Is there anything worse than having your entire day eaten up by meetings? They are often unfocused, filled to too many people who don't need to be there and they don't seem to accomplish the decisions that needed to be made. In this episode, we will look at why so many companies are meeting centric and the 4 things you need to work on so you can have fewer meetings and the ones you do have will be more productive.
SHOW NOTES:
http://thecrazy1.com/episode-57
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Is there anything worse than having your entire day eaten up by meetings? They are often unfocused, filled to too many people who don't need to be there and they don't seem to accomplish the decisions that needed to be made. In this episode, we will look at why so many companies are meeting centric and the 4 things you need to work on so you can have fewer meetings and the ones you do have will be more productive.
SHOW NOTES:
http://thecrazy1.com/episode-57
FOLLOW THE CRAZY ONE:
Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook
What's going on everybody, and welcome into the 57th episode of The Crazy One podcast. As always, I'm your host, Stephen Gates. And this is the show where we talk about creativity, leadership design, and all kinds of things that matter to creative people. Recently, as I was running through, you know, what are all the different possibilities of shows that I could put together? For some reason, I thought to myself, you know, what, Steve, what's one of the most boring things that we could talk about? yet? It is still one of the things that is the absolute bane of everyone's existence. And I thought to myself, you know what, we need to do a show to talk about meetings. Meetings are a necessary evil. But in so many cases, at least for me, they are the bane of my existence. They eat up so much of my day. It's not right. It's not productive, at least for me and the way I look at it, I think in a lot of cases, too many meetings are actually incredibly destructive, even self destructive to the team's creative process to your creative process, because they keep us away from what it is that we're there to do. They keep us away from what we love. Anything that does that can't be good. And it's also the challenge of, for me, the more you kind of you go up in the organization, the more of a leader you are, the more meetings you need to be a part of. And that's the thing is that that drives me crazy. So that's what I want to talk about today. I want to take a couple minutes to talk about how did we get here? How do you know if you know do you have a healthy number of meetings in your day to day? Are you part of an organization that is really just kind of getting drunk and oh, dealing on just way too many meetings that serve absolutely no purpose? Then I want to dive into really kind of like, how do you fix it? If that's the culture that you're in, if you're kind of just going through and wasting way too much time? What are the four areas that you really need to focus on to get your meetings under control? troll, how do you get this fixed? So that's what we want to talk about today. But, you know, I also want to make sure that we're clear about the fact that for this episode, we just want to talk about meetings, not brainstorms. brainstorms was a different episode with the seven rules for running a brainstorm, you can go back and check that out. What I want to talk about here are meetings, which is where when we are going to get a group of people together to make a decision, as opposed to a brainstorm, we're going to get a group of people together to create ideas. So I want to make sure that we do not mix those two up, because they should not and cannot really be used interchangeably. Yes, technically, a brainstorm is a meeting because we get a bunch of people together. But for our purposes, for the purposes of discussion, and hopefully for the purpose of you keeping your brain separate meetings, brainstorms, not the same thing. So let's start with how did we get here? What happened where we have so many meetings? Why Is this get so out of control? And how do we how do you tell if your team your organization has a good and kind of a healthy amount of meetings. Now, in my experience for my own teams, companies that have been a part of other companies and other teams that I've watched work, in a lot of cases, those organizations are going to fall into one of two sort of different operating models or operating rhythms. One of them works really, really well reduces the number of meetings lets decisions happen really, really well. The other one is in almost completely paralyzing dysfunctional and leads to way too many meetings about meetings or meetings about having another meeting or like just it's too much kind of just meeting and not enough doing. So those two models, and it's what the you know what, let's let's see, we always do let's start with what doesn't work. What doesn't work is that If you think about the organization, you're in an organization that you've been a part of, and if you think about kind of, you know, top to bottom, from the the leader to the intern, how that's structured. And if you think about the way that information flows, if you think about the way that decisions are made, the ones that don't work are the ones that all call information up. It's a model that I see too often. And it's a broken model. It's the one where everyone on the team has to have meetings to push information up through the tiers of the organization. So it's where, you know, the