How to Fix Meetings with Hayley Watts
Graham Allcott 0:12
This is Beyond Busy. I'm Graham Allcott. I'm the author of a number of books, including the global bestseller How to be a Productivity Ninja, and I'm the founder of Think Productive. We work with some of the world's leading companies to help people get stuff done but more importantly, to help people to make space for what matters. Beyond Busy is where I explore the often messy truths and contradictory relationships around topics like work-life, balance, happiness and success, and explore with interesting people, what makes them tick. In short, this is where we ask the bigger questions about work. My guest today is Hayley Watts, she is a Productivity Ninja at my company Think Productive and she's my co-author for the book, How to Fix Meetings. She's a mum, a coach, and also has a background as a leader in the charity sector, where she gained a lot of experience with meetings both good and bad. In this episode, we talk about productivity, obviously, and how she helps people to change their work habits for the better. And of course, we delve into what's broken with meetings and how you can fix them. This is Haley Watts
How are you?
Hayley Watts 1:30
Hi, I'm good. Great. Thanks. How are you?
Graham Allcott 1:33
Yeah, I'm good. So we were talking before we press record about how sometimes it's, for some reason, more nerve-wracking, doing podcasts with people that you know, than it is with people that you don't know, I don't quite know why that is. But we know each other very well, having been colleagues for a number of years, and then having probably had about the closest working relationship you can ever have with somebody else, which is to be a co-author with somebody, right? You have to kind of live inside someone's brain for a little bit. So we're going to talk about how to fix meetings. But let's start a bit more at the beginning. So how long have you been working? We think productive now how many years Is it?
Hayley Watts 2:10
Oh, just over six years,
Graham Allcott 2:12
six years? And so with your work as a Productivity Ninja, you're going into companies getting working with our clients and helping them to have a better impact and be clearer and be better and do their best work? What do you enjoy about that work?
Hayley Watts 2:31
Good question. I think the thing I really enjoy about it, it's just seeing things change for people. Your work is quite practical, isn't it? Yeah, we go in. We deliver some thoughts and ideas about how people can change their working habits and practices, but we actually get them to implement that on the day. And it's like, you can sometimes see this Penny dropping moment where people are like, Oh, that's how it's gonna be easier. And just seeing that change for somebody is, it's just brilliant.
Graham Allcott 2:58
Yeah. And we first met a really long time ago when I was in my first ever job. Yeah. As we were both we were both project managers with a project called Millennium volunteers. Weren't we going back very many years, and then you ended up running the volunteer Centre in Camden. Yeah, and various other things. So what drew you to working with think productive? having started in charities? Because it feels like, feels like we've actually had a very similar work history in that.
Hayley Watts 3:34
Yeah, very similar. So I think when I was working, I CEO at the volunteer centre, and I was there for quite a while I was there for about nine years, and a membership organisation. So lots of, you know, wanting to respond to members and do things well and represent all those organisations and people coming to us looking to volunteer. So small team, I guess, like most charities, more work than there is people to get it done. Yeah. So I felt very overwhelmed, very overloaded with my work. And that was partly, like, email was the thing that was like, Oh, I said to my chair, I really need to sort this email thing out, and we had a conversation about you, getting you or think productive to come in and do the email course with us. So I was really nervous. But you see my inbox thinking, Oh, my God, this is really embarrassing. And I have nowhere near as many emails as I perhaps thought I did, but it felt really stressful. And it felt overwhelming. Every time I opened up my inbox, I had a mild sense of panic of like, Oh my god, there's gonna be all this work there that I'm not going to get time to do. So that really helped me. It really helped the rest of the team. And this was before you'd written your first book. How to be a Productivity ninja and so I went away and decided I was gonna learn more about this productivity stuff. And one of my trustees at the time was was really into it and recommended Some reading for me and I went and got the book at the library. And then I took it back after three weeks having not read it, I thought this is really bad. And that was a bit of a moment because I really need to get my head into this stuff because the email has really helped me change my working practices and my behaviours around that work feel less stressful, I feel a bit more in control, I need to apply this logic toward the rest of my work. So I went off and learned about it, implemented, like loads of stuff, a few other productivity books that I'd read. And it helped hugely, it gave me confidence that like, Yeah, what I'm working on at any point in time is the right thing to be putting my energy and my attention into. And it all started to feel so much better. But I couldn't get the rest of my team to do it. We're having the same problems. But yeah, that's how this is just so what he's on about again at the moment. And so one of the other productivity ninjas, Matthew came in and did a one day workshop with the whole team. And then I think we had a conversation afterwards, you're like, hey, Matthew says, you're really into this productivity stuff. Why don't you come and join us as a ninja? Not gonna do that? And here we are.
Graham Allcott 6:11
Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? So do things just to pick up from there. One is, and this is always reassuring for people to hear is that even the person who wrote how to be a productivity ninja in my first ever job, I was late to a time management course. Like, that literally happened to me, I had to go to London to do this time management thing. And I was just, I was just late. So that happened. But the second thing is that what you described there is something I think is really interesting about the work that we do, which is that often it's not, you don't, you don't get less stressed. Because you've ticked everything off your to-do list, and it's all done. You get less stressed, and you feel more in control. And everything makes more sense, just because you change your relationship with that stuff. Right? So a lot of productivity is not even actually about the things that you get done. It's about having the most appropriate relationship with that stuff. Right, right. relationships, information is the is really what it's all about.
Hayley Watts 7:15
Absolutely. And if somebody said to me, or what you need is some you need to do some work on how you organise yourself and your productivity. I might have said something quite rude to them about that.
Graham Allcott 7:24
right.
