Unlocking Remote Work Through Smart Meetings With Chris Dyer

Skot Waldron:

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Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Unlocked, where we talk about unlocking the potential of people in order to unlock the potential of our organizations. Chris Dyer is one of the probably most knowledgeable people that I've heard talk about remote work lately. We've been in this pandemic for over a year now. We've been talking about remote work for a long time. I've been talking about remote work for a long time. Chris brings some new, fresh insights.

And the reason why is because Chris, he is the founder of a company called PeopleG2, which is a background check company. He's also ranked as a leadership speaker, number one leadership speaker by Inc. He took his company remote in 2009. And it wasn't because of a pandemic. And it wasn't because of anything like hip and cool. It was out of necessity. But he learned a lot of lessons from that and is sharing those lessons with us.

One interesting thing that he shared with us, and you need to stay tuned to learn about this is what's called a cockroach meeting. What? Yeah, cockroach meeting. That's a little teaser for you. So Chris is going to bring some really good insights into meetings and what they do for us and what they do against us, and how we can be more intentional about having effective meetings while working remote and keeping our people healthy. All right? You ready? Here we go.

All right, Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris Dyer:

Thanks so much for having me. 

SKOT WALDRON:

Yeah, it's going to be good. I'm fascinated. First off, you are the founder of PeopleG2, which is a background company, background research for job placement and companies looking to hire. Interesting. You've been in that for a while, but your new book is about remote work. So to me, I go, "Hold on a second. What happened there? Where's that transition? Which one came first?" Can you tell me about that journey?

CHRIS DYER:

Sure. So back in 2001, I started the company really because of 9/11. I was working in a job I hated for a person I hated, too afraid to go out and do something on my own, or at least secure enough. I had a salary. I had a mortgage, and it was like, do I just keep doing this thing that's safe? And 9/11 happened and I was like, "Oh." It's like someone released me from a spell, that I could, "Oh, life's too short. I need to go take chances. I cannot work for this person another day." And I literally quit the next day, and went and started PeopleG2. And so we began by November 1 of 2001, we were rocking and rolling and working for our first client. 

So from that point up until about 2009, everything was always very focused on. We were small, really small. It was just me on day one. But it was really a small company for a long time. I was always very focused on my clients, on my technology. Then the recession happened in 2009. So we had the big housing crisis. We had the recession. 40% of my clients were mortgage companies. And they all like disappeared, went out of business, and didn't pay their bills. And so I had to very quickly figure out how to save the company. And one of the ways we figured out to do that was for us to go remote.

So I took the company completely remote in 2009. And there was a lot that went into that to prepare everybody for it. But we didn't even know what we were doing. We didn't. I knew one other person, my coauthor from the book who was remote. So I leaned on her to see what she did. But it was purely a strategy, a fiscal strategy. This was not a ... We didn't do remote work because we thought it was better. We just did remote work because we could afford it that way and we could keep all of our people. But very quickly we realized once we did this, how much better work was, how much happier everybody was, how much more work we got done because we had deep time to think, to be alone, to not have interactions and interruptions that were not productive to the day.

And it was that moment that I went, light bulb went on and I said, "Holy smokes." I didn't say smokes. But I said something a little more dramatic, but I have been focusing on the wrong things. I should be focused on my people. I should be working on them and how we work and the company and the culture first, and really, as the primary driver.

I now spend 80% to 90% of my time on that, inside the company. And by doing that, by literally wielding my machete of cultural goodness all day and clearing away crap for people and removing obstacles and creating better paths for them to get their jobs done, they're incredibly better at doing almost everything compared to me. They're better at customer service. They are better at IT. They're better at sales. I hire all these great people and they can go out and do their best work because I'm working on them and their goals and their teams and all the culture and the glue with the norms and all that stuff.

So really it was, we started doing that stuff, and then we started rapidly growing. And then we started winning all these awards. I mean, no one ever paid attention to us from 2001 to 2009, like literally not an article, not an award, not a mention. And now we're getting written up in the newspaper and now we're getting all this stuff because we're doing this and it's different and it's working.

So that really was the journey for me, that people started asking me to speak, to come and talk about it. Then I started a podcast, a radio show. Someone asked me to write a book about culture. I'm like, "Do you know I don't know how to write?" Like literally all my emails have misspellings. "But okay, I'll write a book." And then that book, and then the same publisher came back and asked me to write a book on remote work before the pandemic. So we were actually working on this before COVID even was a thing or at least a thing that anyone around me was paying attention to.