intern meets with the art director, the art director meets with the creative director, the creative director meets with a senior creative director who meets with a group creative director who meets with the Executive Creative Director, who meets with the CMO who then makes a decision and it rolls back down the chain. This sort of information up model, it leads to too many meetings. And it's a really a structure that will paralyze an entire organization for a lot of different reasons. The first is because it is wildly an effective and it's an effective B Because you are literally robbing the talented people who have hired have their decision making ability. We've talked in the past, and I'm a big believer about, you know, wherever you become part of an organization, whenever you're part of a team that comes with a responsibility, that responsibility comes with accountability, accountability, and that decision making in this structure is taken away. And that's the thing is that everybody keeps waiting for someone else to make a decision. They're looking to the person above them to tell them what to do. It paralyzes them, it turns everybody into these just sort of like mindless lemmings who run around waiting for the top tier to make a decision that will then be you know, bestowed down on everyone. That also then creates a bottleneck because no one has any authority. And then at any given time, you are also not really sure who's in charge, because and especially on the lower parts of the team, which tend to be the much bigger parts, they tend to have a lot more people in them. That means that I have a large part of the team that has little to no faith that their leadership has any authority that they have any voice so they can actually make any decisions? Because they'll come to them and say, Look, Boss, I have a problem, something isn't working, what do I do? Instead of giving them an answer, what they do is they say, oh, let me go talk to my boss who's gonna go talk to their boss, who will then tell me what to do. And it'll come back down and I'll get back to you in a few days. Why do I have any belief, any faith in what my boss is now doing? That's the thing is that they tend to be relegated to very small, production oriented normally decisions of just simply how to get basic things done anything bigger than that they have to defer to someone else. And it's this information model. It leads to so many pointless endless meetings, about having more meetings because, you know, the one tier has to prepare to talk to the next tier above them and then they have to have another meeting to prepare to talk to the tier above them. And on and on as these endless meetings have decks that need to get done and built and redone and recirculated and re approved and 87 people And, you know, I'd like you all know exactly what I'm talking about. I don't need to beat this horse to death. You know what it is? It doesn't work, too many meetings to ineffectual. What we need is we need the opposite of this. We need a better model. We need one where the top tier of leadership and every leadership below that pushes authority down through the organization. It leads to fewer meetings, to vastly higher team engagement. And honestly, in my experience, much, much better work. Because people will support what they're a part of. We've talked about this again in the past. But the reason why I want that is because I want a more highly engaged team. I want people who are invested in more than a paycheck. The only way that that happens is if they feel like they are involved and care about something more than just their paycheck, which means they have the ability to make decisions, or at the very least to participate in decisions. And that's an incredibly key thing. But that's the other part of it is that whenever you allow people to make decisions, you need fewer meetings, things work better. But start there. Think about which one of those models do you fall into if you were somebody that started listening to this, and said, You know what, man, I just I am an absolute victim of just way too many meetings and it happens way too often. And I'm not getting nearly enough done. As with most problems, take a step back and look at the root cause. Look at the structure to see what model you're in. Now, either model that you're in, you can always do better. You can always figure out how to you have better meetings, how whenever you bring people together, can you get decisions made more quickly? How is it that your goal at the end of the day can be to have fewer meetings. Now there are four areas that we're going to need to focus on, to help improve the meeting and to fix the problem of having too many meetings. Those four areas that we're going to dig into Our focus, people time, and the aftermath. The last one sounds like it should be, you know, the first album of a band I've never heard of. But let's start with focus. Because this is where most meetings go wrong in either one of those models, even the good one or the bad one. The thing that I see in too many times is that meetings lose focus. And they do it for a number of different reasons. The biggest reason that I see is that whenever people get together, there is not a clear purpose for that meeting. Because this is the thing is the fact that a meeting is supposed to focus on the key decision doesn't mean that it will. You have to define the purpose of the meeting have a clear outcome that needs to happen. And then anything that doesn't have a purpose shouldn't be a meeting. Anything