Why “Ra Ra” Meetings Are Bullshit
Celebrating success is great, but don’t let it turn toxic
By Joe Madich and Emily George
We’ve all been in at least one.
You know the ones: those mandatory, all-hands, organizational, quarterly business review meetings.
Cue a hypothetical C-level leadership representative:
“Our profit margins are up 5% compared to last quarter. Great job, team! Ra Ra! Our recent measures to control costs are outperforming our goals. We are committed to being the most creative and innovative business in the industry, and our margins show just that. Ra Ra!”
Are you thinking, “Oh man, I know those meetings”? Are you laughing inside and rolling your eyes? Perhaps that because you’re a seasoned veteran who’s been to a million of these meetings and can’t stomach the idea of one more.
Or maybe you’re newer to the team, bursting with energy and excitement in your new role, and you’re excited to learn about the business.
That’s cool. But hear us out, young Padawan.
These kinds of meetings—Ra Ra meetings—create a phenomenal dichotomy: It’s a wonderful thing to get your team together and celebrate the great work you do, and you should do that in a genuine fashion.
But there’s a tipping point, when the celebration careens over the edge to thoughtless, even unjustified self-congratulation.
That’s when these meetings can become toxic for your team.
I [Joe] can remember almost 10 years ago, as a developer in my first job, sitting in a business review meeting for DSW listening to marketing presentations about newly implemented features to sell kids’ shoes online. All of our large projects had a postmortem, in which our project manager would review “lessons learned”—and these were mostly good lessons. No one wanted to talk about the headaches around merchandising risks after introducing new product types, or wade through the issues with our ill-performing technology platform.
And by the way, none of those “lessons learned” seemed to be associated with any follow-ups. Despite all of the good intentions, nothing was actually… actionable.
Ra Ra meeting number one adjourned.
Most team members would walk out of those meetings thinking, “Well, at least the stuff we discussed and documented will get crammed in someone’s desk drawer and never see the light of day.”
We also had quarterly business review meetings, where leaders shared metrics with the organization showcasing the performance of the new revenue stream in glorious bar-graph form. Then came closing remarks similar to, “We’re investing heavily in technology to make progressive milestones like this one today!”
Everything was so positive. The company was making more money! Customers were excited about the new offering!
Ra Ra meeting number two adjourned.
But the rest of the team—even those who were more “invested”—saw through the positive spin. If we were truly investing in technology, why not talk about the things we were trying to improve? Why didn’t we ever hear stuff like…
“We’re entrusting our development team to analyze our current technology stack and look at ways to both support a scalable business that is simpler to manage and create more ambitious business goals. The team will be presenting those goals and strategies to the organization at our next meeting, to show how we have recognized our technology support problems and how we will drive to become a modern force in ecommerce technology.”
…?
If only these Ra Ra meetings had a bit more realism, a bit more honesty, a bit more action to them.
By exploring both the good and the bad, these meetings could be more invigorating, more thought-provoking, and more purpose-creating for everyone.
Couldn’t they?
When executed thoughtfully, team meetings can provide opportunities for an organization to celebrate success while simultaneously facing its problems and taking time to create actionable solutions.
When executed poorly, they can create complacency, distrust, and toxicity.
When all you talk about is the positives, you’re not teaching your team to address the negatives. You might be toeing a company line and saying all the right things—but are you saying things that are true and accurate, or just the things people want to hear?
There’s a difference, and it’s an important one.
To say only what people want to hear merely feeds a craving. You’re getting your team high on the positives. They’ll leave your meeting cheering, shouting from the rooftops, and feeling great — but that feeling won’t last. It never does. They’ll come down from the high of your meeting and return to their everyday frustrations.
Your team might be frustrated by company policies, by ineffective communication, by double standards within your team, and by the hazy expectations you’ve set as leaders. If you don’t set positive examples for addressing those frustrations and concerns, how will your team develop the skills to be able to address those problems?
In short, they won’t.