It's sort of a really interesting, I'd say a lot of stuff in my life is just a bunch of like accidents or like, I don't know. You're walking down the road and you fall down and then you go, "Oh, there's a penny on the ground. Okay." You know what I mean? Like you find something good out of all these little stumbles as you go along. And we've been able to sort of then take those things and try to magnify and try to turn them into something great and run with it.

SKOT WALDRON:

You know what I call that? I call that vision. It's what I call that. Your ability to see opportunity and embrace it. Not necessarily going, "This remote work thing is going to be a wave of the future. Like everybody's going to be working remote, especially, what happens in a pandemic? What happens? Oh yeah. What if a pandemic happens? Then everybody's going to be working and forced to work remote."

So it wasn't that. It was, "Hey, there's an opportunity here to build culture. There's an opportunity here to be more profitable and save my company." You were strategically minded about a vision you had for the future. And remote work just happened to be part of that, which made you inevitably an expert in that, which then you got paid to speak and write and do all these other things, which now here we are, right? Now, you're famous on my show. So everything's going to blow up. Super cool.

Let's talk about the book, Remote Work. What's the content of the book? Why should I read your book rather than any of the other remote work books that are out there right now? And everybody's been talking about remote work for a good year now hardcore, but why you now?

CHRIS DYER:

And there are some good remote work books out there. And I think, but I would say that you probably should read more than one book. I'm not going to say you should only read one book. You should probably read several. I mean, I know I read like a hundred books on culture to try to get and really figure it out what resonated with me. But our book, I think is different in that we have the reflections of the pandemic in there. So we have that reality. A lot of these other books were written, most of them were written pre pandemic. So they kind of have ... It's more of a very singular view. It's a very small use case. Where we were talking about what did I do? What did my coauthor do? And she had 300 recruiters around the world that she was managing, starting back in 2001.

So we took our stories and weaved in, why we thought remote works for a company, why it works for the employee, why it works for leadership. But then we brought in case studies. And knowing that our experiences with our size companies may not be congruent with every reader, we interviewed the CEO, now the founder, chairman of the board of Cornerstone OnDemand, the largest training company in the world. So he came in and we interviewed him, did a case study on what they did with remote work. They bought their largest competitor and announced that the day California said everyone has to go shelter in place. And they had to onboard 4,000 people remotely and convert to a completely remote company with 10,000, 15,000 employee, wherever they got, they have a lot of people.

So we talked about, we show that in the book and what they learn and what they discovered. So there's big co learnings. And then we looked at, well, who's been doing remote work the longest? And this answer may surprise you, but it is the army and the marines and the armed forces have actually been doing remote work the longest. Because you train someone and then you send them off to go somewhere, to go work away from headquarters. The Pentagon, its headquarters, you're sending these people all around the world to go work and do jobs. And they're doing them together sometimes, but they're not connected to headquarters, or they're not in headquarters doing that job.

So we interviewed a top general from the Marine Corps and talked about how they train people remotely, how they ... So it's really a training case study, because they have to prepare people who are maybe all dispersed, all totally all over the world and get them ready up to a certain level. And then they all come together in one place to go do a job. Or they may not even come together. They may be sent all around the world to do this particular thing, to get all these different bases and people.

So we brought all these totally different case studies. We have Girls Inc in there, so we have like a nonprofit, AMN healthcare, which is in San Diego, near you. They were the ones that had this. They took on the contract for the state of New York. They staffed 5,000 nurses remotely to help. How did they go from being a totally brick and mortar company, sent everybody home, and then have to recruit all these people remotely and get them in to help? Remember when New York was literally the worst place you could be in America for COVID, they were helping with that.

The book really is a combination of these stories, of what people did. And then, we sort of juxtapose that to super practical things. I mean, we tell you exactly how to do your meetings and exactly how all this stuff needs to work. One of the worst things that happens when you read a book or you watch a speaker is they get you really excited and they totally convince you, you should do this thing, and then they don't tell you how to do it. We did not want that in this book. We want you to be able to have complete understanding and be able to have enough to do everything that you can to go and start that process. And I've got the first copies ever off print here. It's a decent size book. I mean, my first book was half the size.

So we really did put a lot into it to really try to make it special and useful. And at the field ... You would call it a bible, a field guide. I mean, it has the practical knowledge that you need to go and make remote work work.

