A Day in the Life of a Senior Leader

Chapter 10. So You Want to Fix Your All-Hands

I will now explain why at least 50% of your team finds your current all-hands meetings to be a waste of their time. They believe:

• This is information they can easily find elsewhere.

• This is about you, not them.

• This is boring.

Now I will describe how to build an all-hands that will exceed their expectations. Let’s define the all-hands meeting.

Everyone. Together.

The basic definition of an all-hands meeting is “the whole team—together.” This can be the entire company, but more commonly it’s an entire function gathering together. Think all of engineering, for example.

The whole team—together. The need for this type of meeting is triggered by an important organizational inflection point—the point when the whole team becomes too big to gather organically. Is that at 50 people? Maybe? Is that when they no longer fit in one room easily? Probably? The inflection point varies as a function of the company, but this is a required meeting because it mimics what you did instinctively when you were a smaller team, and that’s a good place to start.

When it’s you, Frank, Aki, Liz, Gigi, and Joshua sitting in the same room cranking on your start-up, what are the events that everyone needs to regularly understand?

• What is the current state of the business?

• When has something significant in the business changed?

• What is important for us to do next?

In the same room, it is relatively easy to gather much of this information. You look ...