How To Get Projects Done On Time With Clint Padgett

Meetings are a problem and an issue. People have more work than they could possibly get done as it is. So you don't want to add overhead onto it, but you want to make the meetings productive.

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What is so challenging for leaders and for the teams to execute and hit their deadlines in their companies?

It's tough, especially when you are remote. This challenge existed in Clint's office six months ago because people sit at their desk and would shoot an email or send a text message or post on Slack and not get up and walk three doors down the hallway and stick their head in the door and talk to you. That's so it's just exacerbated now with the remote.

When you work remotely, the challenges you have are, it's very easy to get off on a tangent and do something that's not remotely close to what should be done at the moment.

For instance, what happens is, each person communicates to the next person, that person hears the message through their filter, biases, and their understanding of language that they experienced in life. They then communicate that message as they understand it to the next person who puts their spin on it.

So it's not surprising that what comes out of person number five mouth isn't remotely close to what person number one said.

The thing that happens today in a remote environment is you hear something in an email or a text message. You've put your own spin on it, and you're off to the races. And now you're doing the wrong thing.

What we should do when we are working remotely, is we should have conversations and ask clarifying questions. And then the message that comes out of person number five mouth is the same thing that went into person number one, and the same thing when you parlayed into teams.

If I'm a leader, I want to make sure that the message I said was heard and understood how I wanted it to be heard. And I want to make sure the team is clear on the message and who has to do a certain task, and that all comes through having conversations.

What are some of the pressures you've seen that cause you not to take the short-term sacrifice or bypass the short-term gains for long-term prosperity?

I think your time is limited as an entrepreneur. So, you're focusing on the things that you feel are the most important that you need to get done right. The problem is a perfect time that you'll ever coach never comes. It's like saying, you're going to have kids when you're ready. But you are never going to be ready. You just have him and learn as you go.

The same thing happens here. So maybe, you strike a balance and say, you're going to take the short-term sacrifice, but longterm, you're going to choose a trusted person to stick by your side while you do it. So that next time your team can do it, and you can just coach them a little bit, and it'll be more efficient that way.

I like to call a spade, a spade. I think people don't like to hear the truth because it's ugly. We have a saying in the South, "Your baby is ugly."

Nobody wants to tell the senior vice president or the owner of the company that their baby is ugly. They try to sugar coat it, and they try to put it nicely or downplay it.

As a leader, if you have what you think is a brilliant idea, you have to accept your team's feedback.

If you don't accept any form of feedback, people will keep quiet because they don't want to risk their job or their relationship with you as the owner. And this will eventually hurt the company and the leader in the end because of that kind of mentality.

Are you a big proponent of multiple meetings? How do you make sure things get done without spending significant time in meetings?

Meetings are a problem and an issue. People have more work than they could possibly get done as it is. So you don't want to add overhead onto it, but you want to make the meetings productive.

It's about having an agenda, keeping it short to the point. You wouldn't want to be succinct and have an agenda that you stick to. In the world that Clint lives in is project work. The meetings all have value because it's about adding new stuff to the schedule, understanding the challenges.

The real world happens, and so you have a beautiful plan that you built with your team that doesn't survive longer than about 24 hours.

Something we need to change, and we can't be changing everything every five minutes. We want to have one collective change. Then a week later, two weeks, you'd have another change.

According to Clint, if you have these one-hour meetings about a project every two weeks. That's not adding a ton of overhead, but it's about being clear to your point.

If the nature of the project only survives 24 hours and you're waiting two weeks between meetings, that's where people have the disconnect because there's so much to catch up on because it has been so far removed from their last meeting time.

So, we're in this perpetual state of trying to catch up going long on meetings, over divulging or covering too much. That's where the disconnect is. Is this statement true?

That experience is correct. It's all a balance. So if you ask, in a perfect world, what would we do? We'd probably meet weekly, because to that point, if we go every two weeks, then that's 14 days worth of bad stuff to catch up on. But the reality is, most people work on ten projects. So we have weekly meetings. And since the overhead is just too great, we're forced to go to every other week. Suppose we have a meeting every two weeks.

Let's say we had the meeting yesterday. If I have a problem today, I'm not going to wait 13 more days to tell you about it. I'm going to call and inform you what the problem is, and we can make the snap decision to get a small core team together just for 20 minutes to fix it. Or we could say, that's okay, go do your thing. And we'll bring everybody up to speed in the next meeting.