Welcome as you're coming in to the webinar. I'd love if you could put in to chat, what words do you use to describe most of the meetings you attend? Or what words describe most of the meetings you attend? So would love to see that as you're joining.And yeah, it's been a busy day. You're coming in from a lot of different things redundant. Thank you Nicole. So just trying to get from you. What are the words that describe most of the meetings you attend? My hunches for some of you? It's just I'm too tired to even put into anything and chat. That's how many meetings I've attended today. So, status updates. Yes. Thank you, Maya. That's a good one. Consensus building. Great Elizabeth. So please keep coming. I'm gonna get started. So we make sure we get through everything, but I'm excited to share with you some ideas to change up your meetings coming soon. So as you can see, just from a few things on the list, meetings get mixed reviews and a decent percentage of the meetings we attend can actually feel like a complete waste of time and this has a huge cost for us personally. And as an organization, maybe all those meetings that you're attending mean that you're getting your work done late at night after the kids are in bed, maybe it means that you're trying to fit in just one more meeting.

So you're constantly running late for family and friends after work and maybe it's created the sense that you're falling behind and there's important issues that, you know, you and your team need to work on, but you just haven't had time to tackle them. And if we step back even further, think about what it's costing your organization. Think about all those people sitting in meetings with strain on their loved ones because they can't show up how they want to show up. Think about all the people who aren't able to do the work that they know will have the biggest impact and then think about the time that you don't have to grow and retain your best people and those are often the first to leave. And if we step back from all the busy for a second, I want you to just pause and think about why do you do what you do? What inspires you about your work because this is why you should be going to meetings ideally because they get your work done and they help you get done the work that inspires you. So let me introduce myself. I'm Joe Eld. I'm the CEO of insight to leadership I'm actually located in Berkeley, California. So it's still middle of the day here. And one of my favorite places on Earth is Carmel Beach and this is my family and I in Carmel Beach last summer.

I also love to write about leadership topics on my blog. This is a hole I fell into on Carmel Beach last summer because I'll admit it. I was looking at my cell phone. I'm also a huge connoisseur of dark chocolate. And I love reading my favorite art leadership books and romantic comedies. I'm really passionate about helping you end meeting how and making the meetings that you are at more meaningful and productive so that you can get on with the work that matters, the work that you were meant to do and the work that makes an impact on this world, I believe to do that.

We need teams with the capacity to drive to what matters and to do that. We need leaders like you who are willing to give and receive tough love. Now, what do I mean by tough love? No, it's not like some kind of intervention or something like that. And it's not military style, tough love. But when I say tough love, I mean, leaders who are willing to make the hard decisions and willing to take a stand even when it means saying no, because when you stay in the driver's seat, the big work gets done. I've worked with hundreds of companies and leaders facing this need. And if you're listening and you're like, this sounds great, but I already have too much on my plate. You are not alone. Everyone I work with now has too many priorities, not enough resources. And a real question about how it will all get done. So it's one thing to talk about tough love, but it's really important to think about what it looks like in real life. And so to do that throughout this workshop, I'm gonna be talking about one of my clients, I'll call him Sam. I met Sam when he called on my company for help. Sam had just reorganized his R and D team for a global biotech. And the first time we talked, I could hear the frustration in his voice. He said my schedule is killing me. I feel like I'm in meetings with my team and they get so bogged down in the details that we never get to what's really important.

So then we need to schedule another meeting to do a deep dive honestly, between executive team meetings, R and D strategy meetings, one on ones and running my whole org. My day is packed with back to back meetings. If I'm honest, I barely know what meeting I'm heading into, let alone having any time to prepare. And then once I'm in the meetings, I often feel like people are just arguing for their own solutions and they're looking to meet a referee I don't have the energy to do the work. I need to do, make strategic new investments when I'm constantly being dragged down into the weeds. And I know I need to develop my team so I can empower them and I can focus on the big picture, but there's just not enough time. Maybe Sam's story feels familiar to you. Maybe you've heard it from others in your organization. But in the months that followed, as I worked with Sam and his leadership team, we co created the systems. His team used to shift out of the small concerns and get their collective focus back on achieving the bigger results where it belongs.

