Meeting memory
Meeting memory is like muscle memory. The more you practice running meetings a particular way, the more automatic it becomes.
This is a good thing when the meeting memory is productive and values everyone’s time. It’s awful when meeting memory takes us into minutiae and tactical things.
Like muscle memory
I liken this distinction between good meetings and bad meetings to a problem I have: my truck is a manual. When I brake, both of my feet go to work. One pushes the brake. The other depresses the clutch. It’s automatic.
This causes a problem when I drive my wife’s SUV, which is an automatic.
When pulling into our driveway, if I don’t think about which car I’m in both feet go to the floor. In my truck, that’s a good thing.
In the SUV it means my face nearly kisses the windscreen, my kids fly against seatbacks, and we leave skid marks on the road. My left foot’s muscle memory is to push something to the floor — and it finds one side of the brake pedal to do just that. Screech. Oof. Skid marks to prove it happened… again.
Like the skid marks, we have meeting minutes to prove when our meetings are too tactical. This has happened to us lately at Accoil. Leadership meetings are in the weeds and we’ve developed meeting memory that kept us here for a while.
Why is this bad?
Leadership is about direction and strategy. Sure we’re a small team and we each wear the strategic and tactical hats. But if all we focus on is the day-to-day, we lose sight of where we’re going.
It robs our teammates of their autonomy. Why build a team of kickass people if you’re going to take away their ability to make decisions and do their work?
It slows everything down and everyone feels it. There is a very real sensation when teams move fast, build cool stuff, and get shit done. Tactical leadership acts like an anchor, dragging momentum to a slow crawl.
Fixing the meetings
I have stubbornly ignored many people over several years telling me about the Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS) meeting structure. It’s time to give it a look.
This feels like the first step of an addict program, admitting we need to raise the level of our leadership meetings. I don’t say that lightly. This isn’t AA, but it is existential for our business.
The first step is to do weekly Level 10 (L10) Meetings with our leadership team.
That’s the story for now. I’ll share more on this in future notes. Until then, I have a favor to ask:
If you have leadership meetings that are routinely tactical and in the weeds, let me know and let’s do this L10 stuff together.
TTFN,
Peter
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