6 Levers - Ep. 5
Josh: [00:00:00] Did you guys have a good weekend?
Shaun: Yeah, I had a good weekend. Parents were in town for Easter, which is good. My wife works at a church, which you guys know, and so a little bit busy there with running back and forth to the church this weekend. But, some awesome services and yeah, just a great, great time celebrating Easter.
Josh: Nice.
Joe: The weather is just so great. I've always been a fall guy, but now I feel like with kids, spring is really competing with fall weather. Yeah, just that ability to get outside. It was so nice in St. Louis this weekend and just, we were outside all day, both days, so. It was nice. I feel like we've been very hibernating.
Josh: Oh, man.
Shaun: That's great. Yeah. I got like four days in a row of running cuz it was so nice too outside.
Josh: Yeah. [00:01:00] We went over to my brother's house yesterday and like, I think we came in for, I don't know, just like a couple times we ate outside. We had the Easter icon outside. The kids were outside jumping on the trampoline the whole time. It was, it was spectacular but –
Shaun: Nice.
Josh: I went on a run –
Shaun: Is it cold where you are though, Josh? Or is it warm?
Josh: No, it's super nice now. It's supposed to rain and snow though, I think on Friday and Saturday, which is pretty late.
Shaun: Ooh, jeez.
Josh: Yeah, right now it's like 60 degrees out, super sunny.
Shaun: Oh wow.
Josh: Yeah. My son and his grandma, they're having a picnic out on the front porch right now, which is really adorable. He has these like his little chair things…My mother-in-law is like, hanging out right next to him, just like, hanging out on the porch, waving to everybody coming by.
Shaun: Yeah, well, it seems like about 60 everywhere then. All locations.
Josh: Yeah. All right. Well, shall we go ahead and dive in?
Shaun: Let's do it.
Josh: All right. So today [00:02:00] we are going to focus on an important part of the framework, which is Rhythm.
And so to kick things off like we do, we'll go ahead and start with a quick story and, surprisingly, that story is about my pursuit of becoming a better dancer, which occurred in seventh grade. And my sisters took it upon themselves to help me learn how to dance and so we had some, I don't know, we had a mixer or something coming up in my grade school, bunch of different schools coming together and learning how to dance and my sisters who were both in high school.
They're like, All right, just start moving, and I'm like, Okay. And so I'm, like moving my arms. I'm not moving my lower body.
They're like, No, no, just relax a little bit. Start flowing a little bit more. Move your hips. And so like, very rigidly, I'm like moving my hips back and forth and they're just like, cracking up.
They're like, Okay, this is a lot of work. They're like, Just act like nobody's watching you. We're gonna leave the room and just start dancing a little bit. So they leave and I start flowing a little bit [00:03:00] more.
I can't, you know, I can't attest to how good of a dancer I was back then, or how good I am right now, which is not very good, but it has always stuck out of my mind in that rhythm is something that you don't need to think about too much. You just need to start doing it and you can overcomplicate it really, really quickly. So today we're gonna hopefully break down some of those things that we overcomplicate it.
Like how do we just get into a rhythm, how do we feel it a little bit more, and what does that mean for our overall organizational health?
So my mixer days are over, and I can tell you that I don't think I danced the first couple mixers because I was extremely nervous and self-conscious about my movements cuz I did not have rhythm. However, now I am more comfortable because I don't really care and I just start moving to the music.
Shaun: So, Josh, that's great. That one, I love that you're, I mean, I think there's like this lesson in here for all of us and I'm also not a good dancer and also can be quite self-conscious about it in front of other people and I think, but there's a lesson in here like if you just [00:04:00] start doing it, like you're gonna be less self-conscious – and so much of that is true about our framework.
It also reminds me of just kind of my old musician days and I was in a band for a number of years and I was actually in the rhythm section, so I was playing bass and if you know anything about like what the means to be in rhythm section, it means in most bands are, the most important piece is the bass player and the drummer being in lockstep.
And so it means like every note, every beat is accounted for and that you're the bass player is very tightly coordinated in sync with the drummer and vice versa, but what often happened when you're learning a song for the first time is I'm thinking, I'm like looking at the songwriter like, What note is that here?
Like this, are we gonna hit a second verse here? Where's the bridge again? And like, are we coming to the chorus for a third time and like, what's that note on the outro? Right, and so what I'm very focused on just like playing the right things at the right time and haven't even hit like the actual [00:05:00] bassline yet cuz I'm just trying to get the structural components down.
And so that doesn't sound very good or feel very good in those moments as you're learning and trying things on, but then you get it and then you can start flowing and things feel so much better, which I think feels a lot like, I want to – that's my aspiration in dancing. I'm not there yet, but to be able to be to that place where I stop thinking about it and can just do it and hit a good, good state of flow.
So, so much. I think learning for what this means for rhythms in organizations and teams, and Joe, I don't know if that's a good enough segue or tee up or if there is any good segue from dancing and playing music to team rhythms, but we'll maybe leave you with the challenge to bridge it.
Joe: Well, I love, I mean, a couple – the word that you shared that just makes me think about the journey that teams often go on when trying to create a stronger [00:06:00] rhythm is “flow”.
And kind of Josh used this like rigidity of trying to like, you know, like I'm imagining like robot Josh to try –
Josh: That’s on point.
