Welcome And Goal

Amy Dardis 0:10

The Building A Clear Authentic Brand Podcast. And I'm your host, Amy Dardis. And in this episode, we are diving into how to use your weekly team meeting to build and strengthen team trust and engagement.

People First Before Operations

Amy Dardis 0:27

People are the most important thing in business as well as in life. Everything that we do really does come down to relationships. But when we're at work, it's really easy to get pulled into all of the different directions and the needs of the day-to-day operations of the business. And so sometimes it's hard to slow down and take that time to just connect with an employee or a coworker on a real level. And this happens to us in every area of life. This is not just specific to work. Look at time with our spouses, look at marriages, look at kids. Life gets busy. We have demands, we have jobs, we have errands, we have tasks and responsibilities. And one of the easiest ways to lose track of what really matters is to just get busy. It's a constant battle, and even the best of intentions can often just slip slowly away.

Small Rhythms Beat Big Gestures

Amy Dardis 1:34

So one of the best things to do is to just build in systems, is to build in systems and routines and rhythms within our day-to-day operations that help keep us on track, that help keep us connected. So when you're married, maybe it's a weekly date night, or maybe it's 10 or 15 minutes together in the morning, quiet time, coffee before the kids get up, or maybe it's a walk in the evening and with your children. Maybe you have set time alone with them. But oftentimes it's the smaller increments more consistently that are far more impactful than the bigger things. So once a year we might celebrate our anniversary, or a couple times a year we might get away for a weekend together. Or maybe once a month you take your kid out for a father-son or a mother-daughter date and spend time with them. And that's good. That's really important. But sometimes so much can happen in between that time that it really just comes back to these daily disciplines or these weekly disciplines of, hey, how are we doing? Let's check in, let's just talk about what's going on in life because it's the small moments that really do make up our life. And it's the small moments that make up our business. And as leaders, we know that showing our team appreciation and making time for people is important. That's head knowledge, but sometimes that's harder to actually make happen in the day-to-day.

Why The Weekly Meeting Matters

Amy Dardis 3:12

So using your weekly team meeting is one of the most natural ways to build in opportunity and time to build your team connection, to build your team trust, to show each other appreciation and recognition for the things that are happening in the day-to-day. So instead of waiting all year for an annual performance review or waiting for an employee of the month recognition or for a quarterly conversation, the weekly meeting really is where it's at. And if you do nothing else, I highly recommend, urge you, suggest like please, please, please prioritize your weekly meeting. Because chances are if you run a trades or a service business, you are having some kind of weekly meeting. And chances are it's a very operational and tactical meeting that may or may not have a lot of engagement.

A Real Example Of Stale Meetings

Amy Dardis 4:15

So when I first started working for the gas and welding distributor, I knew nothing about the industry and I knew nothing about the company coming in. And so I was hungry to observe how a company with multiple different departments, multiple different branches, and multiple different employees actually ran and stayed connected. And so one of the first things I did was I jumped in and started sitting in on the weekly meeting. So their weekly meeting was a weekly Zoom meeting because they had different managers from different departments in different locations and different cities across the state. And so everybody hopped on at about 7 a.m. on a Monday morning as a way to kick off the week, start strong. And of course, it's early, and of course, everyone's coming in off the weekend. So the meeting went predominantly how most weekly meetings go. They would just kind of jump in and get started. You would have mainly one to three people doing the majority of the talking, and the rest would be silent. There wasn't a lot of engagement. It was very matter of fact, very down to business. And quite honestly, it was just a little boring and a little stale. And I got off my first few meetings and I was like, why are we doing this? Like, why? Like, I just I feel like there could be so much more going on here, and this feels like a wasted opportunity. And the my boss was just like, Well, what do you mean? Like, this is just how we've always done it. And I was like, Okay, but are you open to trying something new? Could we try something a little bit different? And he was like, Yeah, sure. So I had read the book Traction, and in there they talk about the weekly meeting and they call it a level 10 meeting. And one of the ways that they recommend starting off every meeting is with what they call a segue, which is instead of just jumping right into the to-dos and the business of the day, it's starting the meeting in a specific way that kind of is like your meeting icebreaker. And it really just kind of sets the tone and gets people to connect and engage in a human