that distracts from the goal, whenever those people around that table at that time needs to happen someplace else. This can make you kind of come off as authoritarian, it can make you come off as a little unpleasant or a little A bit of a hard ass. But for me, I view it as being somebody who actually respects everyone's time. Because if I take the amount of time that's being wasted and multiplied by the number of people who are around that table, we very quickly realize the years of time that is being wasted. And that that's really the thing is that you have to have a clear focus for that, and then make sure that you get in and get out as quickly as you can to get that done. We'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute. But this is the thing is that you also need to insist on requirements for the meeting to happen, because too often you also see these sort of like half assed meetings. And what I mean is that too, for you to make a decision, you have to have certain people in the room, that you have to have certain things that are done, whether it's work or a deck or an idea or something. But you have to be clear about that those criteria have to be met in order For the meeting to happen, you can't keep doing this thing of somehow thinking that partial progress is the same as actual progress. What I mean is that if there are three key decision makers that I need in the room, I need somebody from product from Tech, and I need somebody from creative who all have to be there. Because this is a really key moment, we need to agree on the direction. And I need everyone to agree to this at the same time, then what I want to do is I want to make sure that all three of those people are in the room for a singular discussion to make a singular decision. Because that is then required only one meeting, as opposed to what normally happens. We can't align calendars people are out on vacation, somebody can't rearrange their schedule. Like there's all this sort of stuff. So what do you end up doing? You end up with 234 different meetings, one to meet with design, one to meet with tech one to meet with product because they all can't actually get on the same page. Well, so then what happens? Three different kind of opinions. happen. So then we need to have an inner realignment meeting where now we're going to come back together and discuss what that feedback is and what the road forward is, which will then generate an email that not everyone's going to agree with. And then we're going to need one final meeting whenever everybody finally takes it seriously, to get everybody in the same room. So instead of saying, look, we have these requirements for this decision to be made for this process to move forward. Now, instead, we say that, well, we're just going to take any progress, we're going to split up this process. It's not ideal, but you know what, it's progress. Yeah, it's progress. They got you probably about a four times longer process and it got you five meetings where you could have just had one here again, requires you to be a little bit more of a hard ass requires you to actually potentially even sometimes not allow work to continue until this discussion happens. But it really interesting happens whenever you do that. Whenever you say, Well, look, you know, we can't proceed until we get everybody in the same room, Rumble, Rumble, Rumble, you know, dissatisfaction, strongly worded email, whatever. But it's amazing. How then all of a sudden, Wow, look at that, meetings can get moved, people can only go to the first half hour of an hour long meeting and then spend the other half hour in the meeting that you need. Who knew that schedules were flexible, you could reprioritize what matters. But that's the thing is that for most people, they will just simply prioritize the thing that is burning, the brightest and the thing that is the most out of control. So there are some times where like I said, there needs to be these requirements, and you need people in the room. And if they can't really abide by that, maybe you need to be a little out of control. Maybe you need to say we can't work unless this is actually going to happen. Because when you do that, it's amazing what actually will happen. Now whenever you actually have the people in the room, the other really important thing to do is to use the amount of time of the meeting to focus people because whenever it comes to meetings, they will always take as long as the allotted time on someone's calendar, the water will always fill the container This means that if you make a meeting an hour, even though you only have 20 minutes of content to talk about the meeting will find a way to take an hour. And that's a really fascinating thing, because everybody has mentally prepared themselves to be there for an hour. So how do we fill that space? So instead of making it an hour, make it 20 minutes? Yes, it's going to be shorter. Yes, there is going to be a sense of people being uncomfortable. But there is also going to be a sense of urgency, a sense of focus, a sense of being able to get things done much more efficiently. So now, instead of taking an hour, he's only taking 20 minutes, people get more work done. There's more things that can go on. But that's really the thing is that and we've talked about this so much that I really am a believer that I know it is the least sexy thing in the world. To use process to get to results use process to get to creativity. I will continue to argue the time and time again, it gets results. And this is one of those things