Hayley Watts 7:24
Let me organise Yeah. But actually, it's that changing that relationship, and moving away from the expectation of everything, it's gonna get done. Actually, that Yeah, the most impactful things need to get done and the rest some of it well, and some of it won't. And that's okay. Because we're, we're just human beings, we can't do everything.
Graham Allcott 7:43
Indeed. And it's quite, you know, it's quite sort of subtle, isn't it? I think sometimes as you say, people can have this view of, oh, I don't need to learn how to manage my time or, you know, I don't need to be more organised or, you know, people have a bit of a defensive reaction to that stuff. But yeah, actually, this, the subtle little changes can bring out the most profound shifts, I think, the smallest sort of habits that you change, or just the way that you think about something in your brain, you know, just the narrative you have with yourself. Sometimes those really small things can make the biggest difference.
Hayley Watts 8:18
They really can. And I think you know, very often you're particularly if you're, you're talking to a journalist, or somebody who's looking to come on a course that's what's the one thing I can do? And it's like, well, sadly, there isn't just one thing. There's lots of little things. Yeah, and those things build up and make all sorts of easier.
Graham Allcott 8:36
Yeah, that's one of things I say quite a lot in keynotes is there is no secret sauce to productivity. But if there is, if there was a secret sauce to productivity, it would be doing the simple things consistently unwell, which is like so unsexy. Because everyone wants the software, or the secret tool, or whatever, and it's like, no, there really isn't one. But there are lots of things that if you just take these things more seriously, just have a huge transformative effect. So there we go.
Hayley Watts 9:06
Absolutely.
Graham Allcott 9:07
So let's talk about the book. So we wrote a book a, we did, we wrote a book over quite a long period of time with lots of stops starts for we maybe talk later about the email from our publisher saying, Hey, can you rewrite the whole thing presume took away that later. So it's taken, it's taken a bit of a while just with the pandemic and everything. We didn't want to put this into bookshops? That was shots and various things like that. So feels like it's been a long time in the meeting, but in the making, but let's start with them. Just how you feeling about how to fix meetings hitting the shelves?
Hayley Watts 9:50
Yeah, it feels kind of surreal, actually. And like you say, yeah, we've been working on it for such a long time. And it feels like a Long time ago since we kind of sat down and said, right, these are things, we want to get the book, and this is how we're going to water them, and what's my chapter and all that kind of stuff? So, yeah, I'm, I'm a mixture of kind of nervous and really excited. So I'm looking forward to getting a paper copy in my hands.
Graham Allcott 10:14
Yeah, I have this weird relationship with my own book books, which is that I often don't look at them for months and months on end, I remember, there was a good period of about three years where I just couldn't open Productivity Ninja, I couldn't even look inside. And I was, I would, you know, give them away events and sign them and sell them and all this sort of stuff I couldn't I just couldn't open it couldn't look at it. But what's nice is just in preparation for this, just opening the first proof PDF of how to fix meetings on the screen and going, Oh, it's full of really good stuff. You saw that? Yeah, like part of your list. It's like a book, I know, part of your lizard brain reaction, I think with books is to start. Just really worrying that it's not very good, or start worrying that there's nothing in it. And then when you open it, and you see Oh, this is lovely illustration. And this is, you know, this exercise and this table, and let's start to just see it all fit together. And it's like, oh, this is like a second proper book. We did a book.
Hayley Watts 11:16
Yeah.
Graham Allcott 11:18
So let's talk about the whole issue of meetings then. So it feels like over the last few years, one of your sort of unofficial sort of little roles within think productive is sort of become like meetings, Maven, right, you've sort of become the person who is just generally very interested in the whole sort of topic of meetings and the process of meetings and techniques to do with meetings. So is that something that you? Were we're kind of conscious about? And where did that start that sort of having an interest in how people get together and how people meet?
Hayley Watts 11:58
Yeah, I think that's a really polite way of saying I was nagging you that we need to do. And I think, you know, when, when Matthew came and did the, the one day course with me and my team in my previous job, we loved it, it was great. It really helped people. But I was going to a lot of meetings, I was going to a lot of meetings, some of them were internal, but quite a lot of them were external, your will, as a membership organisation, I think it was gonna do well, we invite Haley. She's representing like 300 organisations, then we've consulted with this sector. So I was going to quite a lot of organisations, other organisations, meetings, things where there may be lots of different organisations represented people wanting to get their different views across. And some of those meetings were were hard work. Yeah, that they, they're supposed to be an opportunity for people to get together to collaborate to share ideas. And there may have been some nuggets of that within those meetings. But a lot of them I think, were maybe quite political. A lot of them. I don't know, if we achieve what we're looking to achieve, but there wasn't clarity around what we were looking to achieve. And then there was one meeting that stood out as being so much better than all the rest. And I started thinking about, well, why is this. And it was the person who facilitated the meeting, and his expectations and how they were set out. And the bar was just raised, you know, it's like, well, if you come to this meeting, and you take part in this group in this forum, then you will do work outside of the meeting, the meeting is where we decide what needs to be done and what the work happens outside of that. And if you weren't pulling your way, you would expect to have a conversation with this guy about that. And he was great around that. So I think we did the what was then called Making meetings magic, the think productive workshop and xrt converters, applying a lot of this logic in different places, and really saw some changes happening in a really good way around meeting with other people. And, and I remember having a conversation with somebody I was due to meet with and she'd sent through this agenda that had like two or three words just on a piece of paper and one of them was voluntary. I was like, Okay, well, I have a whole team. I've got like six or seven people working on different projects around volunteering. They each manage a team of volunteers for supporting that work. Like what aspect of volunteering Do you want to talk about?