Joe: Like, does my arm need to be up here right now? Right, and just this like super, you're like, it feels super rigid to you. You've been given direction on it and so you're like, sweating the details that don't even matter, right?
To like, and so the journey like, oftentimes for teams trying to develop a strong rhythm is like this place of real discomfort and rigidity and questioning their every move to this state of flow, right? Like where it's like you're not even thinking about the rhythm itself, the structure and the moves are all kind of in the background and you're just, you're flowing.
So yeah, I love that. I love that reminder of the common sort of journey that teams go on to try to create a strong rhythm. I think bottom line though, when you're, when your rhythm’s strong, [00:07:00] whether it's dancing, which I can't, I don't know what good rhythm looks like or feels like in dancing or music, but when it feels, when it's strong inside of an organization, you can feel it, right?
Like you can feel that rhythm being, you know, in a good place and you're seeing the value and the impact of having that strong rhythm.
Josh:Yeah.
Shaun: Yeah, totally. Go ahead, Josh.
Josh: Well, it just made me think when you say like, you know, any organization you can feel that rhythm. I think it's really just like expanding it to any team too.
Like I'm thinking about like my soccer days where it's like there's games where you just knew some, where somebody was gonna be, right? There was just this rhythm to the overall game and practice, and you're just like, okay, you're anticipating people's movements. You're able to pass the ball and lead it, you know, lead it in front of 'em a little bit.
But you're right, like it's palpable and, you know, people watching it can feel it too.
Shaun: Yeah. That's great. The only thing [00:08:00] I was gonna add here is that I think it's when you develop a strong sense of rhythm and each rhythm is designed well – which we'll we'll get into in this pod here – you actually, and we're gonna talk a lot about meetings, although meetings are not the only thing that are in involved or considered with rhythm.
You get to a point where you actually enjoy your meetings, right? Which is, you know, Josh has said a number of times, like, my favorite time of the week is coming together with y'all for the leadership team meeting and like I say this to other people and they look at me like I'm crazy, you know?
And I know that feeling too, like being, like looking at people saying, I enjoy these, these meeting rhythms that I have and so it's like kind of also like one possibility here, and it might sound like crazy from where you feel like you are right now, but imagine being in a place where you no longer don't look forward to your meetings, but you actually look forward to them because they're designed the right way and you're hitting that state of flow with your teammates and achieving some of these things we're [00:09:00] talking about.
Josh: All right. So Shaun, you talked about diving into the overall rhythm lever. Can somebody on the team break down what are some of the building blocks of the overall rhythm lever, what they mean, what they're used for, and how you think about just how do we intentionally, use this as a lever to pull, to improve organizational health, but also an indicator for, okay, where can we improve our overall rhythm as an organization?
Shaun: I'll start here and, Joe, feel free to jump in. I think that the reason that the rhythm lever, well, it was just, it would, it made it the cut as a lever is because we think about this in many ways, is that the most important strategic activities, the reoccurring things that we don't want to get left to chance, and how do we encode them in the way that we operate, right? So that, we don't get to [00:10:00] the end of a period and say like, Oh gosh, we haven't checked in on our strategic goals, or we haven't created space to talk through our most important, emergent issues, right?
We say like, these most important things about how we work together, how do we encode them in these regular operating cycles and rhythms so that we make sure that they have a chance to be worked out, reviewed, monitored, thought through, right? And so, in many ways we talk about the whole framework as not leaving these big strategic activities to chance, but the rhythm lever is one, is where that really comes, where it manifests, and you can see that happening as it relates to, I think kind of like probably in this, what we'll talk about as the main two building blocks or these two ideas that we call like the “operating cycle”.
So these handful of key meetings that we know that if teams put them in place, they start to make a big difference in how they operate and then the other one would be this idea of rhythm design and so – and [00:11:00] that's just kind of simply this idea that not all meetings are the same, meant they should have different objectives that we think about what do we wanna achieve when we get together for this recurring rhythm?
And with that in mind, how do we then design that rhythm to achieve the objective?
Joe: Yeah, I think that Shaun's kind of getting at the – thatt mac first, that macro structure that defines the rhythm lever in the operating cycle. So, you know, we know that if you adopt, install this operating cycle of what's your annual cadence, what's your quarterly or interim cadence, whether it's actually quarterly or trimester, some, you know, that interim cadence, and then what's your weekly-biweekly cadence –
If you adopt an operating cycle that ensures those three rhythms are talking to each other and they're serving the core objectives that you need to on a weekly, [00:12:00] biweekly basis, quarterly, trimester, early basis, an annual basis, that's sort of how you begin to ensure that these important activities that happen on a – should happen on a recurring basis actually happen. And that you are looking at that structure and asking yourself, is this functioning the way that it should be?
So you're placing that continuous improvement lens on that structure but then outside of it, it's this other tool of, if we want to add – if we want to create a habit or a routine around something else that's strategic and essential for our organization to do, how do we do that? And that's that rhythm design tool that we help teams, you know, implement is how do you design this, right?
If we want to see even something like creating shared experiences with our team or team-building-like experiences, and we wanna routinize that and create more of a habit around it, well, how do we do that?[00:13:00] We think about, you know, building a rhythm out of it and so really taking a look at the rhythm design and ensuring you're making that happen effectively.
