Robert Statsky

Team Meetings

Running a Strong Team 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.

If you are going to have a meeting it should have a good agenda, and be 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.

Here is a sample agenda I have used in the past.

Date: [Date of the meeting]

Time: [Time of the meeting]

Agenda:

  1. Review of previous meeting action items
  2. 90 second update from the most senior person.
  3. Discussion of customer success metrics and goals
  4. Discussion of current problems or initiatives/Identification and resolution of any challenges or roadblocks
  5. Open floor for questions and comments
  6. Next steps and action items

Additional Steps if needing to be more specific

  1. Review of customer onboarding progress and updates
  2. Sharing of recent customer success stories and wins/losses
  3. Identification and discussion of any customer challenges or roadblocks
  4. Brainstorming session for improving customer satisfaction and retention

Remember, if there is no agenda, there shouldn’t be a meeting and the update should be communicated via Slack or email.

Further thoughts:

You need to make sure you’re not only sharing either too many positives or too many negatives during a team meeting. You don’t want the meeting to be a venting session for complaints, because that is contagious and toxic and destroys culture, and you don’t want it to be sharing only the positive wins all the time. That promotes a phony sense of utopia that does not exist, and will diminish the value of the meeting over time. People will stop attending meetings that are too positive because they don’t learn anything from phony consistent positivity. On the flip side, if it becomes a venting session to be held weekly where people can commiserate their complaints about the company, the customers or the business processes, people will always show up to feel they are “being heard” and “bonding” with other “like-minded” teammates.

Its incumbent upon the leader to prevent this from happening and make sure there is value in every meeting.