Graham Allcott 14:22
It's a bit like that scene in the office where David Brent is doing the appraisals and he's got big Keith, and he says to be Keith, under strengths you've written accounts. And it's like, but that's your job. And he's just like, yeah,
Hayley Watts 14:42
Exactly like that. So I picked up the phone I was like, tell me what you need to know because like my whole world is volunteering. Like, what do you need to know what do you want to understand what you want me to share with you? And we had like 510 minutes maximum conversation Then. But then when it came to the meeting, like, everything worked really well. And she was like, that was a really good meeting. It didn't take us anywhere near that hour that we'd gotten the calendar to do that. And it was just kind of our there's something here, there's something about the way we're doing these meeting things that that aren't working for a lot of people. And I think that that's interesting. I'm sure lots of people go to meetings where they come out of it and the kind of go: "Oh, what just happened? What did we do? What did we achieve?"
Graham Allcott 15:30
Yeah, for sure. I, I think I was really lucky, early in my career to work with, you know, people like Martin Pharrell, who was a facilitator who did a lot of work with, you know, the UN on climate change, and big, you know, sort of multilateral talks for the fair trade Foundation, and all this sort of stuff. And he was one of my trustees when I ran student volunteer in England. And so if ever, we had big, you know, big, you know, meetings or get-togethers or whatever, we would always bring him in as a facilitator, often pro bono, he was he was just doing it, just as a great way of sharing his expertise, but watching him work was like watching a magician, you know, and just the way things would feel stuck. And then he'd suddenly pull this rabbit out the hat, or just, he just seemed to have this, this real knack of, of like finding the route through these difficult conversations. And of course, like, a lot of that is, a lot of that is experience. But also, a lot of that is forward planning, and having a toolkit of stuff in the back of your head, here's what I'll do, if this happens, if this happens, this is what I'll do, you know, just playing out some of those scenarios, having those, those prepper, eight tree, you know, conversations that people have beforehand, you know, just trying to get them in the headspace of how they might resolve differences and stuff as well. So yeah, I think I've just been really lucky over the years of not just Martin as well. But, you know, people like Fiona door, who used to run youth net, was incredible, in the way that she ran meetings, and she was very influenced by Nancy Klein, who I think, you know, some of her, you know, sort of techniques and ideas are definitely an influence on this book as well. Right, in terms of the I was just quite lucky to, like, you see that contrast between people who are just doing meetings in a way that just felt really meaningful. And that really promoted this idea of human connection. And then, you know, you contrast that with the terrible meetings that you're at, and I've been at plenty of those, you know, you can really see that this is a really important topic, right?
Hayley Watts 17:44
Yeah. And I think when you go to those two different types of meetings, the contrast is really clear. And I think it's not until you, you take a step back, and you kind of try and reflect on why is that like that? And you know, I'm in the meeting, that's not going so well. I'm part of that problem. But equally, I'm contributing the meeting that is different, it feels more energetic. So how do I up my game, even if I'm not the organiser, or not the person responsible for the agenda-setting and all that other stuff that?
Graham Allcott 18:16
So the book is called How to fix meetings, we should probably talk about why start with why it needs fixing, and then talk about what's broken. So what do you think is broken about meetings?
Hayley Watts 18:32
I speak to so many of our clients who will say: "Oh, yeah, I've just got back to back meetings, I've got too many meetings, I can't get the work done, because I'm in meetings all day." And then, you know, you look at people's calendars, and like, literally, they are in meetings all day, you know, that they're back to back and particularly people who are more senior in organisations will say, Well, I spend all day in meetings, and I have to work in the evening at the weekends to get the work done. And it's that's not sustainable. You know, that that's, that's not gonna work that doesn't help those people to make the best decisions. It doesn't help them to do their best work. So I think that there's something that's broken around just the volume of meetings that people go to. But we've also created this culture in the world of work, where anybody who's got anything to do with what's being talked about gets invited to the meeting. Yeah. And the culture is you receive a meeting invitation, and you're like, Oh, right. Okay, can I go? If I haven't got another meeting? I'll go for it. Sometimes when you say to people, what do you need to be at that meeting? What are you going to get out of it? Why are you attending? Why is this other person over here not attending and they're like, did I was invited? I was invited. Okay. So I think that's one of the things that's broken. And this idea of, you turn up to a meeting, and it's the chair’s job to make the meeting.
Graham Allcott 19:54
Right.
I remember doing a fixie meeting session with a group For people, and one of the big reflections that lots of them took away at the end was that actually, yeah, I have a role to play. Even if I'm not the person chairing the meeting, I still have part of the responsibility for making that meeting work now, well is me as a participant is somebody who's showing up.
So even when, even when it comes to ship meetings, silence is complicit, right? Like, if you're, if you just go along with it, you know, it's rubbish, then, you know, you're part of the problem, too. And what about numbers-wise, so, you know, just thinking about the cost, I just sometimes I find myself, when I'm, you know, walking through the floor of an organisation or whatever, and, like, I just sometimes just, I can almost like, see in my head, the kind of numbers or the sort of power of, you know, just how much money is being spent on this office space on this person on this on that. And you can kind of just see that money, just kind of walking around sometimes when you walk into offices and organisations. And I think, never is that more apparent than if you start to just go around the table. And think about how much people are being paid to sit there and how much this collection of decisions that are not being made, is actually costing?
Hayley Watts 21:26
Yeah, yeah. So I think we worked out that way if you've got the four people, and they're in meetings for 10 hours a week, by the time you work that out for the cost per year, that's around 25k, you're starting to get towards the cost of somebody's salary. So you know, if people are kind of sitting there, and they're saying, Oh, yeah, well, we're not getting enough done. We need more people to come and help you maybe naturally, you need less meetings, that you've got more work outside of.
