EP 121: Why Most Agency “All Hands” Meetings Are a Complete Waste of Time (And Killing Your Culture)

This is the Agency Uplift Podcast for agency owners who are done guessing their way through growth. Each episode focuses on the decisions that compound from foundations and positioning to delivery and leadership. With insights you can apply immediately. Let's get into it. Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Sean Lang. I spent the last several years building and operating a digital agency that has grown past 70, 75 people. It's growing so fast. I'm not really sure where we're at right now, but it's supposed to say it's big. It's bigger than I thought it ever would be and it's fantastic. That agency is called Social Commerce Club. That's definitely shaped how I think about what really matters when growing a complex business like a digital agency. Before we kick things off with this episode, just a reminder that we have a free community with tons and tons of helpful agency resources, templates, AI tools, things that I wish that I had when I was just getting started that I've created for you. It's totally free. Head on over to agencyoplif.co/group. You don't even need to engage with a group, although I would highly suggest that you do. You can just go there and snap up all other resources and use those to grow your agency and make it better. On to the episode. This is another solo episode. I think this is going to be a really important one. I hope that they're all important, but this one is something that a lot of you guys are getting wrong. I say that because I talk to agency owners, multiple agency owners every single week. I coach multiple agency owners every single week. I know what all of you guys are doing. By large, the massive trend is that the majority of you are not conducting proper team meetings. Specifically, I'm talking about all hands meetings. Any agency that is a team of five or more including you, the founder, you should definitely be having an all hands meeting. At first blush, when I ask the question, what kind of team meeting do you have in all hands meeting weekly, biweekly, monthly, whatever? Most people will say yes, but when I ask about the contents of that meeting, I'm generally told, "It's kind of a client review. We go through. We go through clients one by one just to get an update." If you've listened to this podcast, you know how much I hate meetings just for the sake of updates. Updates are for Slack messages. Updates are for emails. Updates are not for engaging interactive meetings. If we actually have a data layer and visibility built into the agency, we don't need to have meetings for updates. That is just a waste of everybody's time. We do need meetings to review clients, but that is not the purpose of an all hands meeting. So let's get into the meat of this. Most agencies I talk to, even if they say they have an all hands meeting, they don't. It's a client meeting. It's a client rule call. We're basically just going through clients and looking at various data points and who's doing well, who's not doing all et cetera. A real all hands meeting is not for walking through every account one by one. That turns the meeting into a bloated status dump, which I hate so much. It's only relevant to a fraction of the people that are on the call or really certain moments of that meeting are only relevant to fraction of the people. So it's really, really inefficient. People will tune out if it's not relevant to them. They'll say nothing. They'll start working on something else off the side of their desk while they're on the meeting. You've probably seen this before. And then they leave this meeting, this apparent all hands meeting without more alignment, without more energy, without more clarity than they had before. The purpose of your all hands meeting should be to create alignment, should be to give people energy, should be to give them clarity. So the core distinction here is that a real all hands meeting asks, what does the whole team need to know? What do they need to feel? What do they need to learn? What do they need to align on this week? So if we just use the meeting to walk through clients one at a time, that creates low relevance for most people that are on the call. It creates passive participation. It creates repeated details that people could read elsewhere, right? The sock message and email. There's no real transfer of insight across the team. There's no real reinforcement of standards or values or culture. And there's no shared momentum. We're just going through the motions, looking at the same numbers we do every single week. And that is what specific client update and scorecard meetings are for. That's not what the all hands meeting is for. So a proper all hands meeting should do five things. It should reinforce culture. It should spread useful insight. It should surface patterns that are occurring. It should create team wide alignment. And it should increase energy and ownership. So let's review a very simple template that I've created for my clients as a way to create your first all hands meeting. You base it off this template and which once you get a rhythm done, you're probably going to, you know, tear it apart and make your own, but based on these core principles in the meeting. So part one of an effective all hands meeting will have discussion on our values on and generally on a highlighted core value. Now I've done a number of episodes on core values and I'll probably bring those back. But let me just go back really quickly. If you don't have core values, you don't skip this part. If you don't have core values, then we defer to what I call the minimum operating principles. There are three of them. First one is bias for action. Second one is proactive communication. And the third one is ownership. So I'm going to go through a list for this first part. And it'll either be your core values. And if you don't have core values, it will be the minimum operating principles. So we highlight one value or principle. And we go either by a show of hands in the meeting or by picking people. And we're going to ask maybe one of these questions. First one is, why do you think that core value or principle X is important to our agency? How does it apply to your role with us, you specifically, or what does core value or principle X mean to you? Or what are some ways that we can better apply core value X or principle X at our agency? Or what decision did we make this week because of core value X or principle X? We want to really start to bake in the culture and the way that we operate and the way we think into everything. And it needs to be an intentional conversation. If it's just this implied thing, it will never actually take root because you want your culture. Your culture will be basically you when you're not in the room. Right now your agency probably has culture and it's based completely around you the founder. But the minute you leave the room, culture just completely disintegrates. And that's because you don't reinforce. You don't take time to actively discuss it and to give it