So listening to this, you might start to feel skeptical and be like, oh, we've talked about meetings before and they just never get better and please don't tell me you're gonna tell me about being more vulnerable with my team or even worse improv games. Don't worry, I'm not, I'm not selling snake oil. I don't have a magic pill, but I do wanna share three questions that make a huge difference in making your everyday meetings more enjoyable, more meaningful and more effective. And these are three questions that really show you what I mean about tough love. What's the level is this problem worth our time together and what's our process? So, pause for a second. I want you to think about a meeting you attended where it wasn't a waste of time maybe you nailed it, you got shit done, whatever was going on. It felt like a really great use of your time. It's gonna give you a moment to think. OK, so thinking back on that meeting, whether you were the leader or someone else was the leader, maybe you noticed that this leader was not just paying attention to the content of the meeting, but they were also tracking participation and engagement, right? That leader was paying attention on multiple levels. This is a essential for an effective meeting. So let's talk about how this happens. We have all been in a meeting where two people are going back and forth on an issue. They're in the weeds.

Maybe this issue only matters to the two of them and not other people. And when it's me, I noticed immediately that I just start spacing out and often checking my phone to see can I delete a few emails, get rid of a few things. Make more time in my day. I'm guessing you do that too. We all have these coping mechanisms. It's totally human, but be honest with yourself. What do you notice when you, when you see yourself checking out and you look around the room and you notice 3/4 of the people in the meeting are checked out or not participating? What do you as a leader do to address that to think more about what's really going on here? I'm gonna turn to some of the science of leadership, our brains actually stop developing at 25 physically but cognitively, they keep developing our entire lives. And what that means is as our brain develops over time, we can handle more and more complexity. Researchers have found there are four different developmental stages commonly found in adults. The first one is self sovereign. These are people who see life as a battle. It's me versus the world and their perspective is often pretty narrow. Well, how does this impact me? Next up? We have socialized leaders.

These are leaders who are great team players and they care about the objectives of the organization and looking for alignment between what they can provide and what the organization needs. It's important to them that they be seen as results driven and contributing to the company's success.

These leaders have a bit wider perspective. It's me and you, it's us. Then we move on to self authored leaders in this stage. Leaders can look at multiple objectives. They have a larger frame of reference and they can choose among them to decide which has the most merit and chance of success. This leader can hold more complexity and options and is always choosing among them to create the biggest chance of success. This leader is also more independent and finally, we have trans self transforming leaders in the self transforming mind. This leader is again a pro independent problem solver. But instead of choosing among just the best options. This leader can hold on to conflicting agendas, both and and is much more comfortable with paradox and uncertainty in a world that gets more and more complex. This leader doesn't need to pick a path, fully commit and see it through. They can be constantly weighing competing priorities and reassessing with the newest information possible. They have the widest frame of reference to see how this might look in an actual team. Let's turn back to Sam's team. If we were listening to Sam's team, this is how we might hear these leadership types in action.

Imagine Sam is in a meeting with his leaders and someone has suggested that instead of giving each group a but fixed budget that they constantly reassess during the year to see which projects are doing better and then flexibly allocate their R and D spread to the projects that are doing the best.

Now, let's listen to the conversation leader, a self sovereign immediately pipes in. I don't think this is a good idea. I can't plan appropriately for my team if I don't know what my full budget is and I don't wanna have to spend my time defending my allocation resources to others. Leader b socialized and says I'm hesitant to commit to any of this type of plan without talking it through my leaders first and making sure they're on board as well. It's important that my group make decisions together. Leader C pulls the group in a different direction says this is a really interesting idea, but it's really important to make sure that we have clear criteria for what is a successful project for my team. I have well outlined success measures for the research criteria. I would need to see to allocate more resources there. And finally, we have a self transforming leader, leader de pauses before speaking says it's great to hear everyone's perspective. I think it's important. We come up with a flexible model of funding that is responsive to the research results we're seeing on our team, but is also responsive to what's changing in the competitive landscape. OK.