Graham Allcott 21:51
Yeah. And so one of the big, which probably leads us quite nicely onto one of the big models in the book, which I'm really, I'm really excited to share this with people. Because I think, if we can get this, if we can get this mindset over to people, I think it could make a big difference, but the yin and yang of meetings. So do you want to explain what the yin and yang of meetings is?
Hayley Watts 22:15
Yeah, so union Yang being kind of opposing forces, right, that they're the opposite to each other. And if you think about that yin and yang diagram that I'm sure I've read familiar with, you've got like a little seed of one in the other. So there's a little white.in, the black section and vice versa. And so the Yin being the desire to collaborate, the desire for everybody to have their say, it's everybody being able to articulate what they think. And you know, that takes time, you know, the people who are more orientated towards the Yang side of things have to look at their watch when we're falling behind the agenda or not on schedule here. And so that Yang is the wanting to keep to time wanting things to be succinctly focusing on the task, whereas the yen is more what how's everybody feeling about this? And you need a bit of both for things to work, you need those things to be imbalanced, you can't have a meeting, you have a meeting, that's all Yin is probably more of a therapy session and a meeting, that's all Yang is, is maybe not getting to the root of the issue. So it's about looking for balance, isn't it between those things, and I think some people's style is perhaps more Yin or more Yang, people might talk about some of the specific meetings they go to, they might sell, that's more of a young meeting. And this one's more of a yin. So thinking about how you bring those two things together in a way that's, that has a balance between those two different
Graham Allcott 23:46
Yeah, and so I love both of those kinds of opposing energy. So you know, the Yin energy, which for me, is very much, you know, reflective, you know, listening, trying to be in tune with what's around you, you know, generalist, and then Yang is very much more like specific action structure, you know, go go go. And I think it's really important to have both of those within a meeting. But it's also really important to think about, as we talked about in the book, the idea of Yang also just getting on with it, just get out of it, don't be in a meeting in the first place. And so like, what I'm really hoping is that people can get into this model as a way of saying, actually, we need to create more Yang time in organisations and just cut down on the number of meetings. And we've got some nice little exercises and sort of mindsets within the book, which I hope will help people to delete some of the meetings that are attending and start to sort of clear some space but I love the idea that we can when we do get together, we can make meetings, we can make meetings rarer, but then when we do get together We can actually use that to really profoundly connect and share attention. I think that's the thing about a good meeting is that good meetings are one of the last places where humans very generously come together and share their attention with each other. Right. And it's just the way, our attention is so fragmented. Now, I think that's just not to be underestimated, like the importance of that, and how profound that can be. But then also, we need to, you know, actually have the time to do stuff off the back of that as well, which maybe leads us quite nicely on to the 40 2040 model. Because that's the whole thing about when you're in back to back meetings is that you're totally in opposition to the 40 2040 model. Do you want to explain what that is?
Hayley Watts 25:49
Yeah, sure. So the 40 20/40, the idea is you spend 40% of your energy, your time your effort on planning and preparing for the meeting. The meeting itself takes up 20% of the time, and 40% on the actions, the follow-through the reflecting like, how did this meeting work? What do we want to do differently next time. And that's not to say you only give the actual meeting 20% of your attention. And so just want to be clear on that, because people have asked that before. So if you think about your whole meeting experience, and what you're meeting to discuss on that issue, that that's the kind of the balance that we would suggest. So I think I'll be honest, and put my hands up and say, before I came across this idea, I probably spend 5% of my effort thinking about the meeting beforehand, like 85 90% in the meeting, and then maybe another five or 10% afterwards. So that example I talked about before when I was given an agenda with three words on it, and just picked up the phone and said, what are we looking to achieve here? That's part of that 40% beforehand, so that, you know, you can do that planning that preparation, that understanding what you're looking to achieve before the meeting. And that makes the meeting itself so much more effective. You know, if you think about meetings where, you know, maybe you're looking to solve a problem, if you can articulate and share with everybody the data and the information about what the problem is beforehand, then everybody comes to the meeting in the same place with the same understanding, to look to solve that problem. Whereas if you say, look, we've got a problem, and maybe not everybody's on board with the fact that there is a problem, maybe some people haven't seen the data and don't quite know what it is that you're looking to achieve or why a change needs to be made. And you can spend most of the meeting getting people on board with that. So just kind of thinking about how we do some of that beforehand, how do we make the meeting itself effective? And then how do we reflect on it afterwards? How do we say, Well, we know what worked well, what didn't, but making that meeting really action orientated? Because unless it's a deliberate decision at the meeting, like, okay, we've discussed this, and we're not going to do anything. And that's our conclusion. Most meetings will have actions, things that people agree to do, or change that needs to be made, or as a result of all those people coming together and sharing their effort and their attention. And if that follow-through doesn't happen, like what was the point of the meeting, and then you end up, you
Graham Allcott 28:13
know, a month later having another meeting to recap the things that were decided? Everything about? Absolutely. What can people do to just make the follow-through of meetings? much more effective? So how can people use their behaviour in the meeting to really drive that performance and action? After the meeting?
