Running a Strong Leadership Meeting
Leadership Meeting Agenda
I am not a fan of meetings. I am not a die-hard no meetings person which I realize is quite popular at this point in time in the SaaS world. I know many people that schedule 1-2 days a week where they refuse to hold any meetings.
That said I have always managed a large number of employees at fast growing companies and I like to be accessible to my team. So the thought of being unreachable for a meeting or a quick sync in any given day is difficult for me. I certainly see the merit in ensuring you’re “focused” and dug in to solve a problem, but I lead from the field and if someone needs me on my team I am available for them.
If you are going to have a leadership meeting it should have a good agenda, and collaborative in nature. It should be to meet to solve a problem together. Everyone should talk during the meeting and you should come out of the meeting with either a problem solved or very clear action items. There is a ton of free content on this all over the internet so I won’t spend too much time dissecting this but I try to have leadership meetings once per week or once every two weeks depending upon how strict a deadline we’re on. Team meetings for your first team should be concise and supportive and no one should come out of them angry they had to attend feeling like it could have been shared via slack.
Here is a sample agenda I have used in the past.
Date: [Date of the meeting]
Time: [Time of the meeting]
Attendees:
- Vice President/Director/Managers]
Agenda:
- Business Update/Personal Update
- Review of previous meeting action items
- 90 second update from the most senior person.
- 90 second Update from each reporting manager
- Discussion of current problems or initiatives/Identification and resolution of any challenges or roadblocks
- Open floor for questions and comments
- Next steps and action items
If there is no agenda, there shouldn’t be a meeting and the update should just go out in slack or email.
Robert Statsky 