because what What I want to fight against is the fact that the water will fill the container. And this is the thing is that you need to save the small talk for lunch, save it for the elevator, because this is the thing, you may think that it makes you cold or distant as a leader. But in a lot of cases, I think that if you will focus people, if you actually get them in and out and just get done what needs to get done, they will respect you for respecting their time. It doesn't mean you can't be friendly, it doesn't mean you can't spend time on small talk or other things. Just do it in a place that makes sense. Like I said, do it at lunch, do it the elevator, do it walking from the meeting back to your desk, get in there, get something solved and then get back to everything else that you need to do. Because like I said, at the end of the day, it may seem a little harsh in the beginning, but at the end, they'll respect you for it. But then the other thing that you have to make sure of and the last thing we're going to talk about in focus is the fact that you do not leave the room unless there is a decision or a clear Next step, too many meetings. And because time was up, someone had to leave, because there was a disagreement. And this only means that there's going to need to be another meeting about this meeting. And that's the thing is that so what we're really doing is we're just wasting a lot of time. Don't leave the room unless you decided on what you came in there for. And this is the thing is that there are some times when the decision may get to be something where you need more time, it may just be something that is unexpectedly contentious, those outliers will happen. But then just simply keep everybody there, or at the very least, like I said, have clear outcomes of what needs to happen so that we can get to a decision. Because that's the thing is that there are people who will purposely just derail conversations and know that if they come in and make some big dramatic stand, that then they can hold up the process. They can hijack it until they get their way. And again, I'm not saying that this means that you have to be combative. It doesn't mean that everybody has to hold hands. And sing songs and make s'mores. But it means that decisions need to get made. And that if they don't, there have to be consequences. We are all on deadlines, things all need to get done in a certain amount of time. For us to be able to do the best work possible, we have to respect those dates. Because if we give a little bit of time here and a little bit of time there and we need an extra meeting is going to take two extra days and oh, that person you know, needs to push it back till tomorrow. It's death by 1000 cuts. Because pretty soon at the end of the process, you're over budget, you're out of time. But that's the thing is that you need to focus everybody on coming in and making that decision understanding what that is. And if you continue to struggle with that, you need to step back and ask why is it something where you need to do a better job of estimating you'll really how much time is it going to take to make a decision? Do you need to break big decisions down into smaller decisions so that you can make progress? Is it something where again, there's going to be clear takeaways so that things continue to move forward. But you can't be held hostage by politics. You can't be held hostage by ill tempered people, you can't be held hostage by some over bloated process that just simply needs all these sign offs in these approvals. Because at the end of the day, the thing that you're doing is you're hurting the work, you're hurting the creativity. And the thing that we all have to remember is that I don't care what the medium is that you work in, at the end of the day, whatever, whatever that is, is put in the hands of the person who will use it, consume it, appreciate it, whatever it is, they're going to do with it. They don't know how many meetings you had. They don't know what compromises you made. It is a cold truth that too many of us forget. We will not remember any of this stuff. What people remember our results, good or bad. They don't remember why somebody disagreed in a meeting. They don't remember what two point I was supposed to be. They don't remember why we cut something. It is the hard reality of what you put in front of them is all They know. So make sure that you get those decisions made sure that you keep things moving. And you aren't overly bogged down in the minutiae, because creativity, any creative process is going to have problems. As we push to try to do new things, we're going to encounter problems. But what we need to do is to keep things moving and keep things focused. So that again, at the end of the day, we get to the best possible work. No consumer is ever going to buy your product, or your project or whatever it is that you do, because the process and the meetings were fantastic, right, that's not what they buy into. They buy into the byproduct but that process needs to be fantastic. So the work is a reflection of that. It can be thankless, and like I said, there are times when it can be something where you come off as being, you know, maybe sometimes a little bit uncaring, but it's something that needs to happen. Now, as we move on to talk about people, now people time and Aftermath Just candidly are going to have fewer things in it, then focus because I think, focus, that's really the place where meetings either go really well or they go really wrong. The other ones are equally