Josh: Can you take it a little bit deeper? What do you, when you say “rhythm design”, can you like, take one from a recent client or something and break down the different components of it, and then maybe we can get and go a little bit deeper?
Joe: Yeah. So I mean, it often starts from a place of sort of, why do you think you should create a rhythm around this activity, right? What – talk to us about the why and usually from that we're getting at the real meaning behind the activity that this team is sensing needs to happen a bit more habitually and from there, we sort of are able to align on an objective of sorts.
So let's start by defining the objective of this rhythm based on sort of your ultimate why you think this activity should happen and you'll find that in that process, if you go through that [00:14:00] process meaningfully and arrive at a solid objective for the rhythm, that is, that moves you forward tremendously, right?
You realize a lot of alignment inside of that defining and that questioning and then it's around structure and tools. So, okay, so this is the objective. How are we gonna facilitate this objective? If it's more of a – if it winds up being more of a meeting-like structure, you're leaning into the agenda, you know, what agenda can we create to facilitate the achievement of this objective?
But if it's not just a meeting, if it's more of a process or a piece of communication even, you're starting to think about what, you know, what do we need to do to facilitate and move us towards that objective? And sort of alongside that, you're asking yourself about tools, you know. What tools might you leverage to help facilitate, you know, to support that meeting.
Could be technology. So it could be, if you're [00:15:00] thinking about a meeting, what tool are we gonna use to facilitate the meeting in a meaningful way, in a way that helps to get us towards those objectives. So I guess it is like really trying to get at the why and as a result, land the objectives, and then think about what are the structure and tools you can use to facilitate the achievement of that on a regular basis.
Shaun: Joe, this piece is – I think starting with the why is so important because it’s just sort of reminding me of a conversation we've had both internally and in guiding our clients and on this important rhythm design piece and it's elevating for me, like, this idea that often time when we have to work on something together, I think we, in teams in general – and I don't mean we as our organization, but just like with the global “we” – we think, well, we need to meet, like we gotta have a meeting, right?
And it tends to be like this, it's like the only thing we know to do. Like if we've got a big project coming up or something coming up, [00:16:00] we need, we're gonna meet, right? And we're gonna meet on a recurring basis and let's set the meeting for every week, or should it be every two weeks? I don't know. What do you think? – Right?
And then we're just, we look up and we're like, a month, six weeks later, we're like, what's going on with my calendar? It's like, totally full, right? And so, you get to this “why”, you can start to then answer it to say, Hmm, maybe we could do that in this one part of this existing rhythm we already have. Would that – what do you think Team, could we carve out this and move this? And maybe just for this group of people that are already meeting, maybe they can accomplish that. Why over here? or, you know, What – maybe we don't even need to do that.
Maybe there's, to your point here, there's an asynchronous share we can do at this time every week that would accomplish that “why”, right? So it's just some communication that we all agree to send out that gets to the why. But if we start with the why, then we can start to see like what, knowing the tools that I have, how do I then use the tools to accomplishment, and what we hope teams realize is that it doesn't [00:17:00] always mean creating a new meeting rhythm.
Joe: Mm-hmm.
Josh: I feel like, and what you just said is gonna blow some people's minds that we don't actually have to create a new meeting. Just like a practical example, Mission Matters Group, we brought some new discipline to some KPIs and targets that we're gonna monitor on a monthly basis. It's like operational financial performance, a couple different things, and we started out with having it as a monthly meeting and basically reviewing in retrospect and then as we got into it, we're like, Okay, this actually – this is meaningful data to be incorporated within our leadership team meeting. Let's get rid of this brand new meeting that we created and let's actually merge it with this other thing.
So to hit kind on Shaun and Joe's point, we should constantly be monitoring these different rhythms and disciplines that we have and saying, Is this the right place for it? Is there a better use of [00:18:00] this time? Because time is extremely valuable and how else can we augment or extend other rhythms that we have going within an organization?
So, again, they're always changing. Rhythm should be fluid, hopefully and, again, those are just some practical examples that we in our own organization are constantly learning.
How can we adapt? How can we get a little bit better?
Shaun: Josh, that makes me think – and I love that example and it makes me think like you don't always know what the tools, what's gonna be the thing that ends up working out.
And so like, I think the encouragement, you should – we say this all the time – is you're gonna learn through doing so we thought in the example you just shared that it needed a new meeting rhythm. We got into it and tried it another way and then said, Does it work in this? Does it work now? Does it feel good?
Like just moving in the leadership team rhythm with like, Yeah, that feels better than when we did it as its own rhythm. Why don't we try that? Let's keep doing that. And we'll keep asking that question, Does it continue to feel good over [00:19:00] here? Is it achieving the objective of what we wanted it to achieve?
But we're trying to hold a learning mindset here and to say like, as we're doing this, is it achieving what we want it to achieve? If it's not, we can make some shifts and that it just takes a lot of the pressure off of like, you know, we don't have to talk in certain round and round of what we think.
Let's just try something and if it doesn't work, we can make some adjustments.
Josh: So that's why I was able to start dancing a little bit more fluidly when my sisters left the room. Stopped talking and I was able to just start doing it a little bit more.
Shaun: There you go.
Josh: Sorry Joe. Go ahead.
Joe: Shaun, one thing, I mean, I think what – that mindset and that sort of posture around, “we learn by doing”, but we're also sort of experimenting and we feel like at any moment we could cut the ties with a rhythm is so important to embrace while embracing the rhythm lever, because we haven't really just straight defined that. Like the rhythm is really just [00:20:00] all about like these operational routines, right?