Hayley Watts 28:40
I think it's really good to be clear in the meeting, like what are we going to do? So yes, we've talked about I said, this idea, we've come to these conclusions, but what are we going to do and who's going to take responsibility for doing it? And those people writing down those actions for themselves? You know, I sometimes hear people say, Well, I have got actions from that meeting. But nobody's emailed the minutes out yet. So I don't know what they are, like, well, you don't need to wait for somebody else to do that. They might not send the minutes out till the day before the next meeting. You know, but you've got actions to do, you need to move that forward. So having clarity on that, and making that kind of the expectation, you know, before we move on from this agenda item, let's just recap on the actions who's doing what and I think people often get carried away Don't they? You meet up with maybe the rest of the team and your team meetings? Yeah, I'll do that. I'll do that. People say oh, that's that need to doing and actually, you get back to your desk and you look at the whole load of work you've got to do is I'll actually am I going to do that. So I think some honesty and understanding around that but also being able to look at you know, okay, we decided in the meeting that we're going to do these things, which are those are like mission-critical, which those things like need to happen and they need to happen soon. Which those things are kind of the icing on the cake. They're a nice to have if we get around to doing it because They're not all, they're going to be equally important.
Graham Allcott 30:02
There's a couple of things that we share in the book that I think are really important around that. One is to ban the use of the word ongoing. When it comes to writing down, you know, minutes and stuff, because when are they going to do this, or it's just ongoing, like, I think it's just it's such a cop-out. And I think when you have Willie vague language, you get really vague actions, right. So having a really specific, you know, time period deadline. And also the other one, which I think is really important is every action needs an owner, and that being a singular owner, I think as soon as you get into, this is going to be this person, and this person will suddenly create, you create the grey area between those two, where it probably falls. And so having every action has, you know, a really clear, articulated next physical action, right, which obviously, we talk about a lot of things productive, but then having an owner, that's a singular person and a particular deadline. I think those are just such simple principles. But it's amazing how often they're just not followed, right?
Hayley Watts 31:15
Yeah, it sounds obvious, doesn't it? But I think so many people go to so many meetings, it's just easy to lose that. And, and to encourage people to think, okay, if I'm taking on this action, do I know what my next physical action is, you know, if I'm taking on responsibility for delivering an outcome, do I know when I need to be doing that by do I know how it's going to be measured? Like what?
Graham Allcott 31:37
I think this is an interesting thing, because it's, it's one of the few examples of where meeting on zoom is actually better than meeting in person. But when it comes to the person whose job it is to write the actions from a meeting, the great thing about zoom is you can have them doing that live and sharing their screen. And the great thing about that, and I remember I remember watching Martin Pharrell do this quite a lot, in a lot of his meetings is that either at the end of the meeting, or at the end of the section, like you said before, he would recap the actions, but he would get the person whose job it is to send the minutes out afterwards to read them out in the room. And the great thing about that is it gives everybody else the chance to just clarify or, or say, Actually, I don't think that was quite what we agreed, or, you know, in getting that clarity in the room with people and kind of using the minutes. That kind of feels like it's a future, you know, after the meeting thing, using that as the device in the meeting to drive the clarity, I think is something like I do that a lot in my own internal meetings and just find that like a hugely valuable little, little, little kind of, you know, tip and trick.
Hayley Watts 32:54
Very often, I think meetings don't need like long pages of notes with who said what and other kind of the detail of the conversation. Sometimes they just need the action points. And it will depend on the meeting. You know, if it's a board-level meeting, you probably want more detail than that. But, if it's a team meeting or project meeting, maybe the actions are enough and somebody doesn't need to spend your their effort and attention on typing up exactly who said what, because you've captured the actions - the things that matter. The minute
Graham Allcott 33:20
you walk the talk quite a lot with this, because you're also Are you still the chair of your school governors? board. So you think you're going to be the acting chair for two months or something, wasn't it? And then they roped you into it big coming along? It's our commitment. Yeah, that
Hayley Watts 33:38
was a year. I
Graham Allcott 33:39
think I remember saying at the time, that's never gonna be a temporary.
Hayley Watts 33:45
You did. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And I think that's, that's an example of that's quite sure. We
Graham Allcott 33:53
just Should we just recap, because we've got people listen to this all around the world that might not know what school governors mean. So your point, so you're a parent of a kid who's in that school, right?
Hayley Watts 34:08
Yep. So the, in the UK schools that are independent schools, no, that's the wrong word. Because there are different thing, schools that are run by the local authority. And they effectively run their own budgets. And they have a what they call a board of governors is essentially a group of volunteers. Some of them are parents, some of them are not parents, who people from the local community who bring together their skills and their expertise. And the idea is that they're responsible for the strategic vision of the school. They're responsible for making sure that that vision is implemented by the senior team within the school. So it's the equivalent I guess, for Board of Trustees for charity, but with I guess more
Graham Allcott 34:54
Yeah, scrutiny, I suppose.
Hayley Watts 34:56
And that there will be a List of like things that, you know, these are things that governors have to discuss either pattern or point per year. And it's part of the role of governors to monitor what's going on in the school and to give feedback not to check up on the quality of teaching as such, but to share their observations, you know, if we've decided at a strategy level that we need to make teaching of maths a priority, that how is that being implemented? If the headteacher comes to a board meeting and says, Oh, yes, we're doing a great job with maths, the children are all where they're supposed to be at? What's the evidence for that? So the board is about accountability and strategic vision, it's not about the day to day operating stuff,
Graham Allcott 35:42
a lot of the stuff that we talked about in the book, so you've been implementing that. Within this within your school governance boards, what's been sort of like the reaction to that? And how different is that Ben from? What went before culturally? Wasn't there, like in that sort of setting? Because I always think about what we do is more about, you know, business meetings, you know, internally within a culture and that, yeah, and I think it's obviously got a statutory sort of legal element to it as well, right.
