So You Want to Fix Your All Hands

I will now explain why at least 50% of your team finds your current All Hands 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:

Everyone. Together.

There’s an important organizational inflection point when you need the All Hands. The basic definition is, “The whole team — together.” If you’re a leader of a team of seven, then you might think your team meeting is your All Hands and — strictly speaking — that’s correct, but that’s your team or staff meeting. Not an All Hands.

The whole team — together. This is a required meeting when the whole team is no longer able to be together organically. Is that 50? 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 around, see that Liz is on the phone closing her new head of engineering, and you think, “Go, Liz! I liked her candidate a lot.” Then you look over at Gigi, who has been quiet for two days and hasn’t smiled in four, and think, “She is the most focused designer in the world. I can’t wait to see what she’s done with our logo.” And so on.

The ebb and flow of information in a group of humans decreases as a function of population size. With growth, your ability to organically discern what is going on within the team decreases1.

Pick a Format. Keep It.

It’s not just the ebb and flow of information, but the chance that Critical Piece of Information X reaches Correct Person Y. Each additional human creates another opportunity for important information to not reach its intended recipient.

As the senior leader, it’s trivial to forget this simple math because there’s a firehose pointed straight at your face. Your challenge is not the absence of information, it’s the abundance. Your challenge is picking out the signal from the noise while also not drowning.

The firehose is the primary reason for my first piece of structure guidance: pick a format for your All Hands and stick with it. Here’s the format I’ve been using for a couple of decades:

Hello, let’s learn something.

Here’s the current structure of the team and how it is different from the last time I showed this structure to you. If something huge changed or is about to change, there is room later to address this, or you can do it now.

Here’s an opportunity to hear from my direct reports.

Here’s a special guest.

No Q&A. I’ll explain shortly.

I’ll explain the intent of each section in a moment, but the important thing to know right now is your structure will be different than mine, and that’s just fine. The point is not following my lead, but consistency. Anyone who receives an invite to this meeting understands broadly what to expect out of the meeting. Senior leaders who randomly do All Hands with fluid agendas at a time that suits them stress the team. When the unexpected and unexplainable meeting shows up, they instinctively think, “Uh oh. Someone’s in trouble.”

Tree Talk

We open with Hello. Nothing fancy. Over the years, a simple hello seemed empty. I wanted to do a little more than say hello while folks were still gathering and getting into the All Hands mindset. At the last gig, I followed Hello with a single slide called “Tree Talk,” where I spent a few minutes teaching the team something interesting about trees. One slide, a few facts. Totally irrelevant to the team, but absolutely essential to the culture.

Why? Because I believe curiosity is an intrinsic motivator. I don’t want the team sitting there as I drone on about things they already know; I want them to see what I care about. I care a lot about trees, but I care more about the team understanding the value of curiosity.

One Slide. What Changed.

This is often the most boring part of the presentation, except when it isn’t. This is a picture of your organization. “The org chart.” Your job is to describe what has changed since the last time you threw this up on the screen with a little color commentary.

It will feel tactical and obvious, but as I said above, this is because it’s your organization, and it’s likely you were involved in whatever changes occurred. Zero changes? Really? OK, you still show the chart and briefly say, “Hey, nothing’s changed here. Next slide.”

If massive changes have occurred since the last time you showed this, it’s worth cutting something from later in the agenda below in order for you and your team to explain what changed on the team and why.

One slide. Never more. Yes, for a large organization, this means you’ll need to simplify or abstract out some organizations into simpler buckets. That’s fine — it just means you have subteams that need their own All Hands.

Not Your Show

The bulk of the presentation is not you, but some or all of your direct reports. What are they going to discuss? Up to them. The greatest hits:

We built something!

We learned something!

Everything changed on the team, and we need to explain.

There are more.

We haven’t discussed the length of your All Hands, and now is a good time. The maximum amount of time is 90 minutes. Frequency? Minimum is once a quarter.

90 minutes is a lot of time. In my experience, the average human’s attention span in a meeting like this is 30 minutes, which is why I have the above-suggested agenda. Think of it as three acts. Act 1 sets the table. Act 2 is the heart of the matter — what the team is actually doing. Act 3 brings in the rest of the company — more on that in a moment. Each act gets about 30 minutes. Act 1 runs short unless the building’s on fire, Act 2 always runs long, and Act 3 you can cap.

Once a quarter is the sweet spot for this meeting. Four times a year. Every month? Overkill and a waste of time. Once a year? Not an All Hands, it’s an Annual Report.

I’m talking timing right now because Act 2’s size is a function of the number of direct reports. Three? They should all have a slot — seven minutes per direct, but they’ll end up using 10. Anything more than three and you’ll need to devise a rotation between directs.

Back to their agenda. You should roughly know what they are going to talk about, but don’t micromanage it. It’s their schtick. If they screw it up, give them feedback.

You’re building the humans who will replace you. All the time. This is one of the many ways you do that.

The Mystery Guest

For Act 3, you want to bring in someone else for a fireside chat. Who? Depends on your team or your company. Start with known folks who are obvious co-conspirators. Folks you personally know with an existing rapport. Write 10 or so questions that you want to ask them, and send them the questions a week before. Warn them that you might go off-script — because you might — and see if they are OK with such vibes.

When you get to the External Speaker portion of the All Hands, sit down next to them and start asking the questions. The most important advice? Listen to their answers. By far, the most interesting bits of this interview are the new things you discover via the conversation.

After you’ve done a handful of familiar folks and have a well-refined set of questions, start asking humans you don’t know. Folks you’ve heard of that the team has worked with, but don’t know. My favorite one? I had the CEO show up once as a mystery guest. Fascinating 30 minutes.

Which reminds me. Tell no one who the speaker will be, except the humans who must know.2

No Q&A?

A controversial take, but an earned one. If I’m doing a talk at a conference, the Q&A portion of the presentation is my favorite. The questions quickly tell me how well I delivered the core messages of my talk. Even the random ones that have very little to do with my talk.

All Hands meetings are a different beast. Yes, it is a series of presentations and, yes, there are core messages delivered, but the large surface area covered in ninety minutes plus the size of the audience usually means questions:

Feel random, and/or

Purely serve the agenda of the human asking the question.

However, you must create one more venue for the team to ask questions. Think Slack, your favorite message app, or via staff meetings. Even if you don’t, don’t worry, the important questions will find you.

Entropy Crushing

Being social is work. Especially for engineers. We’d much prefer to be jamming at our desktop. Each time I’ve landed at a new gig where there was no culture of All Hands, I was disappointed by the attendance at first. 50% or worse.

Yes, you can order donuts, and more will show up, but the real draw should be the presentation.

They should leave with the lesson: This is where I will learn.

A regular All Hands meeting is inoculation. You are inoculating your team with quality information. This information will be used to disassemble gossip, rumors, and lies. This information will answer questions before they are asked. This information will remove noise so the human can focus on why they are there — to build.

The folks who need the All Hands the most are the ones who are the least able to request it. See, your old guard employees, even in a rapidly growing team, are the best equipped to gather and share signal. This is why when someone new says, “We should do an All Hands,” they react negatively, “Why? That’s a big company meeting, and we’re a small group of high-hustle movers and shakers.” Yes, this meeting is not for the old guard; it’s for everyone who came after them.

While I am preaching consistency, with regard to your External Speaker, I like keeping it a mystery because it will, eventually, give your team more motivation to attend. I wonder who it is this time!