193. The Best of Everything Coworking, Episode 89: Leadership Systems Behind Successful Coworking Spaces

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193. The Best of Everything Coworking, Episode 89: Leadership Systems Behind Successful Coworking Spaces

00:00:01 Welcome to the everything co-working podcast, where you learn what you need to know about how the world wants to work. And now your host coworking space owner and trend expert. Jamie Russo, Welcome to episode 193. We are getting close to 200. We'll do a little celebration when we get there. So this week I'm bringing back an oldie, but a goodie.

00:00:39 This one first aired as episode 89. And it was very popular. And I think really timely for the phase we are in with our businesses right now. So I'm going to bring it back. You can look forward to interview sessions over the next few weeks. We've been recording those. So stay tuned. So today's topic is on leadership systems for coworking spaces.

00:01:04 Why they're important, how you might use them team meetings that happen daily, weekly, monthly, annually, and best practices for running those meetings. I think this is a particularly salient topic right now, as we're reopening our spaces and ramping back up, we may have gotten a little lax about our team communication over the last year and maybe sort of, you know,

00:01:34 not quite as formal as we used to be, but it's more important than ever that we're all on the same page and that we're all chasing the same priorities. And that only happens from being really connected and having their right leadership systems in place. So hopefully this episode helps you kind of get back into that mindset, make sure that you have the right things in place.

00:01:57 I recommend a few good books on the topic that can be audio books. If you want to soak up some additional perspective on the topic, enjoy the episode, and I'll see you next week today, we are going to talk about leadership systems. This comes up for me because it's something I'm constantly trying to get better at because it's so critical to running a successful business and you have to have the right systems in place to have a team that functions really well.

00:02:28 And you can have the right location. You can have the right business model, but if you don't have the systems in place to sort of operationalize what you're trying to do in your coworking space, that's oftentimes when businesses will start to fail. So we got to get all the upfront things, right? And then you have to run a well-functioning team that can meet the goals that you're setting.

00:02:51 So if you don't have a team yet, and you'd like to get into the mindset of working on your business, instead of in your business, I love the book, the E-Myth revisited by Michael Gerber, which you can find on Amazon. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. If you do have a team, you know, that managing a team well takes practice and effort.

00:03:11 I think it's like marriage. There's a honeymoon stage of hiring someone new that can help you get things done and remove pain points. And then after that phase is over, you realize that you really need to have systems in place to keep your relationship healthy and keep the team functioning at a high level. And I think there, you know, besides sort of the obvious of the fact that the team will help to implement many of the operational systems that will keep your space efficient and member focused and profitable.

00:03:42 A couple of other reasons that I think are a little bit specific to our industry that make it really important to have systems in place to meet with your team on a regular basis. So one is that turnover can be high in co-working spaces. So, you know, I talk a lot about this with my network and community managers. You know, the average life cycle can be one year,

00:04:06 two years, and there are a couple of reasons for this one is, you know, if you are scaling, then you may have a team that's becoming more specialized. We have a bigger team. And maybe at this point you have folks that can specialize in sales and marketing and accounting and operations and community management, which is great. And certainly if you have a broader team than these leadership systems are going to be critical to you as well,

00:04:31 but even if you have a smaller team, I think it's important. And the smaller team kind of runs the risk of, you know, the community manager is wearing all of those hats, sales, marketing, operations, customer service, even janitorial. So making sure that your manager feels really engaged and really a part of kind of the bigger picture of what's happening and has regular sort of input and feedback into all of that can be really important.

00:04:57 You know, another thing about the role in our industry. So we're all running kind of, you know, we would consider ourselves to be small businesses in some sense, but also startups, you know, wearing lots of hats and still trying to learn a lot of things and possibly being in scaling mode, burnout can become, and two, because at these roles,

00:05:15 like they can be very extroverted, very high energy, lots of multitasking, which can really be a drain on someone, you know, over the course of say a year. And then another problem that certainly I've had before is that good staff can get recruited by members or they're just building a good resume of experience, you know, and moving on for higher pay.

00:05:35 And I will also include in the show notes, a link to the industry survey that the global workspace association does that has industry average pay on it. So good community managers can often sort of grow a lot in this type of role where they're doing a lot and if they start to get burned out, but they realized they have a lot of experience they may move on.