It's about, you know, adopting the “I”, you know, embracing the idea of the value of habit and routine and saying around really important stuff, Let's routinize it. So what are your operational routines? Well, on the one hand we see all this value when we routinize things that – in effective ways that are super important because we're not leaving them subject to chance anymore. We're making these things more automatic.
But on the, on the alternative side of that, right? If it's actually not as meaningful, it's not as impactful and it's recurring, it drives us nuts, right? It sucks up our time. It doesn't feel as impactful.
Shaun: Yeah.
And so if you just go full steam ahead with adapting rhythm, without recognizing at any moment, you can just pull the plug on it and say, Hey, that's not working. You wind up with a calendar filled with recurring meetings and you start to, you start to think [00:21:00] like, Oh, this isn't for me. We've been down this road before of recurring everything and that just, that left us with no time for anything else. So I think you're just hitting on this important mindset to embrace as you also think about adopting the rhythm lever.
Shaun: Yeah. That's so great. I mean, it feels, I'm just being reminded of, there feels probably nothing more frustrating in our work than like when you're feeling overwhelmed and have so many things to do and you show up to a meeting and it feels like not a good use of time. When you're like, Ugh, I have all this stuff to do and I was here and it wasn't meaningful.
And don't get me wrong, that's gonna happen from time to time, even with really thoughtful intention, but when it starts to happen on a recurring basis, then you're – I think what we're saying here is we want you to feel empowered to adjust. Right? And not just keep at it when it's not working.
Josh: Yeah. We talk a lot about 6 [00:22:00] Levers being a people-focused framework. So even the concept of this saying like, I don't think this rhythm is serving the purpose anymore. Can I raise my hand and say, can we actually analyze this and evaluate this and see if we should just get rid of it all together or repurpose it in some way, shape, or form?
So having the analysis of routines as a part of your organizational operating framework or system, it gives people a common language to say, This meeting kind of sucks. Like, we need to revisit this because we could be repurposing our time a little bit better.
And that's courage, that's boldness, but it's also enabled because of a common language and it being a part of the way that you work within your organization.
Joe: That makes me think about, you know, one of the leaders I work with who leads a significant team but is also a member of the executive team, and the, you know, the moment that he and his team, you know, the teams, [00:23:00] got into a good rhythm and had, you know, defined their operating cycle had even applied, you know, the rhythm design components.
So anytime they're thinking about building out some more recurring, you know, operating rhythms, they're really thinking about it with an intention and their team's gotten to a point where they're humming. You can feel it. There's very few meetings that don't feel super objective-driven and structured in a way that's working to facilitate the objectives. And yet he's also a part of an executive team that has its own set of rhythms and how painful it is for him to be a part of some of these meetings because you just, your bar raises so much that the moment you hop into that classic recurring meeting rhythm where there's really no agenda, it's just like status updates ad nauseum.
You can't – you're like, beside yourself. You don't know what it's like to be in that space anymore and [00:24:00] so journeying with them through that and trying to support and how do we bring this to even more folks on, you know, and teams within our orgs is – it's fun stuff. But, yeah, your bar changes quite a bit once you really do embrace this one.
Shaun: And, Joe, both of you and Josh just shared there. I mean, it makes me think of a couple things. One, just that it's just to really double down on this idea of the power of common language and the power of scalable tools, right? I mean, so when something in a world where you don't have common language around any of these things, rhythm design, look, people look at you and have no idea what that means, or even some of the components within meetings, which will, as we talk about them a little bit today, and as you learn more about the framework, you might begin to feel like they're a bit modular.
Like I can take a key update section and apply it to this rhythm. I can take an emergent discussion and apply it to whatever rhythm. Like I can take these pieces and I can build the right meeting to achieve the [00:25:00] objective. And when you start to understand those things as a team and then you're a participant, like this leader you're working with, Joe is, and let's say the other members of the team were versed in some of this, you can give some quick feedback and say, Hey, this meeting isn't quite going the way it went, and I think it's because we're going a little long in this thing and we're not long enough here.
And they know exactly what that means. They know like, Oh, we need to spend more time on emergent issues. It's not like a whole hour-long coaching section on how to run a better meeting. You don't have to do that because. We've taken the time to align on the common language, how to run these pieces, and now we can give these quick adjustments to each other and say, Well, what's off? Why aren't we doing it?
It's because this particular thing isn't working the way it should and we've, we know what that means. We've agreed to how to do that and, and now we can just make adjustments and move much more quickly.
Josh: That's great. So making me go back to the purpose, starting with the purpose again too, right?
Again, like having that knowledge and saying, We're trying to achieve [00:26:00] this and we're nowhere close to this because I think it's something in the design. Again, just having all those building blocks of this, you know, of this rhythm lever is super huge to be able to say, Okay, let's talk about this. Let's figure it out, if we're actually achieving the intent of, you know, why we set this meeting in the first place.
I don't know what prompted me, but as we were talking, it made me think about our last podcast episode, which we are talking about the focus lever, and as we're talking about purpose and, you know, making subtle changes, we're also thinking about what are we trying to achieve as an organization. And so this makes me kind of pull back that last episode where we're talking about, Okay, focus and now rhythm.