Hayley Watts 36:16
Yeah, it has. And I think that that sometimes makes it difficult to get down to the problem solving the that diving deep into stuff. So in terms of that 40 2040, I probably spent a lot more time reading the papers and the data before those meetings than the actual meeting itself. So yes, I'm involved with planning the agenda, but there's only a certain amount of wiggle room there. There's a whole load of stuff that needs to be on each agenda. And we have a very competent Clark, whose role is to make sure we're discussing the things we're supposed to be. So reports are shared before the meeting. Everybody reads those before the meeting, if people have got questions about them, we now share those questions with the relevant staff before the meeting so that they can kind of plan and prepare their answers to that maybe go away find more information. And they verbally give the answers in the meeting. So that everybody's receiving the same information, because obviously, as governors, we're all equally responsible. It's not like we're Halley's cheresh, it's it's all her responsibility, we all have equal responsibility across that group. So there's loads of stuff that we do before the meeting. The actions that come out of the meeting are very often actions to the senior team at school to take forwards rather than for us as individual governors, although that there will be a few of those. So yeah, that that preparation, that understanding the data and the information that we're looking at all that happens before the meeting, and I probably spend probably 40 50% of my time and effort on reading up on that stuff and understanding it so that everybody that's coming to the meeting has had the same information. They've had a chance to ask questions, they've understood that. And that does make the meetings flow much better. I mean, we would be there for hours now.
Graham Allcott 38:09
Well, that's often the stereotype, isn't it of things like school governors meetings and charity trustee boards and stuff is that, you know that it starts at 6pm and finishes at about midnight. And, you know, everyone's just kind of on coffee fumes and biscuits by the end of it sort of thing. So
Hayley Watts 38:27
it's been interesting during those meetings in the last year online. Yeah. Because they're, you were still at the same amount of time to deal with stuff that we had before. But I do think, you know, a couple of people have commented afterwards that oh, this online meeting isn't as
Graham Allcott 38:44
bad as if you had any Jacki Weaver moment. So
Hayley Watts 38:46
yeah, one or the other. Oh, no, no, I've got a great group. So we've not had any of that. But you're just things like getting everybody to say something at the beginning of the meeting. Yeah, is that everybody knows there's new people there. People who haven't been to the meeting before is by introductions, but just as a way to connect with each other on a human level, before the meeting gets started. So everybody gets used to speaking and saying something. I think that's important on any meeting, but especially when it's on camera, and people make
Graham Allcott 39:17
sure that's one of those things that so I learned this from, I guess from Martin Pharrell and from Fiona door, but it's one of the Nancy Klein thinking environment things right. It's the opening round. Yeah, she talks a lot about arrival. So when you arrive in the in the room for a meeting, or when you arrive on zoom, that's not your arrival, your arrival is when you've kind of settled, you know, mentally and you've kind of orientated and you understand who else is in the room and, and have that little bit of connection with everybody. And so she basically talks about, you know, you ask you ask questions at the beginning, and everybody responds so that you begin with a positive reality. So the one I generally Do is how are you feeling right now and then just say one thing that's going well. And you find sometimes people have a really obvious work when that they want to share. And other times, it's like, oh, you know, my kids back in school, it's really good. You know, just, it's just like a personal thing. But the thing is, everybody's an expert in their own life. So no one can get that wrong. And there's something about being able to contribute early on in the meeting, which is uncontroversial, where you reliably just can't make a mistake with it. It just kind of settles everybody down, I think and just creates that space where, like you say, if then later in the meeting, there's something that you really is like a burning issue. And you really should be saying something. If you didn't speak at the beginning, and this was going to be the first thing you're going to say, then that just becomes more awkward, right, but just adds a kind of heightened nervousness to it. And we've all been in those meetings where we might be the one person who disagrees and it feels like everyone else has got it wrong, but we just stay silent, because we're worried about being judged. And I think that opening round, because it breaks the seal, it really helps to encourage that more healthy dialogue, at the points where it really matters, you know, when it comes to challenging groupthink or throwing in an unusual idea, or just being brave in whatever the circumstances.
Hayley Watts 41:25
Yeah, and I think if somebody is kind of thinking, Oh, I want to disagree, I'm not too sure what to say the fact that they've already spoken and they've already contributed something, I think does make that a little bit easier. And I think it's very rare for somebody to say something and put that out there. And then for people to just dismiss it and say, no, that's not a thing. Yeah, I think whenever somebody does that, that's where the really good conversation in a meeting can sometimes happen. Yeah, somebody's just being brave enough to say, actually, we're going down the right track here. What about this other thing over here? We haven't taken that into account? And then if people are Oh, yeah,
Graham Allcott 41:57
yeah, think about that look, just generally recently about how we have we've sort of lost the ability for healthy disagreement. Right? Just I think, you know, just the way people view social media and all these other things. It just feels like we've got to a stage now where we're, we're only really comfortable if everybody agrees. And I think it's, it's actually a really healthy thing, isn't it to have that tension and to have that disagreement and to, to hear different sides of an argument kind of interrogate, interrogate positions, because I think then you end up getting to somewhere that might be slightly better, you know?
Hayley Watts 42:39
Yeah, I think you, I think nearly always end up at a better place. And that's interesting, I was having a conversation with my eight-year-old My partner and I, were not arguing but disagreeing about something. People are allowed to disagree, it doesn't mean they don't like each other, or they don't love each other anymore. But you're we're allowed to have a different opinion. And we should be able to express that. I found that very confusing. But I think it really applies in the meeting like you know, and that's the thing about your being an engaged participant, right? You don't have to just go with the status quo. And just agree with what people are saying, like, you're there, you've been invited to the meeting to offer your skills, your expertise, your perspective and your insight. So you kind of have a responsibility to do that. Like otherwise, what's the point of being there?
