing from you is you want to have – generate maybe a list of potential ideas for this project on specific topic. We call that ‘desired outcome’. If you know, like, the desired outcome is tangible or something concrete that you achieve it, at the end. So you can measure the success, whether you achieve outcome at the end of the meeting. That’s before you call this meeting. We think meeting is not a onetime event. It’s a cycle. You have, before, during, after activities. In the before framework, you think about what’s the desired outcome and who should be participating in this meeting. Then, what are the norms that you should follow in this meeting? Like you said, we want to allow people to generate as much ideas, as possible. That could be different from like – “We only want tangible ideas, actionable ideas”, that will result in really different conversations or, “We want to defer judgment”, that will be a norm that we want to encourage people to embrace in this meeting when a meeting leader is setup a meeting.

[0:15:36] MKS: To pick up what Tai was saying, if you have a brainstorming meeting, you want to make sure that the desired outcome aligns with what success looks like. If people walk into the room thinking this is going to be a decision making meeting because you’re generating ideas and they think at the end you’re going to decide on one and then you don’t, people will be very frustrated when they leave the meeting. You want them to know the outcome of this meeting is just to have that list of ideas. Maybe even put a number on it. “We want at least 20 ideas.” Different than “We want three good ideas”, right? Because now you actually are having, somewhat of, a decision making meeting at the end where you’re narrowing down from your list of generated ideas to three that are going to move forward to the next stage. Being super clear about that outcome is the first thing.

[0:16:21] Charlie Hoehn: I love that.

[0:16:22] MKS: Then to pick up again on norms, which are just guidelines for the conversation, it’s about setting people’s expectations. If you want to create a safe space for ‘all ideas are good ideas’, you need to say that, so write it down. Have those things listed out where it says, “All ideas are good ideas.” Number two, “No judgment”, number three, “Think big and think small”. Number four, “Think without resource constraints.” Super different than if you’re telling people, “Our norms are – we only want ideas that are within our budget. We only want ideas that are within our existing capacity to accomplish.” If you don’t give people those guidelines, you can end up with spaces of judgment where some people who are naturally more ‘big picture, wild ideas’ people are frustrated by those who are thinking really small and you have the people who are thinking like that idea is impossible, we could never do that. You know, frustrated by the people who are thinking big. You want to give those parameters so that again, people have expectations over what’s appropriate and you can not only have a successful meeting but everybody will walk away feeling good about the conversation that they had.

[0:17:30] Charlie Hoehn: I love that. You just described, actually my most common personal gripe with meetings is that scenario that unfolds in brain storming sessions and I think it’s because those expectations aren’t set and the parameters aren’t really well defined. That’s really helpful so thank you. Author Hour is sponsored by Book in a Box. For anyone who has a great idea for a book but doesn’t have the time or patience to sit down and type it out, Book in a Box has created a new way to help you painlessly publish your book. Instead of sitting at a computer and typing for a year, hoping everything works out, Book in a Box takes you through a structured interview process that gets your ideas out of your head and into a book in just a few months. To learn more, head over to bookinabox.com and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. Don’t let another year go by where you put off writing your book. Let’s talk about, and just to be clear, of all the meetings you mentioned and the format we need to follow when we have meetings, all of that is laid out in the book. Is it laid out individually, for each type of meeting< or do you give the same guidelines for every type of meeting?

[0:18:57] TT: So Charlie I want to go back a little bit to the previous example because we talked about before the meeting, you set those expectations upfront and in the meeting you reference those things. It’s not like you just set it and send it in the email and you just run the meeting with now those guidelines and those helpful resources.

[0:19:16] Charlie Hoehn: Oh you have to reaffirm it, yeah.

[0:19:18] TT: Yes, so to reinforce those behaviors in the meeting and that will also - those desired outcomes were, your meeting norms will help you design what activities you need in the meeting and to maximize engagement, to make sure everyone’s voice is heard and make sure that no matter if you’re an extrovert or introvert, you can thrive in this meeting and contribute your ideas. So that’s during the meeting activities. Mamie, something to add? And then after the meeting, you need to make sure that when you have that list of five ideas or 10 ideas, what’s next with it? Who’s going to do what after a certain period of time, what’s the next step for this conversation? What are the decision - agreement made within this team. So those are really crucial piece, when you’re trying to implement whatever you discussed in the meeting.