00:05:55 But I think that you can keep that from happening at least delay that from happening, if you have the right systems in place to help them really feel a part of growing your business. And we can talk about this on another episode, but certainly having incentives to help them participate in upside in your business. So, you know, just a couple of other reasons to have these systems in place is that if you are starting to scale and you have been sort of the front facing member,

00:06:24 facing person in your brand, you know, you can no longer be the brand your team needs to develop into reflecting the culture and values of your brand. In addition to performing all the tasks that go with running a successful space, but say, if you have start to have multiple locations, you can no longer be in each location all day long, you know,

00:06:47 kind of front-facing with your members. You're going to need to be doing all the things on the backend to help scale your business. So you'll want your team to be really aligned with what you expect of them and your culture. So these systems will also help you get to a place where you can comfortably take a vacation with your family and not be on Slack or email all day supporting your team.

00:07:07 Because if you have systems in place to help them be highly functioning, they can manage without you. So where do I come from on this topic? Your approach to team management may differ depending on the size and scope of your business. I have one coworking space, but I also have a GWA team and an everything co-working team. So some of you may be in a similar situation of running different businesses and trying to keep each of them sort of functioning really well,

00:07:33 and even growing and keeping your teams happy and productive. And I find that the only way I can do this is to have systems in place that helped me to do that on a regular basis. I am not in my co-working space every day. One reason is that it takes me almost an hour to get there. And so there are many times when I just can't have the commute time.

00:07:52 I don't have an office when I get there. And I have a lot of phone work that I do for my other roles. So I spend time there every week. Absolutely. But I am not there to micromanage or to be the face of the brand, which is a position you may be in or start to be in as you start to scale and spend more time away from a specific location or working on other projects ex so what might your team look like?

00:08:16 So you may have an in-space operating team that consists of community managers, operations managers, cleaning staff, and then you may have a corporate level team that manages things like sales, marketing, it finance and accounting. And I think ideally as you scale, those are some of the advantages to scale, right? You can have a corporate team that supports multiple locations and those locations can share the costs of those central functions.

00:08:43 So what systems do you want to have in place to help your team communicate, coordinate and work together or so certainly there are tech space management tools that can help you manage your business. I think there are a couple of other pieces to specific to team management that you will want to think about. So have a really good project management tool. I personally love a sauna,

00:09:06 a S a N a and I'll make sure that goes in the show notes. It is an app that allows you to create projects and assign tasks. In those projects, you can do get a visual view of all the projects, but all your team can be in it. And you can link to Slack. You can link to your Google drive. It's really like a central place to keep things moving that your full team can have access to and get really good visibility on what's happening.

00:09:31 And when I love Slack for team communication, I think you want to be careful to set expectations around Slack use because depending on the personality that you get on your team, you'll have folks that really love to use it and put every thought of every day into Slack. So I find it to be very distracting sometimes depending on which members of my team and sort of personalities come out on the Slack channel.

00:09:55 So I have to try to set some expectations about what's appropriate for Slack and what needs to stay off of Slack and go into our weekly team meeting. And that's the advantage. We'll talk about that in a minute of having a team meeting is you can really funnel a lot of communication into that in-person team meeting and make it really efficient. That being said,

00:10:13 I don't manage email well because I get a lot of it. And so I love Slack to keep do to reduce the amount of email that I have. So it's a constant balance kind of around what goes in email, what goes in Slack and what goes in those team meetings, team scheduling tool, make sure you have access to each other's calendar, or there's a space calendar that you can all access outlook or Google calendar is a great option.

00:10:36 Make sure that you can all, you have a central repository for document sharing like a Google drive or Dropbox, and then make sure you have a CRM for your business. So that's a critical business tool, but can also be a critical communication tool if you're running multiple spaces, especially in the same market where you're sharing customers and that's a topic for a different time,

00:10:58 but I just wanted to mention kind of some of the technology that you can use to help with the support your leadership systems. So now we're going to kind of dive into one of the core pieces of leadership systems is having regular meetings. And I will make a note about meetings. First of all, it will be easy to push them off for urgent issues that come up.

00:11:20 I've been in that boat many times where it feels like a waste of time to have a meeting because you want to actually get stuff done. And I've certainly done that before. You might be tempted to cancel meetings or to let everyone have the hour back and get stuff done. But even though I experienced the value of meetings that temptation to ask for time back is always there.

00:11:41 And I also will say this, I am sort of inherently against meetings. I live a fairly meeting, productive life out of undergrad. It was after I graduated from business school and went to work for Kraft foods, which now has another name that my distaste for meetings became really deep seated. I was like drowning in a corporate culture that thrived on calendars full of cross functional meetings.