important. But there aren't quite as many ways for it to go wrong. Now, whenever it comes to people, I think, obviously, you want to make sure that you have the right people in the room, the people who can make the decisions, who can contribute, who can make things better, who can add to that. But just as important is to make sure that you get rid of the people who don't need to be there. Because this is one of the things that I see is that these organizations, these meetings take on an insane amount of meeting bloat. for one simple reason, the fear of missing out and that's the thing is that go around the room and do this at your next meeting to be sure that everyone needs to be there not wants to be there needs to be there. What are they going to contribute? What is their role in this project? If this is something where they are there just simply as an FYI, because it was something that they walked by and thought it looked interesting, something like that. You cannot let that sort of FOMO rule meetings. So what you need to do is, like I said, go around the room and ask every single person, why are you here? And if it's something they aren't working on, they need to leave. Because what you want are the people who are focused, the people who are decision makers, the people who can contribute, those are the people that need to be in the room. This is a technique I learned from Apple. Because time after time in meetings with them, I would actually watch the leadership come in, and would very specifically point out people in the room and ask them to explain why they were there. And it's amazing, and many times it was like, Oh, well, we thought at some point down the line. This might impact us. Well, we're not there. Great. Get out. It's amazing what it does to focus the room. It's amazing what it does. So you don't have On educated voices, unnecessary voices, voices who are there to derail voices who are there to be able to do something else. And it really lets you just focus on what needs to get done. That is an amazing, amazing thing. So again, here be a little bit harder on making sure the people that are in that room are the ones who really need to be there, and are really going to contribute. Now, let's talk about time. The one thing that none of us have any choice over the one thing that none of us can control. Now, for me, one of the things that will drive me crazy, is when meetings do not start on time, you can say whatever you want about how much you value people's time about how important the team is, but your actions speak louder. Be respectful of everyone's time, be respectful of every person, and expect that everybody else does the same. And this is the thing is that you cannot tolerate those people. Who wastes your time, and who waste the time of other people? There is nothing that will drive me crazier than starting a meeting a really important meeting, leadership meeting, project meeting, meeting of your choice. And you're in the midst of something and all of a sudden, somebody who is a key part of that comes strolling in five or 10 minutes late, they had to go get a coffee, they had to go do something like Oh, they didn't see what time it was. Basically, what you're saying is that you are more important than everyone else, that you are more important than the team. So for a leadership standpoint, not a message I'm okay with, as somebody who's running the meeting, not okay with the fact that I now have somebody that has missed a good chunk of what it is we're talking about, because they are now less effective. They are not able to contribute at the same rate as everybody else because they're going to either distract somebody else in the meeting, asking them to catch them up. They're going to be less effective because they're going to be trying to figure out what's actually going on before they say anything, but all of these outcomes are not okay. So this is my thing is that if what they will do is they will respect my time. respect everyone. time so that we can start on time, then what I will do is to make sure that I respect their time and respect the next meeting by building a buffer between meetings. This is one of those things where if you truly want people on your team to bring their best thinking to a meeting, don't chain meetings back to back to back, especially about different projects. And every meeting five or 10 minutes early, let people have the chance to recollect themselves, to actually move between meetings move between floors, just have a minute to reset their brain, check in with their commitments, check on their phone, post something on Instagram, whatever it's going to be, and then refocus on the next topic. So that's that thing is where I will ask for that discipline at the beginning of the meeting, you give it back by always trying to end the meeting early so that people can go on to the next thing. But here again, it takes time it takes the ability to again when we talk about the three things That will always bring about change are the tools you use, the space you occupy and the norms you establish. This squarely falls into the norms that you establish, it will be painful at first, people will bemoan they'll grumble, they'll give you dirty looks, you know, you're gonna have to be that person that actually call somebody out for showing up late and whenever they come into a meeting. But again, once you reestablish that norm, it works so much better. Because again, everybody's there on time. You can start on time, you can get it done, you can get people out