The Business Best Personal Best Segue

Amy Dardis 6:32

way. And so what this entails is everybody in the meeting going around and sharing a business best and a personal best for the previous week. So if you're meeting on a Monday morning, then you're only having to remember over the last seven days. And if the meeting has anywhere from seven to ten people, then it can go really fast. It only takes about five to ten minutes of the meeting time. And you just go one by round, and it's just a quick round robin of my personal best was that I worked out five days last week, and my business best was that I was able to close a deal that I had been working on for the last six weeks. And then you move on to the next person. So this allowed people a great way to one, get to hear what other people in the company were working on, what they were proud of, what they were celebrating, what they had accomplished. So you're not like, oh, hey, I didn't know that you had been working on that, that lead for so long. And hey, good job. That's awesome. Good for you. And then also hearing the personal best of being able to be reminded of like, oh, wow, we are all human and we all have lives outside of work. But when you do it on a weekly basis, every single week, everybody is learning just a little bit more about each other. And over time, you're actually creating more connection and more trust with each other because as people get more comfortable sharing, they're willing to share a little bit more and a little bit more. Also, life happens. And so sometimes you have a personal best and it's not a best. Sometimes you start off the week and you're like, hey, I don't have a personal best this week because my father-in-law passed away this last weekend and it's actually really rough right now. And people hear that, or someone says, like, my spouse just lost her job last week and I don't have a personal best, or my kid's been sick for a couple of days and we're not sure what's going on. So that's just what's going on with me right now. And it's just, it's a sentence, it's a couple sentences, but it allows people the space to be able to share what's actually going on in their life. And then for you as the leader, you are getting to hear what is going on in all of your employees' lives. And so when you first start doing this, when we first started doing this, everybody was a little weird about it because they're like, What? What are you having us do? But we just set the expectation. We said, Hey, we are going to try something new and we are going to start our meetings differently. So everybody come prepared with a business best. So something you're proud of, something that you accomplished, and a personal best that you can share. And we're just going to do it real quickly. We're not going to spend a whole lot of time. We're not going to give someone the floor for 10 minutes. Like, this is just something new that we're trying to do. And so at first everyone was a little weird about it, but we got through that first meeting and everybody was like, oh, like, cool. Like I just learned about a bunch of different things that I didn't know because it's the beginning of the week and I don't always talk to all of these people all the time. But now I just learned something. And so we started just getting in the habit and getting in the routine of doing it. And when you do that week in, week out, you start to see more connections and more engagement and more people talking. And so we started having people share and they would share funny stories and people would laugh. And then inside jokes would start to be created and people would start to like, you know, tease each other a little bit and smile. And so we're then starting our mornings with energy. We're starting our meetings with people engaged and connected. And so by setting the tone for the meeting like that, based on one valuing people first and two, bringing them closer together, it then set the stage for people being willing to actually speak up more within the meeting itself. And it was a really cool way to build relationships, but also to keep a pulse on what's going on in people's lives and be able to watch how these relationships and how these connections were able to build over time, especially as we had new managers, especially as we had new people, and being able to kind of like bring them into the mix. And this is something that we actually carried over into all of the meetings that we did. So whether it was a department meeting or it was even like a two-day off-site meeting or quarterly strategy meeting, we would we made it a habit to start meetings with some kind of icebreaker, some kind of connection building, whether it was just taking the first five, 10 minutes of a meeting, or if it was a longer days meeting, then we were taking maybe 30 minutes or an hour to intentionally create space for people to build relationships. Because when we're in the day-to-day, especially in a we were in a distribution company. And so, I mean, it was go, go, go all the time. There was not downtime, there was always something happening. And a lot of these managers were actually within different branches and different cities. And so they weren't connecting or talking to each other on a daily basis. But when we were bringing them together each week, it was helping them learn more about each other as well as learning more about the successes and the wins that were happening within their branch, which then brings us to the second thing that we started doing, which was building in just a few minutes to give each other recognition.