[0:20:11] Charlie Hoehn: What you’re talking about is bringing up another thing that I am realizing is a gap in some of the meetings I’ve been in which is what do you do at the end to confirm whether the meeting has been successful or not? Because it feels like sometimes meetings are just like, “All right, good, all in the same page. See you later”, and there’s not a feeling of we’ve gotten to the finish line or we’ve really accomplished something here. How do you recommend the leader of the meeting make that moment clear?

[0:20:49] MKS: Well so first off, it doesn’t actually have to be the leader of the meeting. Anyone can do that in the meeting. And this is to answer your earlier question about how is the book designed. So the way the book is laid out is the first couple of chapters around what are the problems with meetings and the unintended consequences of having really bad meetings and then the next set of chapters are all meeting practices. For example, ‘desired outcome’ is one chapter. Norms is one chapter and in each chapter, we talk about what you can do before, during and after the meeting related to that subject and number two, how to do it if you’re the meeting leader or if you’re a meeting participant, because we believe that everyone has a responsibility to make the meeting successful. You can’t just rely on the meeting leader. So when it comes to what we call the wrap up or using the last couple of minutes of your meeting to make sure that everyone actually is aligned on the next steps and you’re not, “Okay great. We’re all in agreement”, and then nobody actually knows what’s decided or nobody knows who’s doing the next step because, “Oh we should…” no, we should really follow up on that like who is actually going to do that if you say ,“We are going to do that.” So anyone at the end of the meeting can say, “All right just as we’re wrapping up can we just do a quick recap of what the next steps are?” and ask the group. “What is that we are going to do”, and ask, if someone says, “Okay so we’re going to follow up”. “Okay so who’s going to follow up and when should that happen?” Be really, really specific. It’s great if the leader does it but it doesn’t have to be.

[0:22:15] Charlie Hoehn: Now, I am trying to remember all of this right? Because I really do want to bring this to each meeting. Do you find meeting organizers and organizations are bringing your book or wanting to use your book during the meeting or do they write them all in a note card so they remember? How do you remember all of this stuff? What’s the best way to casually bring it into a meeting?

[0:22:40] MKS: Well you can do a couple of things. So one you can plan your thoughtful agenda. We have meeting agenda templates that you can use. We also have a software right now that you can use to help you plan your agenda that includes all of these components like norms and pre-work and such and helps you take notes and clarify those notes into tasks, decisions and learnings. So you could use the software. You could have an agenda that you’ve wrote.

[0:23:04] Charlie Hoehn: Where’s the software?

[0:23:05] MKS: On our website, meeteor.com.

[0:23:08] Charlie Hoehn: Great.

[0:23:09] MKS: You can also use a template. So you can create your own or you can use one of ours. That is an agenda template or a note taking template and use that as a reminder. We always say just to meeting facilitators that they write down on the top some notes for themselves in the meeting. And we also have postcards. They are a little cheat-cheat postcards to remind you of some of these things. So we’ll put those up on our website if you want to get them.

[0:23:37] TT: And we also have a physical notebook that mark the – whether it’s a note, task, decision or learning because a lot of people told us they still like handwritten notes. So if you want to write handwritten notes, you can write on the notebook and categorize them. So that’s another way. You don’t need to hold all the information in your head. You just want to focus on the content of the meeting.

[0:24:01] MKS: But really the most important thing is, you don’t have to do everything, right? Meetings are big events. There is a lot of different pieces. So you don’t have to start with the, “Oh my gosh I have to do a desired outcome and I have to have norms and I have to have pre-work and I have to facilitate engagement and I have to do a wrap up”, and just pick the thing that you think is going to be the most helpful to your meeting. We suggest that would be the desired outcome if you are getting started or the wrap up if you are already pretty good about knowing what your meetings are going to accomplish. But start with one and then move to the next one and then move to the next one and overtime, they’ll become like second nature to you and it won’t be a thing that you have to think about anymore. It will just be a thing you do. You always enter meetings with a wrap up. You always start your meetings with a check in. You always write a desired outcome before you get together with people.

[0:24:46] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, this is great. So I am looking at your site which is Meeteor with two E’s at the beginning. So M-E-E-T-E-O-R, and you’ve got all sorts of products, apps, that people can use to run effective meetings. So this is fantastic. So let’s talk about some of the transformations that you’ve seen with your clients that you’ve worked with. Tell us a story about someone who got a lot out of these ideas?