SKOT WALDRON:

That is very cool. Yeah. That's hefty, but it sounds meaty. It sounds like there's some really good content. So I'm interested. What was your biggest takeaway from say the military case study for you? What was the biggest thing? You mentioned training, but what was the biggest aha or the biggest impactful thing you got from the military case study?

CHRIS DYER:

Yeah, I mean, it was that they were able to train these people. When I mean train, I mean like they had to learn like how missile ballistics work on this particular aircraft or whatever. I mean, they have to learn really complicated, big, big things, and they have to do it remotely, all in different locations, in different time zones, working asynchronously, and not fall back on that, well, we have to all be at one place.

Traditional training would be, we should all fly them to one base to go look at this one airplane so they can look at this one missile and they can see it and they can really understand it. The military said, "No, we can't do that. That's too expensive. It's too slow. It's too ... " So they figured out how to train people on their own and with collaboration, without ever having that person have to physically be in someplace, sort of eliminated that mind block that so many people have.

I talk to so many leaders that are like, "Yeah, but we all got to be together. We have to be together to collaborate. We have to be together to brainstorm." And that's bull crap. That is not true at all. What's true is, is they just don't know how to do those things unless they're all together. And I like to call this signpost.

Think about if you work in a traditional office, you walk in the door and there's your boss, standing in the conference room, holding a dry erase pen, standing in front of the big white board, waving you in. It's pretty clear what's going to happen. There's a meeting. You've just been invited in. And there's probably going to be some sort of brainstorming, right? They got a pen, the white board. We're going to talk about. This is going to be. You're not in trouble. You're probably being invited in for your opinion. It's very clear what's going to happen. Those are signposts. Just like when we can see a stop sign or a traffic light, we know what to do. And in remote work, we have to recreate those signposts.

And this is where people stumble. This is where they get messed up, is they don't recreate the signposts. So when do we brainstorm? Well, how do you do that? Well, in my company, we call a very specific meeting with a very specific name that has very specific parameters around it so we know when to do that. We have regular team meetings. We have certain sort of recreated structures so that people know when it's time to brainstorm, when it's time to check in, when it's time to update people or do a stand up, or whatever those things are. We have to figure that out. I mean, if you saw, if you knew that Tom and IT had to talk to your boss, Jane, before your project can move forward, well, as soon as you see Tom walk across the building and walk into her office and they had a meeting, signpost, you know now it's time for me to go follow up with Jane because I can move my project. That's all gone in remote work. That's gone.

Instead, you got to stop having one-on-one meetings. You got to have more group meetings and get people talking and collaborating and realizing, okay, this thing has happened and you move the information around. And actually the good news is that process is better. That process is faster. That process creates more transparency and makes happier employees who perform better and you have higher profits and better productivity. It's just different. And you have to kind of retool things. Much like sitting on a horse is a lot different than sitting in a car. I think we would all rather sit in a car if we were going to go drive or go somewhere that's two hours away. But it's just different and you have to figure that out.

SKOT WALDRON:

Yeah. Okay. So this is the kind of meat that I want from those learning lessons. Let's stay on this topic of meetings. We're all in meetings. Every day we've got meetings. And they can be various types of meetings. And you talked about some of the way we need to rethink meeting from one standpoint of treating them and treating remote work is not a prohibition, something that's thrust upon us, that we have no control over, but maybe reframing that into understanding that it's an inhibition. It's me telling myself, "Oh, we can't do it that way because they said we can't," or, "because we can't do it that way because we've always done it one way and now we can't do it." So it's really about how do we switch that mindset to empowerment and understand how to still be productive.

So stay on the top of meetings. What are companies getting right and wrong about meetings right now? What's going on with that?

CHRIS DYER:

What they're getting wrong about meetings is a lot of people are just showing up and just meeting. All right. They're like, "Okay, well, every day, like we don't know how this works so we're all just going to show up and be on a two hour Zoom every day," or, "We're going to just keep having these blocks of one hour," just filling people's time up with all these meetings, and there's no time to go to the bathroom, there's no time to get something to eat, there's no time to get up and stretch, there's no time to collaborate with anybody. And there's no time to actually do your stinking work.

SKOT WALDRON:

Are you talking about just in the realm of remote work or just any work?

CHRIS DYER:

Right now, I'm saying specifically with remote work. When you're all in an office, meetings will work a little differently. I mean, a traditional office, if you got to go pee, you just say, "Oh, excuse me, real quick. I need to pop out, I'll pop right back in." It's no problem. But when we're sitting on a Zoom, nobody wants to leave. You feel trapped in front of your computer. And there's people like, I mean, just, they're miserable, they're miserable. We have to change that.