of their, you know, edit better time, so they actually have time to go between their meetings. Here again, though, not always pleasant, not always fun, but it's something that needs to happen. Now, the last thing is to talk about what happens after the meeting the aftermath. Because here again, as we've talked about in presenting creative in so many other things, human memory is a really funny thing. Not many people have a great memory, and it's amazing how differently people can remember What happened in the meeting? what God said, What did we agree on so that whenever you come back days, weeks or even months later, how their expectations will have changed, their memories will have changed. And so just like, as we talked about in presenting creative, you have to accept this, you have to know that this is something that's going to happen. And so what you need to do is to say, Okay, I'm going to fight this by sending out to the entire group, a recap of what happened, it will be time consuming, because someone in every meeting is going to have to be the note taker, you can figure out based on the structure of your team, maybe this is a role that already exists. Maybe it's something that sits with the project manager. So the account people are different things like that. But you need to make sure that this happens, because you need to have a shared referenceable memory that everybody can go back and look at, they can go back and agree on what were the next steps. What did we agree to what did we say was going to happen? So then that way there again, there's a shared understanding so that I'm not getting into the next meeting. having to spend half of that meeting not talking about the work, not working through the decisions that need to get made. What I'm doing is I'm spending the time getting everybody back up to speed about what did we, what did we discuss what got agreed upon? What were those things that we walked out of here and said, this is what we're going to go do. Because then I've wasted half the time, and I've had the time to actually present the work that addressed that problem. So again, understand the devil, you know, this is the way that people are, they will always be that way. There are certain things that are great to go out and fight and change and do that. Sometimes some parts of human nature, you're just not, it's gonna be a fight that's gonna be bigger than you're gonna be able to handle. But that's the thing is to go through, and to make sure you're doing some of those basic things. Now, there are going to be two side effects to this. One of which we've already talked about a little bit. That is you being the person who's going to try to focus in your team, your organization, as the person who's going to try to get things to be more effective, that in the short term, you need to be prepared for the fact that not everybody's going to love you. I would highly suggest that what you do is instead of just simply starting to implement these changes, that you again, call everyone together and talk about the problem. Because if you bring everybody together and say, Look, we are having way too many meetings, we're not getting nearly enough, done, this is a real problem, you will get a lot of very vigorous head nodding a lot of people who really agree with that. And that so what you can say is that, again, establish the norm, say that from now on, everyone is expected to show up to these meetings on time to show up prepared that people who do not need to be in these meetings will be asked to leave and to go through this list of all the things that we've talked about to get it out in the open up front. Because at that point, then I've established a norm. It is one that is agreed upon communally by everyone there, and we've established what that is, so that whenever it happens in the meeting, it's not a surprise. It's not me being an asshole or having a bad day being grumpy or anything like that. It's me just simply doing what I said. Very simple, very straightforward, but just simply that approach to the change can make it Huge difference. Now the other thing that you're going to see is that there will be some people, most of them probably outside of the creative, quote unquote team who are going to start to have meeting withdrawals. Because this is the thing is that meetings are so common. And as we talked about the information up way of doing things, that you're going to see that they rely on these meetings for other information, they don't engage with the team, they don't engage in the work, they just simply sit around wait for the information to be brought to them. And the thing is, is that a lot of the underlings underneath them will often gauge their relative status by the number of meetings, the number of invitations how quote unquote busy they are, by how successful they are. So not everyone is going to be happy if you actually go through and try to reduce the number of meetings or reduce the number of people who are invited. But this is the thing is that to smooth out this transition, it helps to convey the idea that everybody will soon be attending fewer meetings, like I said, Go in and reestablish that norm, to make sure that the remaining meetings will be more productive than were in the past. leaders will be able to be come to the meetings that really are the ones where there is a decision to be made. And that's what we need them therefore, and then again, they need to trust the team to go through and to do that work. And that to give us the space to try this. If whenever