[0:25:22] TT: So one of our customers, well one of our workshop participants, we have two stories, we’re going to share. So one of our workshop participants, when we teach these practices, she told us that she goes to weekly staff meeting every week where people are just spending time there and doesn’t really know what to do there but this meeting is on her calendar. So she goes there every week. But if she knows that we talk about the six different purpose of meetings. And she understands that if the purpose of my alignment weekly team meeting is to connect, how do we design this differently, not just presenting what we are doing each week and no interaction in between but if we like to connect, we can design different activities to connect with each other. To know more about each other’s lives, each other’s preferences and what they learn. So that’s a transformational personal revelation moment for her. To think about, to challenge why she’s having those kinds of meetings and what’s the purpose of the meetings.

[0:26:27] MKS: She shared with us a couple of weeks afterwards that she talked to her boss about this and he was so excited because he too was struggling with how do I make these meetings helpful but it’s not something people typically think it can be any different, right? If anybody knew that their meetings could be so much better they would do something about them but most people don’t. They’re like, “Oh meetings are just a necessary evil”. Until you got exposed to the idea that “Oh no, you can do this differently. There are things that you can change. You don’t have to have a typical weekly team check in meeting that’s super boring and everyone just rattles off what they did last week or what’s coming up next, right? So she was saying how excited she was and how they are now experimenting with different kinds of meetings and different activities in those meetings. So that they can really focus on building relationships. This is the only time that the whole team gets together every week.

[0:27:18] Charlie Hoehn: I love that and you had a second story Tai?

[0:27:20] TT: Mamie has that story.

[0:27:22] MKS: Yes, so one of our very early customers is a stone masonry company. Which I think is so cool because it’s guys outside working with their hands mostly, doing stone masonry and landscape architecture and none of them want to sit through meetings in a conference room. And they were really struggling with their team meetings and keeping their projects organized across with their different team leaders and they started using our software and just totally changed their meetings. And one of the practices that they started using was norms. It was one of the things that they are like, “I don’t know about this norms ground rules thing” but after a couple of weeks, they said it really transformed how they engaged with each other. Their meetings are so much more efficient. Everyone feels really empowered to redirect the meeting if somebody goes off topic. Their meetings are shorter and they are just loving their meetings now.

[0:28:16] Charlie Hoehn: Wow, that’s so cool. I’m curious as guests on this show, we are humming along through this episode and I feel you two have done a great job laying out some really useful stuff and I can’t tell if it’s because you’re so used to being efficient and effective or if maybe I might be getting a little some of these stuff right with how I have laid out the agenda for us. What would you - what am I doing right in leading this podcast as a meeting and what can I improve upon?

[0:28:53] MKS: Oh that’s an interesting question. Well first –

[0:28:56] TT: [inaudible].

[0:28:57] MKS: Well first I will say, so you sent us a whole bunch of information ahead of time which was great. You basically give us an agenda and ground rules of, this is the equipment that you need to have, this is what we are going to do during the conversation, this is my expectations for how it’s going to go of what I need you to do. You started with a little set up when we got on the call so that we could get all comfortable, get to know each other a little bit. And now, I think the conversation is flowing. You’re facilitating us through asking good questions, kind of redirecting and making sure we stay on topic and also noticing when it goes off and saying, “Okay so that was an interesting question but we are not going to keep going down that path. We’ll go back to our original plan”, so I don’t know if I have any suggestions.

[0:29:39] Charlie Hoehn: Oh come on. You can lay it to me, this won’t go south, I promise.

[0:29:45] TT: I want to add one, it’s you give the participants of your podcast of this conversation to raise questions like even before the conversation, you share the floor and for us to request the floor, to ask for more information to help us to feel like, “Oh we can prepare those conversations”. Because the questions you sent to us can help us to strategize and think about what stories we want to tell and this is truly helpful on both parties.

[0:30:21] Charlie Hoehn: Excellent. So I get a pass, is what you’re saying?