What we do is we have very specific meeting types and we use what we call a tribal speak to reinforce this. Now tribal speak is not a new concept. Walmart's got these long acronyms, Disney has their own language, they call people cast members. They have this whole thing that reinforces by changing the name of something. You have a new name. Now, everyone goes, "Oh, that means this. I've learned a new name for something, and that comes with all of these norms and rules and definitions." I'll give you an example of one of our most common meetings. And we've done over 100,000 of these since we started being remote in 2009. It's called a cockroach meeting.

So if you have a cockroach in your bathroom, it's a small problem. You may not want to be the one to clean it up and you need help, but it's a small issue. We allow anyone at the company to call a cockroach meeting at any time. You can invite anybody you want. So you're brand new employee. Day one you can invite me, the CEO, to your meeting if you truly think I'm the right person to be on that call. There is no hierarchy. There is no I have to check with this manager, to check with that manager to see if I can actually get that person. No. You have total autonomy to call that meeting. It can only be about one item, one issue, one cockroach. And everyone who's showing up is there to help you solve that one cockroach, and that's it.

It is also optional for you to attend. If you get invited to a cockroach meeting, you might look at it and go, "I don't know anything about this. I don't have time for this." You can decline it. If you say, "I'm super busy today. I have way too many meetings," you can decline it. You as the person being invited aren't obligated to be there, but you can. You might not know anything about it, but you're like, "I'd like to learn what the answer is to this. I'll show up." So it gives everyone a lot of freedom.

And then it has, all meetings, no matter what the name, they all have to start on time. They all must end early, and I can deep dive into why ending early is important. And we only talk about that one item. We don't ask about our kids. We don't talk about how our day's going. It is show up. And if you're like, "Hey, I need a cockroach meeting. My computer will not do this thing and the client really needs it. Who can help me?" Five to seven people show up. "Okay, this is how you do it. You just need to change this, this, and this." "Oh, cool." Or we all show up. "We've never seen this before. We need to go get an appointment with IT." Or maybe your computer needs to ... Or whatever the thing is.

But very quickly, those people showed up. Information was exchanged. We got you your answer. In an average of seven to eight minutes, we just solved a big problem for you and kept you from spending hours trying to figure this out yourself. Or you calling people one at a time and asking them the same question and having the same conversation, you try to figure it out. And you get bits and pieces.

We take kind of the power of the crowd. You have lots of different experiences and brains and people, and we condense it to where they're only having to give you seven to eight minutes of their time. It's sort of a riff on the five minute favor. If I could do a five minute favor for you, I'll do that for just about anybody. You asked me for help. It's going to take five minutes. Sure, I'll help you. It's not going to take all day. Not asking me to move, to help you move. You're asking me to do a tiny little favor. Sure, I can do that.

We have lots of other meetings like that, but that's the kind of structure, that's a kind of intentionality you have to put into these for them to work really well for your people.

SKOT WALDRON:

I love that idea because I've never heard of it, number one. And it's amazing now that we have been over a year in this pandemic of working remote, and I was working remote before that, even with my team. It is a tendency of certain personality types to want to get on the call and talk for 10 minutes about your weekend and how things are going. And I believe in that. We call it third gear time, that water cooler talk that some people really need and desire. They miss that from working in person. They get energy from that interaction with other people.

But you are setting up specific parameters. And I think that's the key, is being clear about what this is. Hey, there's a time and place for water cooler talk. Cockroach meetings are not the time and place. We're in, we're out, we're getting this thing done. And I think that that's brilliant. And I don't think enough people in the remote workspace set up boundaries. They don't. They just kind of, they abuse that hour block. They don't make meetings 50 minutes. They make them an hour. Right?

CHRIS DYER:

Well, the reason we do meetings must end early is this thing called Parkinson's law, which is, if you set an amount of time to do something, it will take you that amount of time to do it. So if you schedule two hours this weekend to clean the garage. Guess what? You're going to spend two hours cleaning the garage. And if you were to squish that down, if you were to say, "I'm going to do it in 30 minutes," how might that change your approach? "I am only going to clean the garage for 30 minutes." Well, you might prioritize better. You might move faster. You might ask your family for help. You might hire someone to help you. How can I condense that down?

But if you set an hour meeting, people just fill it full of crap and they make it an hour meeting, even if it doesn't need to be an hour, because there's this subconscious sort of cognitive bias happening that we scheduled a call from 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM so we're going to be here for an hour, and then just fill it.