Shout-Outs That Make Values Real

Amy Dardis 12:41

And so we call this like giving each other shout outs. So you would start with everyone's personal best and business best. You would get to learn more about each other. And then you would go around and you would say, I just want to give a shout out to this person, or I want to give a shout out to my team, or I want to give a shout out to this person that I worked on this project with for. And then you would recognize them for the little things. And this is what we were trying to really highlight was the little things. It was living out our core values because core values should guide how we operate and how we make decisions. And so when we had core values like we value relationships or we value doing the right thing, the idea is that that is something you're living out. It's not a word on a wall, it's something that you are living out and have multiple experiences and encounters where that is guiding how you operate and how you choose to act in a certain situation. And so, as team members, we're able to actually point out that specific situation of like, hey, we worked on this project, we had to do this install, nothing went right, but we kept at it, we kept a positive attitude, and we were able to do what it takes and get it done. And I just want to shout out this person and recognize them for hanging in there, getting the job done, and maintaining a positive attitude the whole time. And so this way, we're not going weeks or months without recognizing all of the things that your team has to face, especially if if you're in a trades business, if you're in a service business, if landscaping, HVAC, construction, you are dealing with obstacles every single day, multiple times a day. And showing people recognition and appreciation and doing it in a public setting is really important to recognize, hey, look, I saw you do this, I saw you step up, I saw the way you contributed, and I really appreciate that. So you as the leader are able to show them that recognition. But then you're also creating a space for them to recognize each other. And so by doing that, one, we're bringing life to our core values. We're saying, hey, this means something and this guides how we operate. But then we're also taking time to help people feel valued and recognized. And when you're doing it on a weekly basis, you don't need 30 minutes to point out all the things that have happened and then miss a whole bunch because there were so many things, but we're more only going back the past seven days. We might have like a couple stories that it only takes an extra five minutes to be able to do this. So we would get this done in less than an hour. And if you have a smaller team, you can do this in less than a 30-minute meeting time. Not like it doesn't take an hour to do all your business best and personal best and shout-outs, but just for the meeting as a whole. And so when you think of it, like you have 40 hours give or take with your team every week. And oftentimes they are going in 10 different directions because you have people on different job sites, you have people on different projects, you have people on different service calls, you have people in different departments. There's a lot of back and forth, there's a lot of email and calling and texting, but oftentimes it's very operational and it's very tactical. You are deciding to intentionally put aside 15 minutes a week within your weekly meeting to start it off by building in these very simple, clear, tangible exercises. So it's not touchy-feely stuff, it's not something it's a bunch of kumbaya stuff. Like it very much is like, what's your business best? What's your personal best for the week? Let's listen to each other and recognize each other and start to build these relationships. And then let's give each other some shout-outs and some recognition. And you as a leader are going to learn so much. You are going to learn so much more about your team and your people because you're going to learn things about them that you would have never thought to ask, or you would have never had the time to sit down and just chat with them all one by one. Especially as you do this over time, when you do this week in, week out, year in, year out, you start to see the change in the trust, the change in the connection, the change in the dynamic. You start to see people being more willing to open up about more vulnerable things, about more personal things that when they're going through a hard time, or maybe they've been on a weight loss journey and they're like, hey, I have been sticking through to this. I've been going to the gym and I'm down 25 pounds. And everybody together can celebrate them. So then what it does is it sparks these offline conversations. So maybe they hear about it, and then one guy reaches out to that guy on a text or on a phone call and be like, hey man, that's super cool that you're on this journey to lose weight. I didn't know that. And I'm actually thinking about starting my own. Can you tell me what you did or how did you find what worked for you, especially knowing the demands of our job? Like, and then they can start to build off of that. That maybe on a day-to-day basis, they never would have had the opportunity to actually learn that about each other, or start to initiate that conversation. And you are intentionally facilitating connection. And it is a little bit weird at first when you first get started, but because you're giving just very clear and simple direction of one business best, one personal best, everybody gets to decide how much or how little they want to share. We're doing it quickly within a short time frame. So it's not making this long, drawn-out conversation where we're valuing the little bit of time that we're we're choosing to put towards this. And then as a leader, you get to start seeing this change, the dynamic of your team and the dynamic of your meetings, and then building in this opportunity for recognition and contribution and appreciation. So that it's not all on you. It's not all on you to always remember, oh, did I tell that guy thank you? Did I tell that guy I appreciated him? Because you're actually building it in. Now, I do recommend that there are quarterly systems and an annual system, but the weekly system, like this one weekly thing, is I would say the most impactful thing that you can do as a leader in order to start to facilitate better engagement and better trust and better problem solving.