[0:30:25] MKS: I think you are doing a pretty good job and now maybe that’s because you’ve been doing this for a long time too -

[0:30:33] Charlie Hoehn: I’d better be able to get a passing grade at this point but with 70 episodes under my belt but truth be told, I ask this question because it is actually on the top of my mind. It’s been driving me nuts that there are certain things that I haven’t improved quite yet to make the experience even more seamless and better for guests. So any feedback from this from a professional meeting expert standpoint, I’m more than open to and really curious about.

[0:31:04] MKS: Well okay, so I will give you one that you can chew on. So we usually suggest that when you are having meetings and they are happening virtually that you use video because you get to see people’s expression. You get to build the relationship with them better and I know right now, we’re only recording in audio and I know also that sometimes with podcasts or other kinds of coaching sessions, it’s better to be just audio because you’re talking about things that might be a little bit personal or actually having some anonymity is more comfortable for people. But generally in meetings, having video and being able to see the person is actually better because you can engage with them more really, is that a word “really”? In a more real way.

[0:31:46] Charlie Hoehn: Really is a word but I don’t know if really as in more real is a word. But no that’s great. I really appreciate that so thank you for giving that. Yeah, technically there are reasons why I do it audio but we don’t have to get into that but that’s a really good feedback so thank you Mamie. Tai, you want to dig your heels in at all?

[0:32:09] TT: We haven’t ended the session yet, right? So what’s the next step, so if you can tell us what’s next where like after a few weeks we follow up on what we are really clear about whose do what by when and then that will conclude this whole meeting cycle.

[0:32:26] Charlie Hoehn: Beautiful, I love it and I will do that so - all right, let’s get to the final questions I got for your two here. For one, I’d love to have you two present a challenge to the listeners. To anyone who is going to be a part of a meeting this week, what would you say is one thing they can do from your book that you really, really want to emphasize?

[0:32:55] MKS: Well the last part of our book is all about creating the change in your organization or in yourself or in your team. So the challenge that we decided on ahead of time was not a challenge to do something different this week in your meetings but to take time to reflect on your meeting practices and really assess what are we doing well, what are the biggest pain points, what do I want my meetings to be like or what could they be like? What would be different if we were using our time together in really productive engaging ways? And our book includes a whole bunch of information about how to do that reflection and how to have that conversation with your colleagues. We also have a bunch of resources available for people who have our books. So they are at the end of the book, they are also on our website. So if you buy the book on Amazon you can get access to that space on our website where we have -

[0:33:47] TT: Survey assessment. To think about what’s doing well, you can think with your team and assess your meeting, current meeting, culture and then a list of questions. If you want to introduce new meeting practices to your organization. What are the things you need to consider to reflect? And we also have a list of norms that you can just pick and choose, you don’t need to reinvent a lot of norms, you can just use the ones we gather and like how do you write a thoughtful pre-work, so people can actually prepare for the conversation and different type of pre work. A lot of like a flow chart or infographic, things that people can print out on their desktop just as a reminder.

[0:34:29] MKS: Exactly. This week, our challenge to you is to take 10 minutes and think about your meetings. What could be done differently? What would be better? At least check out our website and our blogs, we have a lot of content there as well.

[0:34:43] Charlie Hoehn: Excellent. Apart from your website, is there any other way that you want our listeners to connect with you and follow you. I assume you do workshops I would imagine, right? In consultations or speaking gigs, that sort of thing. Can you elaborate on those areas?

[0:35:03] MKS: Absolutely. We do a lot of things. We already mentioned our software which is available but we also do a coaching program where we’ll work with your entire team to improve your meetings and also your entire collaboration practices so we have a couple of different variations with the coaching. We run trainings that can happen both online or in person, we also speak, so if you’re a company leader and you’re looking for a speaker to come and talk to your company. Their annual retreat, or if you’re a conference organizer and you want to bring effective meeting practices into your conference and you want to have a presentation, I speak in all of those kind of meeting effectiveness, meeting culture, elements. We do a lot of different stuff that’s more around behavior change and building awareness and supporting people to take action.

[0:35:52] Charlie Hoehn: Excellent. Well, this truly was great, so thank you two for being guest on the show.

[0:35:59] MKS: Thank you, yeah, our pleasure.

[0:36:03] Charlie Hoehn: Many thanks to Mamie and Tai for being on the show. You can buy their book, Momentum on amazon.com. Thanks again for listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about book with the authors who wrote them. We’ll see you next time.