we get to these decision making meetings, the work is not in the good place where they want it to be. Then we can talk about how do we take half steps to try to make sure that that's corrected. But this is the thing is to get to this place, because like, so many things that we talked about. Meeting cultures are about trust. There's your boss, trust you do they trust themselves do a lot of these sort of things. But again, the sign of for me, inexperienced or immature leadership are the people who don't trust they're the ones who feel like Well, I have to get all the decisions made. I have to be the one who's involved. I everything needs to be brought to me I have to be that central point. more mature leadership. People who trust the people that they work with people who believe Even the people that they work with will push that authority downhill. They'll be able to go out and say, Okay, look, I trust that you are smart that you can make a decision. We've talked about this in the past another great place to talk about it. That is Apple's Google's Facebook's, all these companies that we fetishize. That's our secret sauce. They actually think that the people who work for them know what they're doing. Simple, powerful, amazing insight. Then instead of micromanaging them, instead of doing this information up model, they say, Okay, look, we hired you, you're a smart person you came in to do this, to work to lead to do whatever it is great, go do that. Huge difference. Huge engagement difference, huge trust difference, huge difference on every sort of way. But that's what so much of this is about is about the fact that if you're not in that room, you're not missing out. If you don't need to be there, that's fine. trust the people who are in that room. Trust that they're smart enough to make those decisions. Trust that whatever it is that you can, again, be able to work through whatever that is because again, nothing that we're doing, we're not curing cancer. People we're not, you know, making these decisions that are coming down from the mountain on to big stone tablets. All we're doing is trying to figure out how to get work done. So show a little trust. Think about how can you get your people, your team to be more focused, to get the right people in the room, to be more respectful of time and to think about how do you keep those decisions made? Because that's the thing is that meetings, meetings are a symptom of leadership. Meetings are a symptom of an organization. We again, we've talked in the past about how what I want to do is to change thinking, not change behavior. And that's the key to all of this, is I need people to think differently. I need them to trust to respect other people to be focused about the work that needs to get done. What I don't want to do is just simply change the behavior of how If you have fewer meetings, but nothing really changes, have shorter meetings. But again, we aren't focused. So again, we're wasting a ton of time. I don't want to change the behavior, I want to change the thinking that sits underneath it. So if you can do that, it's amazing how the respect grows, time gets more efficient, a lot of these sorts of things. And again, I know that process, a lot of this stuff, is the least sexy thing when it comes to creativity. But the reason why I keep going back to it is because it is the thing that sets you up for success. It clears the path, it clears the problem, it clears all these things out of the way. So that whenever you need to make that decision, do that work, find that time have that idea, you can actually do it. And that's why it's important. So, as always, if you find any of this the least bit informative, helpful, anything like that, go to your favorite podcast platform, leave a review, ask it too often they do this, I'm gonna stop doing that. Just need a few more and I swear to God, I'll stop. But while you're there, make sure you have the subscribe button I know I'm not always you know like clockwork the way these episodes come out but whenever they do I want to make sure that you actually know that they're there so make sure you hit the subscribe button so you get those new episodes. As always, you can find out about more about this podcast related articles listen to other episodes get a complete rundown of all the show notes from this episode and all the other ones head over to podcast Stephen Gates calm Stephen as always as STP h n. Gates like Bill Gates. If you have any questions, anything you want to talk about anything you want to kind of learn more about anything like that. You find me on any social media channel, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, what Snapchat on and on and on on tons of that stuff. You can always head over to the Facebook page, just go over search for The Crazy One podcast every week, posting articles, opinions, all sorts of other stuff answering questions can make all that happen there. As always, everybody down and legal wants me to remind you that the views here are just my own. They don't represent any of my current or former employers are just my own thoughts. And finally, I say it every time because I mean it every time Thank you for your time. I know that time is truly the only real luxury that any of us have. Hopefully, because of this episode, maybe we'll get a little bit more of it back. But I know that you know, I'm always incredibly humbled that you want to spend any of your time with me. So, as always, hopefully your meetings get a little bit more productive. And while you do it, stay crazy.