Joe gives executives a deceptively simple challenge: within a month, have two consecutive weeks where every single meeting you attend is a five-star meeting — one that leaves you feeling inspired, invigorated, and energized. Do whatever it takes: walk out of bad meetings, tell the chairman of the board you’re not coming, say “this meeting sucks, how do we fix it.”
This hack works because five-star meetings are incompatible with dysfunction. You can’t have consistently invigorating meetings while being political, blaming, avoiding conflict, or tolerating defensiveness. Each dysfunction makes five-star meetings impossible, so pursuing the goal naturally forces leaders to address every source of dysfunction.
The two-week duration is key — avoidance is “the last thing that gets caught” because leaders might initially skip difficult meetings. But within two weeks, avoided issues inevitably land on their plate. And by then, they’ve learned the techniques for making meetings productive, so they realize it’s not the issue they were avoiding — it’s the conflict around the issue.
“If a CEO or a leader commits to that — two weeks of five-star meetings — within a month that organization is completely different.”
Related Concepts
- Functional teams are measured by wanting to be there
- Enjoyment as the only metric
- Lack of enjoyment diagnoses problems