So if you're like most people, when you're hearing this, you're probably trying to think about the people, you work with your peers, your team. Where do we think they fall on the map? So, OK, here's a tough love moment right here. First, think about yourself. Where do you think you fall on this map? The truth is about 30 to 40% of leaders are at the self authoring stage, but only about 10% of leaders are even approaching the self transforming stage. So most of us have a fair amount of growth that we can still put into seeing wider perspectives and thinking about things with more complexity. So here's what tough love can look like in action as you're thinking about. How do I widen the perspectives in my group? First of all, it's prioritizing your own development, make sure that you are thinking about things and stepping back and always trying to get a wider perspective, then start monitoring your team's level. Notice when your team is in the weeds, talking about things, people are spacing out and how can you raise up the team's level? How can you pull in all the different perspectives of the broom and get people talking about that? And then here's the really tough love part. Sometimes you have a leader on your team who won't raise up, who's constantly pulling the team back down into the weeds. And at this point, you really have three options.

The first option is, is there a way to give this leader coaching and mentoring so that they can start thinking at a higher level with more perspectives? Or is there a way to layer someone above this person? So you get their subject matter expertise, but they are not the ones sitting in the meetings all the time when you're making the bigger decisions. And finally, sometimes you do have to exit someone. And that is tough love. I don't advocate it easily, but it's really important to make sure that you have the right team. So now I wanna do a little bit of crowdsourcing here. Remember when I started, I said for you to think of a meeting that you had been at where you had, where things were going. Well, you were rocking it, things were working. I'd love you to put into chat. Like, what have you seen work? How have you seen leaders engage the room? Get the different perspectives and keep the level of the discussion high? I really want to crowd source because I know there's some great ideas in this room, but I'll tell you a few of my favorites as well. One is, I love having people sometimes if there's an idea out, like, what do we think about this idea? Just having a quick thumbs up, thumbs to the side or thumbs down?

Like, I'm not sure I'm not in favor of it and have everyone do it at the same time. So you don't have groupthink. That's a great way to, you know, keep people engaged and, and discussing different things, other things people can do is I'm a big fan of just having go rounds and making sure every person on the team gets a chance to talk as opposed to giving the microphone always to the people who have the loudest voice and tend to talk the motion meetings.

Ok, great. Thank you so much Elizabeth Nicole. So I see some answers coming in setting expectations at the beginning of the meeting. Yes, I totally agree. We'll be talking about that later. So you beat me to it, but I love it and smaller, more tailored meetings. I agree. You don't want to invite the kitchen sink because then you get all of those perspectives and sometimes that's too much. Um, and that's a great idea. Tia, I don't know if I said your name. Right. But you know what's relevant to this topic and what's not like, let's, let's set out what's relevant. Another thing I've seen people do is have like a parking lot, whether it's a Google Doc or a physical flip chart. And it's like when people come up with things, it's like, that's a really interesting point, but it's not really relevant right now. So we're going to write it on the parking lot. So people know we haven't forgotten and we'll come back to it. So as a leader, your role is to be con consistently helping your people transition to the next level of their development by raising the level that your team can function at. And so one way is by challenging your team's thinking and enlarging their perspective, taking skills.

Another way is to make sure your team is focusing on the right problems together. Oftentimes people tell you that you should be solving problems and thinking with your team together. But what I want to tell you is that there are certain types of problems, your team should not be wasting time on together. Let's talk about why people often talk about how it's a vu a world. If you haven't heard that term before, it's volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. It's a big mouthful, which is why people say VCA and a lot of decision making that might decisions that might have been simple in the past now involve a lot more of that and add a lot more complexity you can take, I'm working right now with the team to schedule a leadership off site retreat.