Now, there are places in our organization in our meetings for us to have time to check in. We like to put all the water cooler stuff in Slack, in a water cooler room so that anyone can see it, no matter who's on at that time. So people who are working in different times and asynchronously, they can get caught up when it's good for them, and they can participate. So we get a much more larger communal experience.

But we put our connection time into a much more intentional exercise called bonding. And that happens in any meeting that's 30 minutes or more. So we know, okay, bigger meeting, because we have two different 15 minute meetings that we do. And we have some other meetings that are 30 minutes and one hour or even two hours or all day. We have these different types. But in those meetings that are longer, we intentionally show up and ask everyone how they're showing up. That's the first thing we do. It's not, "Hey, how's it going? What did you do this weekend? You have a vacation coming?" That's fine. But that's not really checking in.

If I show up and say, "How are you showing up today?" And you say, "Well, my grandmother passed away last night." Oh, you're not really going to be in for this meeting. You got a lot going on. If you're visibly upset and this was sudden, and you didn't expect it, maybe you don't need to be on this call today. Do you need to go take some time? You, as the leader can figure out are people really okay. Not the mindless, "How's it going?" "Good." Does anyone really mean good when they say that? No. But you have to be really intentional.

And then we ask them how they're leaving at the end of the meeting to make sure we're all on the same page. And that we,  "I thought we had a good meeting. Did everyone else think we got a good meeting? And where are we at?" Now, we find that's much more impactful than just filling it full of junk in an hour long BS session.

SKOT WALDRON:

So good. How are you leaving? Nobody ever asked that question. Nobody asked it. They may say, "We good? Everybody got it?"

CHRIS DYER:

Everybody got it? Yeah. But that's ... You don't really want an answer when you say, "Are we good?" That's just, can I end the call? 

SKOT WALDRON:

Yeah. That's like at 10:59 and 30 seconds of our 11 o'clock ending meeting, it's like, "Okay, good, go team." Like, I don't even know if they really listen for the answer. They just kind of like, and then they're out.

CHRIS DYER:

There was a funny meme that says when somebody asks, "Does anyone have any questions at the end of a meeting," the answer is always no. Like don't make the meeting go longer. But there should be an intentional five minutes there, or even actually it depends. If you have five people on the call, you really only need like two minutes, but it's just how is everyone leaving? And you get an employee focused to answer.

The first question you get to a person, like them as the human being. And the second question is more the employee. It's like, and I'll hear things like, "I know we agreed to this, but I don't think our clients are going to like this." And you're like, "Whoa, what was that?" "Okay, well let's do another meeting." Or, "Why don't you go back and think about that and come back to us," or whatever. Or I've even gotten, "I don't even know why we had this meeting. Couldn't we just done this on email? Couldn't we on Slack?" And it's like, "You know what? You're right. We could have," because we don't want to have more meetings than we have to.

So you get really good feedback about the process and about where everybody's at. And if you hear people are confused and you're the leader, well then, go get them unconfused, work with them, get them the help they need. Don't just let them struggle and be confused and then come to the next meeting and then they're not helpful and you're wondering, "Well, why aren't they being helpful?" Because they don't understand yet.

We have to have really intention. And again, those are signposts. Signposts. Is that person okay to meet right now? Are they in the right mindset to have a meeting? Because if they show up and sabotage a meeting, it's probably because they have something going on in their lives. And then are they good to leave the meeting or not? Again, it just, it's different. And in traditional office we can see the body language and we can see someone acting different. And so we can realize maybe there's something going on with them.

If we leave a meeting and they pick up all their stuff and they're real huffy and they ... we know they didn't like the outcome. We can pick that up. But some reason we're on a Zoom call and it's like the meeting's over, we click and it's over and we don't see how the rest of it. And so we lose out on some of that information. We just have to change how our approach is. And we get actually a much better version than on the office version. We get a much more intentional version.

SKOT WALDRON:

That's really, really good. The difference between are we clear is kind of like a, I'm supposed to say yes, I might say no, but that's still more of a more logical type reaction as opposed to how are we leaving, which is more an emotive type reaction. I'm getting more of the feeling, the gut, kind of the limbic system of my brain going into the why purpose of what am I doing here and how is this fulfilling us that is a greater whole.