And I, I'd love to hear in your words, how are these two like, inextricably connected? Why are they like, kind of hand-in-hand in what happens when an organization has clear focus and really healthy rhythms, and what is that kind of superpower as we talk about it internally?
Joe: I think it's [00:27:00] really hard to sustain your focus without a strong operating rhythm. You know, I think that if you go about creating focus in the form of goals, priorities, but you don't have an operating cycle, stood up where you're going to meaningfully monitor and check in on that focus area, those priorities and goals, that focus is going to lose steam. Super difficult to maintain a really strong focus if you’re not, in some way – regularly in a synchronous way as well, right? – actually together at the same time, look at what the focus is. The focus starts to lose steam.
So I think one of the things we just call on is, if you truly want this focus to sustain and to be strong and really be guiding and focusing the team, you've gotta [00:28:00] attach a rhythm to it where you're monitoring it with meaning and ultimately reviewing it whenever it's due up, right? Whenever you're set to achieve it.
But the thing we, you don't really realize until you install some strong rhythms is what a rhythm does to heighten your focus and make your focus more meaningful. It's not until you get into the practice of doing it that you realize during that rhythm, let's say it's a quarterly sync where you're monitoring your annual goals. When you monitor those annual goals, if you're doing it with meaning, with the little structure, you wind up walking out of that more focused on those annual goals and probably have adjusted them in some way, right?
Goals are kind of always this like, slightly, they're like kind of almost always refining a little bit if you're really trying to make sure that they're creating as much focus as possible.
And so the rhythm, it sort of [00:29:00] serves as this like sharpening lens on your focus area because it's that space where you get to check in on it, look at it with a real fine, you know, fine lens and discern whether or not it's still the exact goal that you want. Does it need any – does it need any modification or adjustment?
And then you walk out of it with this heightened sense of focus about what, you know, what you had in the first place. So it has this really neat sort of sharpening and focusing lens as well, when you jump into those meetings.
Josh: That's good.
Shaun: Yeah, I think one thing to add – I agree, totally agree with all that, Joe – but I think the thing that I would add.
Is that sometimes knowing that you're going to attach these rhythms to something that you're gonna focus on helps to actually provide some criteria of worthiness for what your focus is. So what I mean by that is like if you can imagine as you're setting annual goals, for example, on those big priorities and your vinyls targets, [00:30:00] and kind of place yourself in these quarterly syncs where you're going, review your progress, make adjustments, etc., you can start to say like, Are these the type of things that would be worthy of the team coming together and doing that type of like, deeper work around or two would be like, Are they even big enough that I can imagine that they would span the course of, you know, multiple quarters throughout the year?
And then just kind of more near term than that, you can do the same thing at the, at the court. Like what are we gonna focus on the interim? Again, whether it's a trimester, semester, or quarter. Like, can we imagine that these things are worthy enough of our time to review them as a team every week on how are we doing, right?
It begins like very filtering and helping us to think about like, what do we wanna focus on? So they have this interesting relationship where primarily we think about them as the way Joe described them. Like, you know, okay, we've got our focus now we need to add some discipline and rigor to both make progress and monitoring, to learn, and adjust, etc.
But they can also provide criteria to help us think about like, Are [00:31:00] they indeed worthy of our focus? When we imagine the amount of additional work we're gonna do to keep track of them.
Josh: Man, that's great. Yeah, so Shaun, when you were chatting, it made me think about, you know, this worthiness of your focus, where I think on the last episode we talked about focus and Mission Matters Group rolled out the goal-setting framework, objectives and key results and like 2018 or 2019, and we kind of – I wouldn't say we botched it. It just took a lot longer than we expected to start making it a really useful tool for us.
A couple things that contribute to it, right? We didn't set realistic targets, right? We had a couple goals that were just like, they [00:37:00] weren't gonna be achievable in a single year. We didn't have a plan for it. We just got excited and put it on there, and we're like, Yeah, this is gonna be our rallying cry.
The other thing that we didn't have was right, we set a goal, but we didn't start kind of like what we've been talking about here, intentionally saying, How are we gonna monitor the progress against this specific focus? and so really at the end of the year, we kind of are sharing the results of our objectives and key results and we're nowhere near 'em, and we're like, How did we not get these, you know? And so there's like, this element of surprise at the end of the year. It's just like, Of course this isn't gonna happen. And so now, right, we have our annual setting, we have our quarterly review, we have our monthly review, and we're monitoring on a weekly basis as well.
And so something that you touched on in terms of worthiness of our focus, I remember in the end of 2020, I think it was Q3, we actually abandoned one of our key results, and I remember getting feedback from one of our teammates. [00:38:00] He's like, Honestly, what you just did there? He's like, You increased my trust in the leadership team, like tenfold, right? Because before that, we hadn't really abandoned anything, right?
Our world was changing and we just kind of kept monitoring it and still trying to make progress, but in this one quarter we said, This is not worth our time anymore. Too much has changed, and because we had a weekly review and a monthly review, we were able to say, Okay, what is going on? Let's make some very intentional decisions if we should continue to put our focus here. Is this worthy of our time, attention, and resources and if not, why are we rallying the whole organization around it?