Graham Allcott 43:26
I just want to pick out a couple of other things from the book that might just be useful for people. So let's talk about beware of the hippo. So tell us why hippos have a place in this book.
Hayley Watts 43:43
So Hippo is being the "highest being paid person's opinion". And when delivering this meeting workshops everybody always looks at whoever that highest-paid person in the room is, because everybody always knows who that person is. There might be some exceptions. There might be some times when it's the Project Manager for the project that is being talked about. But, there will be someone in the room whose opinion carries a bit more weight and research suggests that So people get into this. Maybe it's an expectation, maybe it's just a cultural thing in terms of how people behave. But they tend to agree with that person because of who that person is, rather than because of what they've said and what they're suggesting. So one of the things that you can do to get around that is if I'm facilitating a workshop, I will tend to ask that person their views last. So you get everybody else to share their contribution and their thoughts. And what that does is that allows that more senior person perhaps to hear everybody else's ideas, there's probably something there that they haven't thought of. Maybe there's somebody else who comes up with the point that they would have made so it allows somebody else to do and say that So, different tools and techniques for trying to mitigate that impact. But if you know that, you know, if you're in a meeting and you know that you're, you're the senior person, take a step back, let others go first so that you get richer.
Graham Allcott 45:17
And coming back to the station thing that we talked about before in the danger of groupthink. Part of this is about anchoring an in a cognitive bias sense, isn't it? So, let's say you ask the most influential person in the room, which generally is the most highly paid, not always, but the person who has that sort of sense of ownership, if you ask them first, everybody else's opinion, let's say it's a number. And it's like how much budget should be used for this thing, wherever. And if, if the anchor is the highest-paid person in the room saying, it needs to be 100k, then everyone else will sort of use that and deviate, you know, slightly above or slightly below 100k. So one of the things we talked about in the book is the idea of when it comes to the voting, or when it comes to estimate, kind of contributions, get everyone to do that silently on paper first. So in the room, okay, everybody, just spend a minute, you know, just come up with your thoughts on what this should look like. And then everyone's committed because they've written it down, so they can't anchor to the thing that you know, is about to be said, by that person of greater influence. So that's the technique that I've used I've used before is like, just get people to, to actually just come up with it on their own first and sort of think independently of the anchor.
Hayley Watts 46:33
And I think that's, it's a good technique to use Not, not just to mitigate that kind of highest-paid person. But sometimes you've got a discussion that's dominated by one or two people. So this is a more equitable way for people to contribute, right. So if you're doing it physically in the room, you can do that on post-it notes. If you're doing it on an online meeting, though, there are still tools where you can use post-it notes, or you can use the chat. So you can ask people to kind of commit to their thoughts. This idea of kind of getting people to think about it before it's discussed, that silent meeting kind of model. And so it's important that when you're doing that everybody knows who's in the meeting, everybody knows who's who you get together, I think we did a meeting one of the focus groups, didn't we for an early version of the book. And, and everybody got together on camera and shared who they were and what brought them there. And then we had three or four questions that we asked people who had read the book to answer and that was just on a, an online document, and people went online, and they typed in their answers. And then we as the people hosting that meeting, because actually, there's agreement and consensus on that issue. We don't need to delve deeper into that we understand the points that are being made. But we're not too sure about what people are saying here. And there's some difference of opinions, we really want to talk about that and understand a bit more about what that issue is. And I think that's just a really neat way for managing the anchoring. But also for people have a more equitable conversation where everybody gets the same opportunity.
Graham Allcott 48:08
The other one I really wanted to talk about is the idea of purpose statements. Because I think this comes back to the idea of 40 2040 and preparing properly, properly and preparing with clarity. So tell us about purpose statements and what they are and why they're important.
Hayley Watts 48:31
Yeah, so for each meeting to have like a sentence or two that says, this is what we're trying to achieve. So we're looking to make a decision. Or were identifying a way forwards with this issue. We want to come up with an action plan. So how do you know when you're finished? And that's not by looking at the clock? That's by saying, right, this is the output we want this meeting to achieve. This is what we want to achieve a consensus on so things that you if it's a monthly team meeting, you don't want your purpose statement to be, you know, to share information and get together as a team like each meeting is going to have you're going to be discussing different things potentially. So some clarity on you in March is meeting the this is the outcome, this is the output that we're looking for. And I think it's actually really helpful to break the agenda down to have a purpose. For each agenda item. Why are we discussing this? So it might be what we were discussing the problem. We're outlining what the issues are, we're articulating that with a view
Graham Allcott 49:30
to come up with a Sunday here, your dog in the background, what wanting to come in, come in there and puts the meeting as well. So that's one or two more than before we finish, I suppose one of the things that a lot of people will be thinking is okay, so it's all very well having good structures, but then how do I deal with you know, the annoying person in the room who just talks too much? So you're at you're in, you're in a meeting? You're the chair, maybe you're not even the chair. But how do you deal with it? Where do you have one person really dominating the airwaves?
Hayley Watts 50:18
So I think like you said, it doesn't have to be the chair who deals with that, right? It can be anybody who deals with that. And I'm sure there are times where I've probably been that person. I'm sure there are times where people listening recognise that in themselves as well. But I think it can be great to be able to say, Well, actually, we've not heard from Graham Graham, what do you think you need to ask somebody to contribute to maybe say, maybe even set a timer? I say, right, can we hear what everybody thinks just one minute, where are we all out on this issue, or 30 seconds, just to kind of take people's temperature and see where they're at that gets everybody talking? It makes it clear that only one person can talk at a time. And then you might say, well, you're okay, this person over here, you're maybe alone, you've got a different take on this to other people. Tell us a bit more about that. So it allows either the person who's chairing the meeting or even the person who's talking too much, it maybe gives them a signal that actually we need to have them for some other people. So I think anybody in the meeting can do that. They can just say, Yeah, I understand your point. What you're saying is, is this, you can briefly paraphrase what's being said? Does anybody else have a different opinion? Yeah. Because that's what we want to be searching for. We want to say, yeah, where's the difference of opinion? How do we Yeah,
Graham Allcott 51:32
I mean, there's so much more in the book that we've not talked about as well. But yeah, let's, let's wrap this up and start thinking about where people can find out more and obviously want people to go and preorder the book, right. So tell us how we can do that. Yep.
