A New Benchmark for Effective Meetings - Josh Little

“Trust is such a big factor in leadership, and we learn to trust by how others act and how they show up in relationships” Josh Little

Communication is one of the critical elements that ensure effective collaboration and leadership. Considering the current work environment characterized by remote and hybrid working arrangements, communication between teams has become even more challenging. For these reasons and more, our guest today, Josh Little, believes in using the right technology that makes conversations more convenient and practical.

Josh Little is the founder of four tech companies–Maestro, Bloomfire, Qzzr (quizzer), and Volley–that have collectively been used by hundreds of millions of people. His work has been featured in Tech Crunch, Mashable, Entrepreneur, Inc., and Forbes. With two successful exits and a third pending, he’s currently on a mission to save the working world from death-by-meetings with his fourth creation, Volley.

In today’s episode, we will discuss what asynchronous video conversation is all about and the fantastic app Volley, which is making effective communication a reality for teams. We will also learn some of the leadership qualities that our guest believes are important in fostering great relationships with team members at work.  

Listen in!

Social Media

https://www.linkedin.com/in/littlejosh/

• I felt my mission in life is to create beautiful things and that could be a tech company, musical performance or a jar of pickles [2:30]
• There is nothing as creatively satisfying as building a company even though it is intimidating and risky. [2:43]
• Volley has been my most recent beautiful thing. [4:03]
• Thinking about how to get the right information to the right people at the right time at work, is something that I have been passionate about for years. [4:30]
• Leaders were going to have to adapt and figure out new strategies to lead, connect, talk and collaborate with their team. [5:00]
• We can’t sort the problem with back to back zoom, because of burnout and fatigue. [5:08]
• There are so many inefficiencies with the current construct that we call meetings. [6:31]
• We are a lot more efficient at communicating by speaking than we are typing and for that reason at some point written communication fails. [7:10]
• Volley is a video messaging App that allows professionals or teams to collaborate by sending video messages back and forth. [7:42]
• We take turns just like any other conversation, except we record our turn with video. [7:54]
• This option gives us the best of both worlds that is the richness of talking and the flexibility of texting. [8:00]
• The beauty of Volley is we take those snippets of content and put them and call them a Volley where you create and send a Volley in a threaded conversation. [10:32]
• The other members in the conversation can see your Volley and respond to it. [10:42]
• A lot of teams have a stand up, or daily update of meeting. Instead of that being a scheduled thing, we do a stand up where everybody shows up. [10:50]
• We want people to try Volley, it is a new technology and new way of thinking and working. [13:00]
• We don’t want to be so presumptuous that we just know that this is exactly the way it needs to be compiled for use at work. [13:15]
• So we knew a free product was necessary to the learning that we needed to do in order to create the product that we needed to create. [13:24]
• We have many ideas for cool features, functionality and technology that we can infuse into this experience that people will be willing to pay for. [13:53]
• We haven’t been working remote in the past three companies, because there was friction and breakdown in communication. [16:25]
• I have been an aspirational remote worker and remote CEO for over a decade now so maybe VOLLEY is just me solving a problem by creating a tool that needed to exist to enable communication to just flow. [16:51]
• While Volley is a great way to communicate, it is really for remote or distributed teams and hybrid teams that have some remote workers. [18:06]
• Commercial Break [19:48]
• The first one is do what you say you are going to do or say something else. [20:16]
• The next one is playing with all cards on the table. [21:08]
• That is the only way that we can get to the sort of understanding and clarity of what needs to be accomplished and why that matters. [21:49]
• I have never been burned by vulnerability in any way. [22:12]
• The new one is continuous leadership or on demand leadership and this is what Volley enables. [22:28]
• You are only leading when interacting with your team. [22:41]
• What we have been experimenting with Volley is the idea of continuous leadership. [23:18]
• Only seven percent of communication is the words that we use, 38 percent is the tone and 55 percent is what we look like when we say those words. [25:12]
• We are elite athletes at this thing called conversation and we need to talk to move forward. [25:50]
• You should download Volley today because relationship and connectedness are important. [27:55]

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