00:12:04 So my days were spent in meeting, after meeting with a dozen people around each table to ensure that every aspect of the business was represented. And I used to literally sit there and do the math and figure out how much it costs to have every one of those meetings because of the sheer number of people in the room. And it was completely ridiculous to me.

00:12:22 And then I spent my nights and weekends trying to get my actual work done because there was no time for work during the work week because we were all in meetings all day. So I started to have kind of a strong bias against meetings, but I've learned over time working for more lean and fast moving startups and running my own coworking space and the GWA and the everything co-working group that having their right meetings with the right people with the right structure is the only way that you can truly be strategic in your business and focus on priorities and get out in front of projects that will move your business forward.

00:12:57 So if you are find yourself constantly wanting to not have meetings because you need to get stuff done. I mean, that just means you're kind of buried and you're never going to get in front of things. You have to get out of that cycle done well. They're also a great opportunity to build your team culture, recognize the winds of your team and give consistent feedback on things that need to get done differently.

00:13:18 So I'm a big fan of making sure that you have a weekly team meeting on your calendar that you're really committed to. And I don't want to digress on the topic of setting and tracking organizational goals cause that's a long rabbit hole. But if you're thinking about, or in the process of scaling your business, there's a book called traction that I think I've talked about.

00:13:38 I want you to read. And some of the folks in my flight group, I know have read it and they love it too. It lays out. It feels like common sense, but it lays out a really very simply the processes you should have in place to grow and succeed are GWA board. Most of it has also read it and they love it too.

00:13:54 So let's talk about meeting intervals. So there can be daily meetings, weekly meetings, monthly meetings, quarterly offsite, and annual retreats. There are probably more that these are kind of the buckets that I'm going to address. So if you have multiple locations and an operational team with a lot of interdependencies or you have a significant project that needs constant communication among your team,

00:14:18 you may want to have a daily meeting. I would consider keeping it pretty short, put a time limit on it like 20 minutes, host it. First thing in the morning or in a slot that's appropriate. Maybe it's like a nine 30 slot after everything's open. Your spaces are open. The coffee's made, you know, your members have come in and your staff has a little bit of time for a breather.

00:14:39 I would also suggest hosting it over an app like zoom, if you can. So that if you have a distributed team, you can connect visually that can have a really big impact on relationship building across locations when you can't get everyone together very often, but they can see each other versus just hearing each other's voice. Connections can be made more quickly. And then you have more interaction and support across your locations.

00:15:03 I would say for every meeting type, have a standard structure for your agenda that your team drives. So I think this is the other learning that I've had over time is that if you feel responsible for the meetings that you have, and as the owner, you're going to have more meetings in your staff has, this may be one of the reasons you get tempted to cancel meetings is I haven't created the agenda,

00:15:25 so I'm not ready for the meeting, so I'll cancel it. So the way to get sort of win on that front is have your team drive the agenda. So have a structure like an outline that you follow each week and have your team put, add notes to it and have your team take full ownership over that content so that you're not spending your life updating meeting agendas.

00:15:46 And this does a couple things. It takes, you know, you no longer have to make the time to do it, but your team is also having to think proactively about what the critical topics are to cover in a meeting, what they need help on what they're getting stuck on, you know, or challenges in the business that need to be addressed.

00:16:03 And so it's a great training to have them be the ones thinking about that content. This may take some time. If you have a younger staff that is still learning how to prioritize, and what's important, you may have some periods of feeling a little frustrated about what shows up and those agendas, but just work through that and give them that feedback. It's a great training opportunity and they will get better.

00:16:25 And it's a good opportunity for you to talk through like, look, this is why this is not a priority right now. Here's what the priorities are. Put the agenda in a shared doc, such as a Google doc, and then put the link to that Google doc in your repeating calendar invite so that everybody has really easy access to go in and update it.

00:16:42 And then you can even include links to other resources that you referenced in your meetings, such as tour trackers and other dashboards. Michael Evarts from shared space in Atlanta uses a tool called notion.io. And I admit to coveting what he's done in that application and have not had time to look at that and explore that for my business, but definitely check it out,

00:17:04 leave a link to the show notes. It's kind of like a team Homebase for his team communications as he's scaling across multiple locations. And again, make sure that you ask your team to prioritize the list, you know, be really specific about that. Consider having a section at the top for priority items, because if you're having a 20 to 60 minute meeting,

00:17:25 you may not have time to get to all of the items. So it's important that they're prioritized and this happens all the time and you just sort of have to get comfortable with the fact that you're probably not going to get through everything in the agenda and it'll roll into the next week, but at least know, you're getting to the most urgent topics. I will say,

00:17:40 make sure that you leave time in your agenda for team announcements, celebrating wins and any feedback on process changes for the team because that's a critical part of establishing culture and making people feel involved and just keeping everyone happy and feeling like they're appreciated. That's really important. And it can be easy, especially for shorter meetings to not include that and just sort of skip over it.