Trust That Unlocks Better Ideas

Amy Dardis 20:03

Because as we're creating these connections and opportunities for people to start to open up for to each other, we're also making it more comfortable for them to speak up within a meeting, which means that once they get more comfortable with that and with this group, then when you get further on in your meeting, and let's say you're talking about some customer issues or you're talking about some obstacles that you're facing or some competitive market issues, and you're like, hey guys, we have this coming at us. And does anyone have any ideas on how we can face this or be differentiate ourselves or innovate? They're then more comfortable speaking up within this group. And so when you're now starting to talk some operational or tactical problem solving, you already have a more comfortable, more engaged team who is more likely to actually speak up and start to be like, yeah, actually, this happened. And what do you think of this idea? Because it's just a matter of comfort and repetition. And so there's all of these like sub-dynamics that are happening on this really, really micro level, but by doing this one thing every single week that is going to pay off significantly over time because you are learning more about your team, you are making sure you're recognizing and contributing, they are learning more about each other, they're actually building up a culture of recognition and contribution. You're bringing your core values front and center to how you operate as a team. It's this one thing alone can help take the words off the wall or off the The document or out of your head. And it brings them to life to say when we say that we value integrity, when we say that we value radical candor, when we say that we value extreme ownership, when we say that we value creativity and innovation or flexible thinking, whatever it is that you value as an organization, you start putting stories to those words. And it starts to come to life so people know that this is real because we are living it and we are talking about it. We are sharing it, we are being reminded of it, and we're doing it week in and week out. And it starts to permeate your culture, it starts to permeate your conversations because then when you're shouting out and recognizing people for living out these values, it's changing their association with these things and it's making it so that each and every time they're in these different situations, it's actually coming to mind and they're being like, okay, if these are our values, how should I act in this situation? How can this guide me? I'm gonna do this because this is how we operate and we're clear on that. And then I can actually share these stories about this is the kind of guidance and direction that I had because we're clear on the things that we value, because we're clear on how we operate. And it starts to bring it to life and to make

Make Work A Support System

Amy Dardis 23:34

it real. So if you're a leader who has weekly meetings, or maybe, maybe you don't have weekly meetings and maybe it's time to start implementing a weekly meeting, or maybe you do have a weekly meeting and you're like, man, I am not optimizing my weekly meetings. Like, this is this is prime time that you have with them to really start to build this connection. And it's a weekly reminder that we are all human. It is a weekly reminder that we all go through hard things, we all have bad days, we all have hard weeks, we all have things that are happening in our life. And our coworkers, the people that we work with, they can actually be a source of support and encouragement and they can help us get through these seasons. And so that people aren't just bottling it up inside and just pretending that they're fine. They can actually be like open up and say what's going on, and they don't have to dive into all the details, but they can be like, you know what? My father-in-law just got a cancer diagnosis and we're starting to navigate through that. And now the team knows, and now they can come with like understanding and compassion and be like, wow, I'm so sorry to hear that. Let me know what I can do for you. Like, let me know how I can help. And you can be more understanding and more compassionate when they are having a tough day, or maybe they need to take more time off because the team knows there's this open communication of what's going on, and we can lean in and support each other and have each other's back, and we can make the workplace a place that is filled with love and life and support instead of it being somewhere that we hide the fact that we have stuff in our life or that we do have struggles or concerns or

Try It Next Week And Report Back

Amy Dardis 25:22

worries. So if you've never done this before, I highly encourage you to start your meetings with a business best and a personal best. If you don't have time for both of those, if you have a bigger team meeting, start with a personal best. Just have people get in the habit of sharing one thing and enjoy it. You will laugh, you will learn about your team so much, you will see connections start to build, you will see the dynamic of your meetings change, and it will not take that long. It will be one of the best things that you ever implement. And if you do, please tell me. I would love to hear how it goes for you. So, as always, you can always learn more at clearauthenticbrands.com. But that is all for this episode. I will see you guys next time.