And so those two things coupled together allows us to say, Is this still our focus? What has changed, and if it still is, let's continue to nurture it, monitor it, and celebrate it with our different routines within the organization. [00:39:00]
But anyways, I'd love to know, we talked, we had some discrepancies before we started recording regarding the concept of an empty vessel and what was the true meaning of it. But I'd love to talk about bad rhythm and what's the impact, right?
We do have rhythms, organizations have weekly meetings and they don't accomplish anything in it. But give me some examples that you've seen from the field and then also what's the impact on the overall state of the organization?
Shaun: Well, I'm gonna jump in here and I'm gonna sort of answer your question, but answer it in a way that allows me to talk about something that I really want to talk about and it's this idea of like, making sure we get to like the emergent aspect of – and also kind of like also the org health aspect of an [00:40:00] org solu – I should say, like, organizational operating system aspect of what a cap and rhythms, and what I mean by that is one example of what a bad meeting can look like is you actually get through the meeting and you don't talk about the things that you should've that mattered, right?
So you successfully get through an agenda, but because maybe the agenda was not designed correctly or the meeting was not designed correctly, you – the team does not end up focusing on the things that matter most for that team in that particular week, and so that is like a symptom of what can happen when a meeting is not designed the right way – and Joe, feel free to go back to answer Josh's direct question if you don't want to go where I'm taking this – but it does, you know, one of the things that we've seen that matters so much when you, in particular on like the weekly rhythm, is making sure that when you're looking at rhythms, this isn't just about monitoring goals.
I think we've spent a lot of time talking about that so far and it's [00:41:00] certainly important and it's a critical function that key rhythms can achieve, but they can also create space like in your week to come together and work through difficult issues you're facing that are emergent that were not planned for, right? That like we didn't – we had this as our priorities and then this thing happened that was completely out of our control because we live in an ever-changing dynamic world, right? So part of what rhythm should do is to create space for that, not just in the rhythm – of course, we don't want you to only do that when you're meeting. You can do that hopefully at other times. But how do you design a meeting rhythm so that it creates space in a meaningful amount of space to work through your most important issues?
Joe: Yeah, Shaun, I think one good point that you call out is that up until this point, we've talked a lot about rhythm being the monitoring of goals, which we know we should create rhythm around that, but it's certainly not the only strategic activity [00:42:00] that we encourage teams to create rhythm around.
That being said, that's where I go to for the meeting rhythm that has a pain point that leaves teams feeling discouraged about continuing to do it and it's that first time that a team runs their own quarterly sync or that sort of interim meeting where they're coming together to monitor their goals and priorities and if they've not prepared for that moment to do that, there's a significant amount of prep that has to happen before that that meeting happens, where we're making sure we actually have data to look at.
If you hop into that meeting and you don't have any – the prep is little, you don't actually have the data about how are you doing towards goals and that can be somewhat anecdotal even, but as long as it's prepared and it's formal and you're actually reporting out in meaningful ways around status [00:43:00] updates and bringing as much rigor and data to it as you can. but if you haven't done that then that can feel so like, time wasted, right? You wind up getting involved in these conversations where you're talking about whether or not it was even, you know, we defined it clearly or, you know, you're talking about whether it's even possible to get a certain data point.
You're sort of talking around the goals and it's messy and there's not a lot of structure to it and so then teams feel just like sort of “meh” about that meeting rhythm when in their minds they're going into it with high expectations, thinking this is gonna be this opportunity for us to really meaningfully look at our our goals and priorities and align and it should be this celebratory and energizing and accountable moment, but because we haven't actually done the work beforehand, sort of [00:44:00] flops and then what happens, right?
We sort of think like, Is it possible to do that meeting well, so I love telling the story of the 10 minutes tells-all, right? We get a chance to work with a lot of orgs who we've observed, after years of implementing structures like this and we do an exercise now that's sort of inspired by one of those orgs where we just take a 10 minute snapshot of a team's quarterly sync, where in 10 minutes you see their scorecard. They walk through all of their data. How are they progressing towards goals? How do they do against quarterly priorities? Their team leader provides some real meaningful sort of summarizing, synthesizing points and in 10 minutes, that team has monitored all that information, has gained all this alignment and clarity and understanding around where they are and walks out of it fired up, [00:45:00] right, and ready to go, ready to get into setting of priorities for the next quarter, right?
So you sort of compare that group who can do in 10 minutes, all of that high-leverage work against another group who's really flailing through it and so it's like when you're observing that team sort of in that flop or supporting them afterwards, it's trying to help to go back to rhythm design, right? To go back to objectives and think through how can we improve this? So yeah, that's just an example that comes to mind for both the flop and maybe the exemplar.
Shaun: Yeah, I mean that Joe, I think there's an overarching point here on the importance of prep and I would say even for what I was sharing earlier about like the.
Leaving how some meetings or a lot of your meetings should be designed to leave space to talk through emergent issues. Even [00:46:00] that requires some prep. Like even that requires us as participants thinking to ourself, even if we're just five minutes for this one particular part, like, What are the big issues that I wanna bring to the team to work on than when we get together this week to talk through, right?
And that's thinking of all of your responsibilities. It's thinking of the teams you lead – if you lead multiple teams or the one team that you lead – if you lead one team and things that are popping up that maybe we didn't plan for, right? And then saying, if nothing else, I want to, this is the most important thing that I wanna bring to the team to talk through this week.