00:18:02 Cause you're trying to get through all the other things on the list, but make sure you do that the hour meeting. So I don't do daily meetings with any of my team. We handle things, you know, urgent things on Slack, but I do do an hourly meeting every week with each of my teams. Maybe it's biweekly for you and it might depend on the team.

00:18:19 So I love to do meetings. Well, my is exhausted me. I do a lot of meetings on Monday, but I love to have like a meeting day. So I'm just in that sort of mind space. So I do a full team meetings on Mondays and kind of have the full team on there. So we can go through all of the agenda items together.

00:18:36 If you have multiple locations, maybe you do a full team meeting on Monday, and then you may need to do other meetings with location managers, maybe an hour, hour and a half in one-on-one. If you have locations that have specific projects that are just not relevant to the full group. And then if you have specialty teams or functions such as marketing,

00:18:55 finance sales, you may have to have those meetings as well. So these meetings can start to add up once you have specialized teams, but when you have multiple locations, that's going to be really critical to making sure that each function is aligned with the organizational goals and understands, you know, what the rest of the organization is doing and has accountability for their KPIs every single week.

00:19:16 I think that's another important one. I did a recent episode on KPIs and if you're not doing weekly meetings, then how do you check in on those goals and how do you know where you stand? So you should have a weekly meeting that looks at those metrics with the whole team. And, you know, very clearly identifies whether you're on track or off track and what those issues are.

00:19:35 But if you're not having the meetings, you know, you're relying on people to look at those trackers. You know, maybe you're sending an email update or whatever, but it's not going to be as effective as going through those in person. So yes, make sure you have your agenda and make sure that agenda does include any metrics, trackers dashboards that feed into monthly targets and leave time to determine a course of action.

00:19:56 If you're off track to meet those goals, what gets measured, they say gets attention and what gets attention gets done. So make sure that's a section in your weekly meeting that probably doesn't happen in a daily meeting. Great. You probably don't need to look at those things every day and won't have time, but make sure at least weekly or biweekly, you're looking at those numbers so that they can get addressed.

00:20:16 One exercise that I did recently, that could be helpful if you have a team and you start these meetings and you're finding that they are not focusing on the right priorities or that they're not getting the right things done every week that you know, kind of are critical to your agenda and your KPIs. I did this recently and Diana, my manager keeps mentioning how helpful it was.

00:20:39 So I gave her a list of the buckets that are included in their role. And I had her assign a percentage of time that she spends on each task in a given week. And then we went through it and I kind of voiced over where I thought she needed to shift the time that she was spending. So that can be really helpful because again,

00:20:58 new managers may not be clear on how to allocate their time and it defined balance rate in these roles, especially for a community manager who is wearing a lot of hats. They have a lot of expectations and they probably feel accountable for a lot of different KPIs. They're also the most member facing role probably in the company. And so they need to balance how much time they spend with members versus how much time they spend on all of the other sort of admin.

00:21:27 I'll just make an admin bucket for everything that's not member facing time. And so you may need to help them manage how much time they spend on each thing. And these weekly meetings can be a great way to do that. Ooh, timing of meetings. So this is a little bit of a side note, but I'm reading this book, I'll put that full title in the show notes,

00:21:43 but it's called when and it's by Malcolm Gladwell. It's like the scientific study of timing basically. And the very first section of the book talks about chronotypes. So most people are what he calls third LARCs, which means they peak in the morning around lunchtime, and then they start to drop off after lunch. And then they started to pick up again late afternoon into the early evening.

00:22:08 So that afternoon slump is biological. It's like nothing to do with eating a big lunch or Turkey sandwiches or whatever. And I've recognized this in myself, I'm actually technically an early bird and I've started to try to adapt to my routine to support that a little bit. But one mistake I often make is having my team meeting with my inner space manager, like late afternoon on a Monday.