They’ll probably resort to less-effective methods of resolution — griping to a coworker, griping at home, or worst of all, flat-out deciding not to care. Your team will grow increasingly complacent, and your organization will suffer.
Organizational meetings, if implemented poorly, can unintentionally breed apathy and stifle important feedback loops within and across the team. The reporting of mostly good things, and a lack of action toward visible, intelligent changes, leads right to thoughts of “What are we really doing?” or “Nothing actually gets done around here.”
Your team members will probably start to channel their distress through jokes, through sarcasm, by tuning out, by feeling dejected. These are symptoms of a deeper lack of sense of purpose in their work, one that can create a toxicity that’s incredibly hard to recover from.
At Rocket Code, we’ve taken a different approach to our team meetings. We had our first official big-kid quarterly all-team meeting off-site, just across town, but definitely removed from our everyday workplace. The space was a clean, well-lit, professional event space that included perks like delicious coffee and snacks, alongside a ping pong table and cornhole court for breaks. If only for the change of scenery and a few perks, our team was engaged from the beginning.
We also capitalized on the space to find ways to get our team excited and tuned in. We broke out into smaller groups and solicited feedback on important initiatives. We talked about great things our team has accomplished and tried to raise awareness about opportunities for improvement.
Most importantly, we were honest.
The partners who led the meeting were honest about how they were striving to improve personally and professionally. They were equally honest about areas where they’d like to see the team improve.
In the future, we’ll be exploring ways to dig deep on these issues and address them. But our goal for this first meeting was to simply give these issues oxygen—to demonstrate that we weren’t afraid of acknowledging them, and that we were committed to overcoming them.
We were also sensitive about the information we provided, and intentional about the way it was shared. Our team is made up of a diverse variety of personalities and learning styles. To present massive spreadsheets of numbers, or to not have visual aids at all, would have minimized the value of the meeting to a lot of the team.
So we kept our slides simple but informative, and supplemented presentations with smaller group activities to break up the monotony. And we resolved to keep thinking about how to cater to the breadth of learning styles and personality types on our growing team.
When executed well, a team meeting can be important crossroads for an organization. Time invested in proper planning and preparation is most certainly time well spent.
So, if the meeting needs to take most of the day to address the right stuff, then do it.
If you need to rent space and take your team on the road, then do it.
If you need to face some tough realities and own up to some bad behavior, then do it.
And if you need to celebrate accomplishments, call out team members for their great contributions to your team, and acknowledge your success, then by all means, do that, too.
Just remember, your work will still be there when you return.
Also remember that just because calendar apps have taught us to subconsciously set up meetings for 30 minutes or an hour, this doesn’t mean you have to cram information and gloss over important matters in these meetings. Deliver the necessary information, but break up the day with a structured agenda, interactive segments, and scheduled breaks. This will invigorate the group and reduce the opportunity for overwhelm.
Then, when it’s all said and done, gather feedback from the group to identify action items and help with future planning. We gave our team a survey asking for feedback on several aspects of the quarterly meeting. Respondents used a Likert scale (“strongly agree,” “agree,” “disagree,” “strongly disagree”) to react to questions about each portion of the meeting.
What did we find? The most highly structured sections of our meeting received the largest percentage of “strongly agree” and “agree” responses; in fact, most of these sections did not receive any “disagree” or “strongly disagree” responses.
The less-structured sections—those that didn’t require audience participation or those that were purely informative and not interactive—saw the highest level of “disagree” or “strongly disagree” responses.
While we’re still digging in and learning lessons from that feedback, the results seem to support our assertion that Ra Ra meetings, or meetings without substance, or even sections of meetings without substance, are bullshit.
You all remember that guy from Office Space — the boss, Bill Lumbergh. That guy. Don’t be that guy.
Don’t be that guy standing below the “Is this good for the company?” sign and doing things that aren’t actually good for your company.
Don’t cheer for the sake of cheering, and don’t avoid tough conversations for the sake of sparing egos.
Don’t tolerate the B.S. and let Ra Ra meetings breed complacency in your organization.
Strive for something better.