And there is the complexity of everyone's different schedules, managing all those different vacations and different holidays, the ambiguity of how to hail no COVID if at all. And then there's the uncertainty of like, what are we going to use our time together? How and how do we bridge the hybrid gaps or do we talk about our strategy? There's a lot that can go into even just something simple, like a leadership off site. One model that I love what was formulated to classify problems. It's called the Canon model and it was formulated by Dave Snowden when he was working at IBM at work, we're constantly making decisions. So it's important to know what type of decisions we're making. So we know what process to use. Let's look at Sam and his team again to think this through the first is simple decisions. When I first started working with Sam, his team spent a lot of time talking about simple problems and complicated problems. Simple problems are problems where if you do A, you get b it's their simple or obvious problems and they're pretty straightforward to solve. Like if Sam wants to call a meeting for his team, he can tell his E A they can send an invite, put the Zoom room and barring any tech snafus, everyone ends up in the meeting at three or if Sam's team needs to create a budget.

They know if they just add up all the different subtotals, they get the total amount of money in the budget that they're requesting. Simple problems, have best practices how to solve them. You do that, you move forward. Next step, we have complicated, complicated decisions also have a right answer. But they're harder to figure out. They involve a lot more steps with Sam's R and D group. Some leaders need to think through clinical trials for prospective drugs. Clinical trials can be really complicated to think through.

How are we gonna recruit people? How are we going to administer the medication? How, how will we measure treatment outcomes? This is a compli process. But if you want to get FDA approval, there's a lot of standards that you can follow. And in many companies, there's a program management office or project managers who help manage all these different types of complicated processes and systems so that the important pieces can come together at the right time. Then we start entering into the other side of the model.

This is the complex world and this is what most of us are honestly facing right now in our companies. That's when A doesn't always lead to B and things don't happen the same way each time. So we can look for patterns and we can find them. But there's no guarantees like if you get a certain results in the lab that it will translate into human re human subjects or that a certain amount of advertising will always lead to the same amount of sales in a complex world of problems. You're not just one answer, you can't just figure it out like a simple solution or a complicated one. So you're looking at emerging practices and what works for where you are right now. As I worked with Sam and his team, one thing we shifted was taking out all the simple and complicated problems from their valuable team time together. Often these can be solved better by more junior employees or individual contributors. And that way Sam and his team have time for the most complex problems. I think Nicole mentioned smaller meetings also a great idea. So imagine when Sam calls his internal team together to discuss, where should they invest their research dollars? There's drugs in early stage development, drugs, clinical trials and there's companies that they can buy with promising results. This type of strategic planning is often what companies are doing where there is no one right answer.

But when we think back to the first part of this workshop, we talked about perspective, taking the more perspectives you can get in the room, the more you can handle these unknown variables and imagine many more different outcomes as a result. Once Sam and his team kicked out simple and complicated problems from their agenda. They had time to discuss the thorny issues that mattered most and use their joint experiences as a brain trust. And for those of you who are like, wait, hold on, there was 1/4 box. What about chaos? That could easily describe what happened to a lot of companies when the pandemic started and everyone had to leave their workplace when you have chaos. What you want to do is act quickly to find stability again. And then once things are more stable, you can start moving into what's next for Sam and his team, when the pandemic hit, they, they suddenly had to deal with a team that was all remote. And so they acted to make sure everyone had the technical equipment and the things that they needed to be able to work from home, then they could start looking at the complex issue of what did they want to do strategically? What were their new priorities given this new state of work from home and this new reality? So it's one thing to just hear about these things, but I wanted to give you a chance to actually play with it because identifying these problems is key.

Otherwise you won't know whether they should be on your agenda or not. Right. So I'm gonna give you a quiz, you can just put the answers in the chat and you know, you'll know if you are right. Or not? So how do we choose between our top three candidates for making a final offer? Is that a simple problem? A complicated problem, a complex problem or chaos? I see. Let me give you a moment to put something in the chat. You can just simplify if you want. For those of you who thought complex problem. Yes, there often isn't a right candidate to choose. And oftentimes we're de it depends what we're working on. Is this a job where we've seen other people do it successfully before? Is it brand new? And we're creating a new position?