meaning, right? So that's part one and that is critical. You just pick one value or one principle. We don't want to again go through a laundry lesson that everyone tunes out. We want to engage everyone on the team on one value or principle and really get them thinking about it. So that throughout the rest of the week they're going to be thinking about, you know, we really actually don't do proactive communication here very well. But here's how I think that we can improve. If you have everyone else on the team thinking in that same way that you're thinking, a rising tide lifts all ships. I'm sure that we've all heard that cliche before, but it is true. So that's part one. Part two, we go through team wins. So we want to ask the team to offer up their wins from the week either client results or maybe it's a new learning. Maybe it's a new development in the agency or the industry, but something that's a win. And if nobody volunteers, pick people. Usually people will assume that their wind that they're thinking of is too small and it's not worth saying. You actually want to create a culture of celebration, a culture of winning. And that comes out by calling out the wins first. Part three is something that you learned that the team would benefit from because everyone is learning all the time and it's often happening in a silo. Wouldn't be great if every time one person learned everyone actually learned from that kind of like what happens with, you know, I'm going to show that I don't know anything about machine learning and AI. And how this stuff works in the background, but generally if something is tied to a network and you know one AI learns they all learn we want our team to benefit from that as well. And again, we're going to ask the team and if nobody volunteers, we're going to pick people and I'm going to pause right here really quickly. This is an agenda. This is a template. And so you should let your team know in advance that this is this is what the all hands meeting will look like going forward. Be prepared to bring up a team win. Be prepared to bring up something that you learned that the team would benefit from because you might be called on you can volunteer or you might be called on makes sense. Part four, I call this the client experience pulse. We want the team to discuss things that they're hearing when working with clients directly, you know, what are clients asking for more of often the clients are leading all sorts of breadcrumbs or even asking outright for things that we either don't offer or we're not doing in a way that they want. We actually want this information to surface to the top to the entire team so we can have a discussion because then we can start to brainstorm and say, oh, we can actually offer that in this way we can change the way we do that so that it actually makes all the clients happy. And another question to ask is what are the clients tired of and either they said it point blank or it's just something that we're noticing a pattern that we're noticing. If we're always just doing client updates, we're not going to be nearly as intentional with with the softer side of the of the client management part of the business and this is very very critical. Part five is one that I actually love. I mean, because I'm a founder and you're a founder, we should love this, but this is something that actually should excite the team as well. And this is the pipeline review. Are there any exciting deals in play the goal here is just to create some momentum and excitement it's always great to. to say we've got five very, very juicy, exciting opportunities that are near the end of the pipeline. And we're confident that three or four of these are going to close. We can't wait to tell you guys who it is. Or maybe you can even tell them who it is, right? It gets the team excited and saying like, Oh, we're growing. There's more interesting stuff coming down the pipe, right? It's very, very important. Now, when we go through all these different parts, keep in mind that some of them will have more meat than others. So you're not going to give part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, et cetera, the same amount of airtime in the meeting. It's going to be based on what is the most relevant. So if pipeline is really, really thin right now, we don't really have much to review. We might just skip it or we might say, Hey, we'll hit pipeline review on the next meeting. And then we'll move on to part six. So part six is any operational changes worth reviewing. Now this becomes especially important if you're an agency owner, you know, working with a coach or consultant like me, and we are building a lot in the back end to make the agency better. We're creating new processes and new policies. We need to actually let the team know what is going on and not just sort of like throw them down from on high and surprise everyone. We want to tell the team in in a group setting and give them the chance to ask questions and understand you changes to process new tools we're using new resources we have or maybe challenges that we need to solve operation. Maybe there's a gap in clarity and maybe we can actually all solve these together in the all hands meeting. And then part seven, and this is sort of a call back to something that you learned that the team we benefit from is just overall team learning. Is there something that you want the entire team to learn? Maybe it's a new concept, a new approach, a new way of doing things. Then carve out some time at the end of the all hands meeting and do a team training and then provide that as a recording afterwards. And then one really, really important thing that I love to do and this becomes less and less possible once you get to 20, 25, 30 team members. But when you're at five, including you, this is you should definitely do this is ask the team members one by one, you know, you got one minute each, what was your biggest takeaway from this meeting? If people know that they're going to be called on to provide their biggest takeaway, they're also going to be very, very dialed in and and actually internalizing everything that we're talking about. So this is very, very different from the vast majority of agencies. I wanted to talk to you. They say they have an all hands meeting, but really it's just going through the raw index of clients and what's working, what's not, what's what are results. There are separate meetings for those. You can't make sure that every single meeting that you have with your team is just about clients, what about culture, what about team, what about alignment. So use this very simple all hands meeting template for your first all hands meeting. And thank you me later. Hopefully this is helpful. If this episode helped you think more clearly about how you're growing your agency, take a moment to reflect on the decision that stood out most. That's where the leverage usually is. And if you're finding these conversations useful, leaving a review or following the show helps it reach other agency owners who care about building deliberately. We'll see you in the next episode.