So You Want to Fix Your All Hands – Rands in Repose Skip to content<br>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:<br>This is information they can easily find elsewhere.<br>This is about you, not them.<br>This is boring.<br>Now, I will describe how to build an All Hands that will exceed their expectations. Let’s define the All Hands:<br>Everyone. Together.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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?<br>What is the current state of the business?<br>When has something significant in the business changed?<br>What is important for us to do next?<br>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.<br>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.<br>Pick a Format. Keep It.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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:<br>Hello, let’s learn something.<br>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.<br>Here’s an opportunity to hear from my direct reports.<br>Here’s a special guest.<br>No Q&A. I’ll explain shortly.<br>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."<br>Tree Talk<br>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.<br>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.<br>One Slide. What Changed.<br>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.<br>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."<br>If massive changes have...