So we need to see certain things. Is someone or some people internal versus external. There can be a lot of complexity in even just making a final offer. Should we reserve a booth at the XYZ conference again this year? Any thoughts from the audience? Simple. OK, Elizabeth, I think in many companies, it is simple. Maybe it is. I sort of gave it as complicated that you could sort of look at how well your ro I was for your booth last year. You could look at your ro i of other things. You're sort of measuring these things and then you're coming up with whether or not to reserve it. But yes, I agree. In some companies, it probably is just a super simple decision depending on what the conference is. It's the biggest conference of the year. What's the best way to pick which product upgrades we should invest in this cycle. See if there's any answers complicated. OK, I went with complex because I think oftentimes you're having to weigh like what is the cost and benefit of different product of different product benefits?

Also what's happening competitively in the marketplace? What are your, what are other people doing? What is the, where is the market moving? So to me, there's a lot of complexity in that, but it depends on what product. And then finally, why am I so tired? And this one I thought could be all of the above. It could be as simple as I went to bed at 4:30 a.m. last night. That is not true for me. It could be complicated like, oh, I'm taking some new medicines and I need to figure out like which one is affecting my sleep, but there's a right answer there. It could be complex. Like I have a lot of stress at work. I'm taking some new medications. I also have a new puppy. That is true for me. And you know, so what are the, which of these things are contributing and then chaos if you're in a war torn country and everything is chaotic around you, that might be a reason as well. So as you can see lots of fun to just start thinking about which problems are, is your team spending time on. So the first thing that you and your team should be doing is to review your team meeting agendas beforehand. And you're looking for things that are simple or complicated. And what you want to use is like the red marker or the strikethrough function and you want to get them off your agenda. And here's the tough love part.

It's not going to be easy because this kind of stuff sucks our attention in the moment. It feels super important and we feel accomplished because we've solved the problem. And then sometimes other people don't like it when we remove their things from our agenda because they want us to help solve their problems too. But if you really want to focus on the big stuff and have an impact, this is a truly necessary part of tough love. So here's what tough love can look like in action. First of all, as I said before looking at your agendas making sure there is time for what is truly complex. What that often means is canceling meetings. I recommend to all my clients that they or their E A spend 15 minutes at the beginning or end of a work day and look at meetings and decide which of these meetings do I really need to be at? Which of these meetings are proforma or they're just going to be sharing about things and just send them an email and say, hey, I don't think I'm really needed in this meeting. But let me know if you have any questions and create some space on your calendar then. And I think I can't remember who said it. I think maybe Elizabeth. But no, when you're going into the meeting, know your meeting goals and what are the necessary decisions like, understand what is a good outcome for this meeting. I worked with a leader last summer.

She was so busy going from meeting to meeting. She felt accomplished if she just showed up on time. But we ended up having conversations about the difference between showing up versus setting a purpose for a meeting, knowing what decisions need to be made and acting on that.

And as a bonus, what I said to her is you can't have executive presence. If you're just showing up at the meeting with no clue about what needs to happen, then you're not leading that meeting from a place of strength so I can't see you. So you're all a little bit saved. But I often will do this poll with people where I'll say, OK, think about the meetings you had on last week for those meetings. Like, did you show up to 100% of them? Like a rock star? Were you prepared and ready? Had reviewed the agenda? Knew what was important about that meeting or maybe for some of you, 50% of the time, like half, half the time I just showed up and half the time I was prepped and for some of you, it might just be 10%. Like there's one meeting a day that I know what needs to happen and that's what I can do. So just apply some tough love to yourself and think about your own schedule and think if there is any room for growth here for you and your team because and here is a key distinction here, meetings that focus on simple or complicated problems are largely pro procedural. Their purpose is about checking in reporting, giving updates or problem solving with known variables and it's not bad work, but it's not leadership as a leader, you have been hired to accomplish something great and to achieve those goals, you need to have people working on the complex problems.