And maybe you've got two or three, but with that pre-thinking ahead of time, you're much better. The things are gonna go so much better than if the facilitator says, Okay team, we've got a couple things on the list right now. What else do we got? and for the first time that and that moment you're just like, Hmm, what else matters right now? You might come up with something, but it's very unlikely that it's going to be as meaningful as [00:47:00] you spend those five minutes just doing a little bit of prep.
And so, back to your question, Josh, that's often where we see meetings not go as well as they could, as when that, when they don't prepare for moments like that, and so therefore the time they have together is not as impactful and meaningful as it could have been.
Josh: When you're talking about just prep, right, we're going from a team and an organizational level down to an individual's responsibility leading up to an important routine, right? So it's an individual's routine supporting, strengthening a team routine.
This made me think, what's your top two or one personal routines, that you do on a weekly basis?
This is a little impromptu question. But yeah, I mean, I feel like that's a super important piece in that, you know, if we just isolate it to the team, we overlook our responsibility and every single person has some rhythm, routine discipline that they do on a daily, weekly basis. What are some of your [00:48:00] personal routines that you think strengthen your work or personal life?
Joe: Yeah, I think mine, I've got two that – yeah, I've got two that come to mind and they're really interrelated. One happens on Friday, one happens on Monday. Friday is sort of the – what I call my “Joe Three”. So it's my one-on-one with myself, and it's really looking out at the next few weeks, and it's a calendar scan to start. which I found to be fun as well as really impactful.
And so it's scanning the calendar to see sort of – what do I have and how do I need to adjust, and also make sure I'm prepared for the big things, cuz oftentimes I have my calendar booked out for, you know, weeks, but don't always have the prep for the important pieces booked out for the same number of weeks.
So it's [00:49:00] calendar scan, making sure I've got the right prep on my calendar and then on Mondays, our team does a weekly priority share out. So we've got an agreement where we, every Monday by 10 share out in our team Slack channel what are our top three or four priorities for the week and oftentimes that scan from Friday is very informative of what I put down for that week.
But that's a nice little forced prioritization, like what from this week is actually most important and how do I make sure that those pieces get the energy focus and results that we need 'em to?
Shaun: Yeah, I think mine are somewhat similar. I – calendar scan is an important part of a routine and habit that I do as well. I will share with you that I do this on Sundays and I know that some people might have opinions about like what they want to do on Sundays, and I think that's [00:50:00] totally fine.
I'd say one thing I'll, my one note I'd have about this is that I tend to take significant breaks in the middle of the day to do physical activity and choose to let my work spill into the weekends a little bit. But that works for me and so part of my routine on Sunday and preparing for the weekend, by the way, I love my work and so these aren't like the “Sunday Scaries” where I'm like trying to work over some anxiety. So if that's you, maybe you don't wanna do that.
But because I am mostly looking forward to everything that's on the calendar, I'm similarly preparing for the work and preparation required for each one of these and as someone who has to facilitate a number of things, I'm mainly trying to make sure that I've got the time blocked to do the appropriate and – amount of preparation for the things that I have to facilitate.
I think the other thing that I'm doing there is making sure expectations are clear for anything that I share ownership of and so, Josh is – [00:51:00] like for you and I tomorrow we're co-leading an internal planning with our team, making sure that if it's not something I own solely, that I'm collaborating effectively with that individual to make sure we're clear on an expectations perspective, How we are going to own running whatever it is that, whatever project or task it is that we have together.
So that is a good experience for anybody that's participating.
Josh: Yeah, I'm really glad I asked this question for two reasons. One, I was genuinely interested, like what you would say, but then two, so I got a few Slack messages from Shaun last night, which was a Sunday night And I saw the notifications, but because I know that that's his routine, his individual rhythm, and we have an agreement and expectation that he knows that I'm probably not gonna respond to it until first thing in the morning.
But because I'm aware of that, it actually gives us a pretty unique ability to have deep levels of [00:52:00] trust, understanding of how each other works, and respect the way that each other works. So that is – I'm, I'm glad you flag that. It's a good learning – I promise I'll answer this one as well.
Normally Shaun's like, Hey, you can't get outta this too. There's very similar to you guys, I have, I think two of like, my most important like, life routines – but they happen each day during the week and then on Monday mornings – but every day I wake up pretty early and I have like 15 minutes worth of reading and about 20 minutes of silence and then about 20 minutes worth of prep. And so that daily routine, because I'm not as, just to call it as it is, I'm not as organized with my calendar. So I need to look on a daily basis, otherwise I'll get outta sorts pretty quickly and so that early morning routine just gets my mind right, my heart right, and just ready to tackle the day.
And then I usually, you know, 6:30-8 o'clock off and just hang out with the kiddos and my wife, and that's a huge part of my life.
And then, [00:53:00] I think the other one is my LTM, my leadership team meeting prep, and we have this meeting on Mondays called “Family Standup”. So I take about an hour on Monday morning, think about the things that happened from the previous week, assemble our weekly scorecard, and it just gets my mind right about, okay, what do we need to communicate to the organization? What do I need to focus on for the week? And, you know, similar to Joe and Shaun, what communication to, you know, different owners of things or different initiatives, must I do, but those things are…
Shaun: Josh, I will share. You took the question in a spot which I wasn't necessarily feeling and you made Joe and I sound like maniacs with you choosing to talk about your meditation and boarding prayer and things like that.