Now you have something really cool that you wrote about company culture, and you define company culture, and I haven't heard of this. So I ask a lot of people this question. You put it this way. A combination of the easily seen ideals, first of all, which are vision statements and values. So a combination of the vision statement and values combined with the harder to see norms, which are the behaviors, language, beliefs, and systems. I love that, that combination of easily seen ideals. Like we see them all the time. They're on a poster in our break room, whatever, combined with the harder to see norms, which are the everyday behaviors, the language, the beliefs, and systems. So talk about that combination here.

CHRIS DYER:

Yeah. I mean, so really culture has to be fed and designed and created from the top. That really is one of the few areas where it is top-down. So the leadership creates that. And even if, and you can look at that at a really big scale. You can say Steve Jobs created the culture at Apple. But then most people though your experience around culture is actually what happens on your team with your boss. That's really ... So there's a really cool research out, I think Marcus Buckingham did of it, and they showed there was a direct correlation when they looked at how employees responded to what do you think of your company's culture and what do you think of your team's culture, or how do you rate your team? They're almost exactly parallel to each other. So if you like your team, you like your company. If you hate your team, you hate your company. So this is weird combination.

So you show up to the company because you believe in whatever they're selling or doing or whatever in most cases. You're going to have a career somewhere. You're somewhat connected to what they're doing and why they're doing it. But then it's, well, what are our meetings actually like, and how do you get things done, and if you need to run out the door and go pick up your kid for an hour and come back, is everyone cool with that? Or do you get stares and people talk about you and you're afraid your boss is going to write you up or something? Those really subtle little norms and things that happen inside at a very micro level. So that's culture. That's sort of this combination of things.

I can get up as a CEO and say, "We're going to be a more diverse company. We're going to hire more diverse." And then if all the managers only hire exactly what we have in the company right now, that was the norm, and they just kept going. It doesn't matter what I said. So these things have to really work together and challenge and push and pull on each other all the time. And hopefully the leadership is really strong and really committed to what's important on the macro level, and that managers are doing a really good job on the micro level to reinforce that and to bring in good behaviors and signposts and norms and meetings and whatever that is to make it a great place to work for every employee.

SKOT WALDRON:

All right. So how can people get a hold of you or buy your book?

CHRIS DYER:

So they can go to chrisdyer.com. If you do this before May 25th, /remoteworkpromo, and you can pre-order the book in bulk and get thousands and thousands of dollars of free stuff from 50 different companies that support remote work or great work. If this is after, no problem, you can buy it on Amazon or wherever you buy your books online, or you can find it everywhere. The Power of Company Culture is my first book and then Remote Work with my co author, Kim Shepherd. You can find that again on Amazon or wherever you buy. It's a nice teal color. So you should be able to ... shouldn't miss it.

SKOT WALDRON:

It should pop off the shelves. Well done on the design. That's good. It's smart, smart. Okay. Well, thank you very much for the insights and for sharing all of this wisdom with us. I know I got some nuggets out of this that I'll share with the audience and the outro here, but I really want to appreciate you for your time and investing in us. And hopefully we can pour back into you and go buy your book.

CHRIS DYER:

Awesome. Thanks for having me on the show. 

SKOT WALDRON:

Meetings, meetings, more meetings. They're not going away. We're going to have meetings. We need to stop having meetings just for the sake of having meetings though. And we need to stop feeling like we need to fill up these meetings with things that aren't necessary. So let's be intentional about those meetings structures. Create more opportunities for various types of meetings.

We learned from Chris, they have a bunch of different types of meetings. Set up boundaries to protect the health and culture of your organization, because the way your team culture is perceived is the way your company will be perceived. If you as a leader are not intentional about how you treat your employees and about how you lead those meetings, it's going to reflect poorly on the entire organization. And that person is probably going to not want to be there anymore. Then they're going to say things about you when you're not around and you won't like that. All that stuff happens.

This is so important. I learned a ton from this. I've been having meetings all my life. You've been having meetings all your life too. And it's interesting how we can still learn something important and impactful about how we can lead ourselves in this new era of remote work.

I'm super grateful for Chris. Get out and get that book. It's a meaty book of content, case studies, and some practical tools and lessons you can learn about how to be more effective and intentional with leading your remote teams.

Super grateful for you for being here today. I will put this on my website and YouTube, and hopefully, well, that's where you're watching it. And like, subscribe, comment, all those things. Go link in with me. I'd love to connect with you there. We can start having some conversations and get on with it. But be intentional about those meetings people. Thank you for being here, and I will see you next time on another episode of Unlocked. 

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