And in the beginning, you're gonna have to hold that agenda for your team because they might not be used to it and it might be a pattern interrupt for them. But when you hold that vision that meetings are a place to focus on complexity and what our team can really do that makes an impact. I guarantee you you won't feel like your meetings are a waste of time again. So let's say you've cleared your agendas of all those simple and complicated problems that have been eating away at your team's time. Now, what I'm glad you asked you might know already that you can't forge ahead and just solve a complex problem head on. That's not how it works, but here's one way it does work. I call this model, the complex problem solving blueprint. I also joke. It's the tangled necklace model. So many women, maybe you two store their necklaces in ways where when you pick one up suddenly you've gotten multiple necklaces and they're tangled together. I've heard this is similar to the Christmas light problem when you're taking them out for the new season. And most of us have learned by trial and error tackling tangled objects that if you go right to the tangle and you sort of pull harder, it doesn't help, it makes things worse. Solving complex problems is the same thing.

If you go right to the middle of it, you often end up with the tangle being tighter and you end up in more confusion. It turns out you need a more systematized approach. The first step I talk about with my clients is executing a strategic step back. I talk a lot about strategic step backs with my clients. I find most of us are so busy going, going, going that we don't take the time to stop breathe and look at the problem we're facing and understand what is, what is this problem involved? What are all the elements of this problem? Especially once we're out of the domain of simple and complicated problem solving. So the first step is recognizing what are the, all the things involved in this complex tangle that you need to think through and to do that, you take time by yourself or with your team to identify and name all the elements of going on of what's going on. Otherwise you might be missing the big picture. One of the things I find when people start noticing that they're in a real tangle is that they're having the same conversations over and over again. One of my clients nicknamed these zombie issues. And I love that means you think you've dealt with something, you think you've made a decision and boom, it keeps popping up again. I often find that happens when we have a complex problem and you haven't thought about all the pieces together.

So you've made a decision and then people are like, oh, but what about this case out here? What about here? And so you haven't thought about all the elements of the problem. So once you've identified the edges of the problem, I find it's often wise to tangle, tackle a tangle in the edge first before you go to the middle. This helps your team work on the smaller problem first, gain a little bit of traction and even learn more about the complex tangle in the middle. So the next step for your teams and leaders is to notice where on the edges of this issue might you be successful in having an impact? Let's return to Sam and his team to see how this works. Our first step was to initiate quarterly off sites for the global team. The leaders could come together and discuss where is the industry going? Where do we fit in this landscape? What's our vision for R and B within the company? And then following my model, these leaders picked one tangle to start what they realized is that they didn't have strategic questions that they were always asking of new projects to figure out whether it fit well in their portfolio or not.

So what they chose to focus on was creating 10 questions or guideposts that they could agree that helped them and the company decide which projects to take on and which to pass on. The first set of experiments that they did was holding focus group like discussions with other groups in the organization to make sure do these seem like the right questions? Is there anything we're missing? What these leaders saw was how valuable it was to involve their stakeholders.

Earlier in their thinking, they had a monthly meeting with the CEO and what they started doing was also setting up regular meetings with stakeholders like regional heads and the coo before this monthly meeting. So they can improve their ideas before they presented them to the CEO complex problem solving. Doesn't just work for meetings though. It also works for company wide problems and for teams that are different than Sam's too. I had one architecture firm that I worked with and their chief complaint wasn't time wasting meetings. It was profitability. When they came to me, there were four partners and two were retiring soon. And the leadership dynamic was changing and their big tangle, their big complexity is how would the firm survive, how would it stay profitable and become even more profitable? And what we saw as we did a step back together and started thinking about the issues that it made sense to start with the tangle of who were the next leaders coming up in the organization so they could develop them. So as these two leaders left, there were more leaders coming up through the pipeline. So we used a mix of individual and team coaching and we got these leaders together, thinking not about architecture or project management, but thinking about business sustainability and building new relationships.