So I was, my lens on the answer your question was very work-focused. You guys are, but, Joe and I are not robots. We also have some – I'll speak for myself and I'll let Joe speak, but we spend time with our families and we have some morning reflection time as well. [00:54:00]
Joe: Yeah, I do yoga, every morning –
Josh: I thought I gave a preface that it was personal and work life.
Joe: No, it's good. I love hearing it. I mean, it's a practice. I love just hearing people's routines cuz like Josh you're, I'm up every morning as well, but every three, six months or so, I need to refine that morning routine a little bit.
And just hearing you speak to your specific discipline right now has me fired up to rekindle mine a little bit with a little bit more intention. That's good.
Shaun: Yeah. Well, you two, you guys – both of you guys are two of the most, I don't know if “thoughtful” maybe is the right word, about your morning routines of anybody that I've ever known. Just with the amount of like discipline and thoughtfulness that you bring to what you do and you both are early risers. so that's – Yeah, I've learned a lot from both of y'all over the years and I've tried a [00:55:00] few things. I haven't, still don't get up before six, but it's definitely an aspiration maybe one day.
Josh: Alright, well we're getting to that point where we love organizations and individuals making progress, right? Sometimes we can get just caught in this minutiae of perfection and we feel like we can't make any progress or make a decision. So turning it to Joe and Shaun: if you had an organization that runs their organization like I danced as a seventh grader –
What would your feedback be to them in terms of building that rhythm as an organization? Anything that just comes to mind. They don't have any rhythm whatsoever. No meeting cadences. What would your advice be to just get the ball rolling and make some progress?
Joe: I think I'd sort of start real general, and it's almost like we've got such a relationship with meetings – so many of us have such a [00:56:00] relationship with meetings and oftentimes it's not a super positive one, and yet I think what we've found internally but with so many organizations is that the opposite is certainly possible for any org who wants to lean into it and so I think it's embracing the reality that like a super objective-driven, disciplined and structured meeting rhythm can have an incredible impact on your team, and so choose a specific meeting and try out sort of rebuilding a set of objectives maybe with your team.
Define an agenda, try to put some structure and detail to how it's gonna be facilitated, what tools you're gonna use. You know, take an hour or so to do that, and then test it out and I think you'll learn quite a bit [00:57:00] from just – that sounds super simple, I know, but I think that the thing to go alongside that is to not be discouraged when the meeting doesn't go as well as you'd like it to be.
Because when you're doing this and you're reinvesting in it, it never does right off the bat. Like we talked about at the beginning of this, like it probably will feel a little clunky and rigid, because you're thinking about your steps and your moves and you're not as familiar with it.
Don't be discouraged. That is just normal anytime we try to do something, you know, new. And so, you know, rather than be discouraged, be encouraged that you've tested out a new intentional rhythm, and you've learned something from it, right? And just get back to it the next time around. You'll feel good about it.
Shaun: Yeah. I don't, I'm not just saying this, take an easy way out. I don't know that I'd say anything different. I don't even know that I want to offer anything different because it feels so much like the right place to start is to [00:58:00] pick a meeting. Maybe it's a meeting you already have or could be a new one that you're thinking about, but just going in for the objective, for the why behind the meeting and then – we're talking about recurring meetings, right? Not just one-off, but the recurring ones – and get aligned in that and then try to design some pieces of the meeting around it.
I think that maybe just the point to emphasize here is like when things get a little off, as Joe described it, and like, don't be too tough on yourself. Like, go back to the why, right? So if something doesn't feel like it's as effective as you thought, like you could answer, you should be asking the question, Is this part of the meeting achieving our objective, right?
So if you just keep going back to that and then keep tinkering with it until you get it to where you want it to be and hold, you know, kind of have an open hand with the ability to adjust and then do that for a number of times and stop and have a conversation about it as a team and then, How that's going? How is it going and what it – should we continue to run it this way? [00:59:00]
That's probably the most meaningful thing that you can do.
Josh: That's good. Yeah. The only thing that I was thinking about, while you guys were chatting is I did this maybe like three years ago where I just got an Excel file and I inventoried all my meetings and I rated them on a scale of like one to three – three being a great meeting, one being not a great meeting – and it went from one-on-ones to daily standups to, you know, weekly meetings, quarterly meetings, and I just tried to see what was gonna be the lowest for the highest value, right?
So depending upon where you're at within an organization, you could just be a part of, you know, 20 meetings, but never run anything. So you might feel like you don't have control over that, but if you can think about your meetings and see where maybe the least amount of friction points are, where you're like, everybody believes that this meeting is not good.
That might create that common ground or that framework to be able to say, Hey, can we just take a look at this and maybe define why we're [01:00:00] meeting and then make progress forward, but being able to just get that inventory and make maybe a bit of a data-informed decision to say, Hey, I think this will be the easiest for the greatest amount of value, might be a helpful exercise. Plus you'd get some insight in terms of your overall calendar.
All right, well we appreciate you checking in today. As always, if you wanna dive deeper into the overall 6 Levers framework, check out sixlevers.co. We always have running sprints where we take organizations through a seven-week course, giving them a framework or a deeper understanding of the overall 6 Levers framework. And if you're a consultant, check it out if you'd like to, learn more about applying that to your own practice.
Thanks so much and we'll talk to you soon.