Hayley Watts 51:56
So yep, book comes out on the
Graham Allcott 51:58
Yeah, it's changed about three times in the last month, due to, apparently, a lot of printing in a lot of the publishers print houses because of COVID. So it's, yeah, they literally couldn't print it fast enough, basically. But yes, it's the 13th of May, we're out.
Hayley Watts 52:22
And, you know, hopefully, by then people will be able to meet again, in person, but the book covers is all the stuff we're talking about in the book, it applies to whether you're meeting online applies to whether you're meeting in person. And so you can order that from all the usual places, Amazon. It's called How to fix meetings. There's an audiobook as well. So that will be available.
Graham Allcott 52:43
Yes, that's my job to tell him what to do.
Hayley Watts 52:53
And then if you're interested in meetings, workshops for your team, that's something we do as well. So depending on when you're listening to this, I know there are some dates coming up in April of May, where Graham and I do a couple of free webinars, talk a bit about meeting. Or we can come in and work with your team.
Graham Allcott 53:11
So we'll put all the links to those in the show notes. And then yeah, it's good that you mentioned there that we, we have made this deliberately a book that will, because it's about how to how to share and how to manage attention. in group settings, it's as applicable for zoom as it would be for face to face. We, we didn't really tell the story that way. But like I said, we got an email about a week into the pandemic from our publisher saying like, Hey, can you rewrite the whole book for zoom and have it done in about three weeks and all the rest of it. And then basically, I sent a very, very forthright email back saying, we kind of got quite a lot on our plate right now, we've already written this book, and it's ready to go. But we did actually go back and do quite a lot of adjustments, didn't we to make sure that it's as, as applicable, as applicable for zoom as it is for face to face? I think so many of these as principles are, you know, I mean, the principles the same, it's just the medium of face to face, or the medium of zoom is absolutely, a lot of it didn't really need to be changed. But we did make quite a few alterations off the back of that to make sure that we're a bit more in tune with the kind of, I think the hybrid model of working that will be become the norm over the next, you know, two or three years, I guess. Yep. Cool. Hey, is there anything else you want to say before we finish? Cool.
Well, it's been great having you on Beyond Busy. And, yeah, as I said at the beginning, it's always like, I always feel more nerve-wracking doing this when it's people that I know really well. But yeah, just to say thanks for being On being on Beyond Busy. And yeah, it's been just a real pleasure collaborating with you on this book actually. And just, I feel like we've worked really well together in the kind of process of writing it. And now is the fun part because we get to actually just continue that by sharing it with lots of people. So I'm really excited. And yeah, really looking forward to sharing it with people. So thanks for sharing it with us today.
So thanks to Haley for being on the show should also just send a thanks and shout out to my producer Riz. And also to Emilie for all that help with getting bookings, and everyone out Think Productive, our sponsors for the show. So if you want to check out more about Think Productive and lots of stuff that he was somewhere in the episode, just go to www.thinkproductive.com. And as ever, you'll find show notes, and all the links for previous episodes over at www.getbeyondbusy.com, as well.
And the final thing I want to say is that obviously that episode was recorded to celebrate and mark the launch of How to Fix Meetings, which is a really special book. I'm really happy with how it's come out. It was great working with Hayley, she was immense to work with. And you know, often it was me the season, you know, five-time author, that was missing deadlines, and she was the one hitting them. So I have to, you know, just give her props for keeping me on track with that. But yeah, I'm really pleased that other books come out. So I would love you to go and get a copy. I said this on a podcast a few weeks ago, I said, we put all of this stuff up for free. And we have no intention of charging for it, we have no intention of adding adverts into this kind of ruining the experience for the sake of it. But what that means is I would love you when we do have a book coming out to just go and buy a copy, it would just be a really nice way to you know, to just kind of help us fund all the work that we put into Beyond Busy, so go and buy a copy of counterfeits meetings, we were able to. And we would really appreciate it, you can get it from Amazon, you can get it from bookshop.org. and links to all of that if you just go to Grahamallcott.com/links There'll be some links there for how to get a copy of the book. And just help us along with J that would be lovely. We just really appreciate that. So please do that. And when I said that a few weeks ago, a couple of people actually tagged me in on posts on LinkedIn saying, hey, I've just heard your thing. And I've just gone and bought productivity ninja for the first time. And I'm like, Yes, cool. So feel free to tag me if you have bought a property book and also just share it around with people that you know as well. We'd love to just help give that book a boost. I really believe in it. I think it's it's much needed right now, as people kind of, you know, mix this kind of hybrid of zoom meetings and also being back in offices and sort of sussing out how to do face to face meeting Well again, so please go and buy a copy of how to fix meetings. And we will be grateful for your help in giving it a push. It's so so important that first please, please do that.
We'll be back with another episode next week as ever, we're gonna have a break over the summer actually, but we'll be weekly until the school summer holidays in July. And some really interesting guests might look over the next two or three weeks as well. So strap in and make sure you're subscribed and following the podcast and we'll see you next week. Until then, take care and bye for now.