What it meant to mentor their teams and work in a very different way. Then we worked with a third party RO I firm who surveyed the leaders and what they found is it does make a difference. These leaders all were much better at strategic execution and at anticipating and responding to what was new opportunities in the market that helps a lot with profitability. The final return on their investment was 218% and this was the end of one year of work together. Since then, I've kept in touch and these partners who were once at a firm that was struggling with viability have grown 25% year over year and had some of their best years despite COVID, the investment in leadership development pays for itself. This had been a firm really worried about viability and now they talk about the most important things as a group. So this is one version of what it can look like to work in complexity. But I find once you get your team better at conducting experiments, then it's important to build in time to think about. What did we learn from this experiment? What do we need to do differently going forward? I find a lot of teams do that. OK. But then they skip the second part. Here's tough love where you actually need to create an action plan for what your next iteration is. It's not enough to just talk about it.

You actually have to put it into action and to do that, you need to create accountable team members for that post mortem follow up in Sam's team that meant there was someone responsible after each focus group for taking the feedback and incorporating it into their 10 touchstones and guidelines.

Um for other teams, this might mean creating new templates and checklist for on boarding. So the same mistakes don't happen again and again. So I want to give you a moment to post mortem this workshop and we're not totally over yet, but we're getting the close. And so I'd love you to just think about what's one idea insight that stood out to you at your workshop. And if you're willing take the time to put it into chat. What is one takeaway from this workshop or some wanna do differently with your team? When you go home as you're putting that in, I'll just keep moving on so that I make sure to get through everything and have some time for questions. But if you are like a lot of the people I work with when you, you have go to this conference, you hear great ideas and then you go back into the meeting madness and it is hard to change and tough love needs support. So if you think that you and your team could use some support, just drop me an email at um Joe at insight to leadership.com. And we'll find a time to talk about the strength and growth areas of your team and what you can do next with your team, that would be most effective. So whether your team feels like a disaster, whether your team is running to working together, ok.

But you know, they need to resolve some key issues or whether your team is doing pretty well, but you're ready to take it to the next level. Our conversation can help you identify where your team can easily improve and transform your company's results. Here's the thing when we find ourselves going to meetings, meetings, meetings. This is another time to step back and ask ourselves, where am I having an impact? What will my legacy be? I wanna leave you? With this story, my dad was a lawyer for a top research university. And I grew up listening to him tell my mom at the kitchen table about his day, his meetings, his vision and he shaped much of how I first learned about leadership in teams. My dad was often focused on solving complex problems like community relations with a large research university. But he also made time for mentoring and life changing conversations. A few years ago, my dad art passed away and the first flowers that arrived to my parents apartment were from then first lady Michelle Obama. And the card read art was a true mentor to me. My dad was able to impact many people through his dedication and care, including a first lady of the United States.

If my dad had settled for just getting through his need to do, he never would have made time to meet influence and change the lives of the people he did. If my dad had settled for just getting through his daily meetings, he wouldn't have focused on the bigger picture and creating long term change. And if my dad had settled for things being good enough, he wouldn't have left the lasting legacy that he did. Tough love is really about more than meetings. It's about paying attention to what matters. So when you notice yourself consistently checking out in team meetings, it is a big signal that you and your team are not doing the impactful work you need to do because that is really why we're here, right to do the work that inspires us and to make a difference. And I want that for all of you. Thank you. And I know we're at the end, but I'm happy to stay and answer any questions if people have them and if you have to jet off to other sessions, that's totally fine too. I'll just wait for a minute or two and see if there's any questions in the chat. Ok. Thank you. Everyone. I really enjoyed being here with you and you drop me a line, Joe at insight to leadership.

If you have any questions or I can be helpful to you and your team. Thank you.