00:22:29 And that is when I would normally have my slump. And Monday is also a really long meeting day for me. So by Monday at three, I am not in great shape. That's when I should be doing low level activities like responding to emails, not hosting meetings that set the tone for the rest of the week. So I'm trying to commit to changing that meeting so that I can be of better energy and have,

00:22:52 you know, just be more ready to have a really productive, good meeting with my team. So just something to kind of be self aware of. I've been thinking a lot more about like, you know, what gets done in that chunk of time during the day when you're just, you know, low energy and you're kind of waiting to get your second wind.

00:23:08 The monthly meeting monthly meetings are great for specialized functions that don't need weekly meetings. So maybe that's marketing, finance sales sales probably needs more regular attention, but you may want to not do weekly meetings with those folks and have monthly check-ins and really review quarterly KPIs with them. Another reason to do monthly meetings. So you may want to have weekly meetings with your team and then have one monthly meeting that's longer than your weekly meeting.

00:23:36 You're more urgent, you know, sort of short-term projects, but it's more a longer term planning meeting that helps make sure you're spending your month moving towards your quarterly goals. So I've started to do this with my GWA team, Megan and I are doing a monthly meeting to make sure we get out in front of anything critical that's happening that month, that aligns with our quarterly goals.

00:23:57 And this has been super helpful for us. We open up a sauna, we have projects to plan out. We go through them, we put timelines against them. We block time in our calendar to work on them. And so that helps us really see kind of what's in front of us. What do we need other resources for? What do we need marketing for?

00:24:13 What do we need our web developer for et cetera, so that we can kind of plan everything and not sort of feel behind. And that, that everything we do throughout the month is urgent. So a monthly meeting with your team might be helpful if you don't have a marketing team, for example, maybe it's monthly that you meet with your operational team and go through some of the bigger picture projects that you're working on.

00:24:37 Like, you know, your website or your blog or things that are not sort of more urgent and to day-to-day, but could use monthly attention, quarterly meetings you might consider. If you have a broader team, you can use quarterly meetings and try to do them in person. If you can, to do staff trainings, strategic planning, project planning, team building Pacific workplaces,

00:25:00 I'll give a shout out to them. And I know their team puts a lot of emphasis on, they have 19 locations now I think, and managers at each of them. So they do quarterly meetings for different levels of managers that they have, and they will do all the things I mentioned in that meeting. And they try to bring everybody together in person if they can,

00:25:21 because they feel like it's face-to-face time is really critical. And if they're bringing someone in to do training, it's really nice to do that live versus over a webinar, for example, and then annual meetings. Again, this is like kind of a bigger strategic thing, but if you're growing your team, you might want to start thinking about doing this. Can you bring your team together annually and do something kind of fun and meaningful for both fun team-building wise and meaningful for your business?

00:25:45 So some objectives you might want to have for your annual meeting team building, can you do something that's volunteer related together, annual goal setting, annual planning. And I think having, again, a period of time to do this really sends a signal to your team that it's important for them to be a part of this planning process and to be engaged and committed to what's happening in the business.

00:26:08 And they feel more accountability and are just happier with feeling like they're really contributing to what's happening in the business. And again, I'll mention Pacific workplaces. They separate their volunteer effort from of their sort of more strategic meetings that they do. But they have a tradition at their company of taking Columbus day and doing a volunteer event. And they give all the managers the day off,

00:26:31 they closed, you know, their locations are unstaffed for the day and they choose a volunteer and then team building activity to do, which I think is really neat and just an important part of their culture that they've decided to pursue. So I will leave it at that. I'm going to put the outline of these meetings in the show notes for reference, but I would say,

00:26:49 start thinking about those systems, certainly start with a weekly meeting. I think it's so critical and that agenda template that gets you through, you know, what's important and helps really align the team on, you know, meeting your targets. And I would say, it's not going to be perfect if you're just starting out, be consistent and be okay with the fact that you're learning and you're going to learn something new about how to do it better next time every week,

00:27:16 but try to do it every week. Even if, you know, if you're out on vacation, don't do it, give yourself the week off. But if something is, you know, if you normally have a meeting on Monday and Monday, a holiday, then reschedule it for Tuesday. Try not to miss it too often. And if you fall off,

00:27:30 just like get back on the schedule and you will see results because having these types of systems in place are the only way that you can avoid being the person who does sort of all of the thinking about the business and it's committed to the business and it will engage your team and help them stay focused on your organizational goals as well. So some Q4 goals to be thinking about,

00:27:51 and certainly to try to kind of ramp up those processes and have a really amazing 2019, which is not that far away. So I hope this was helpful and I will talk to you next week.

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