10 Steps to Transform Your Leadership Meetings and Drive Real Business Results

How often does your leadership team (if you're less than 7 people, that's all of you) hold a meeting?

If it's less than weekly, you're making a mistake.

From working with so many businesses over the past 5 years (big and small), I know the norm is to not have a structured meeting cadence.

Why? Because the meetings you've had before don't feel like an effective use of everyone's time—yours included.

Meetings have gotten a bad name for themselves in recent years, but the problem isn't meetings... the problem is poor-quality meetings.

For a team to work together effectively and grow a business, they have to have meetings.

The key lies in making sure those meetings are effective.

When your meetings are effective, people enjoy them, things get done, and they lead to a good culture in your business.

I've spent hundreds of hours over the last 5 years helping teams in businesses of all shapes and sizes run good weekly meetings. Here's how you can do it too.

1 - Be Clear On The Purpose Of The Meeting
What is the point of this meeting? You should do this for all meetings, but here we're discussing a leadership meeting, so let's consider that.

Why is it important for us to get together and talk every week? There's no right answer to this, but for most leadership teams, it's going to be to:

Analyse business performance
Identify key issues
Problem-solve key issues
Make new commitments to solve issues and grow the business
Straight away, just by having something like that written down, your meetings become vision-driven.

Having this written down also gives the group or the meeting master the confidence to intercede when the meeting goes off on a non-vision-driven related tangent... which I guarantee it will.

2 - Make Sure It Starts On Time At The Same Time Every Week
Your weekly leadership team meeting needs to become part of your leadership team's DNA.

If the meeting changes time every week, you'll struggle to get full attendance.

If your meeting doesn't start on time and people are turning up late, it implies to everyone that the meeting isn't that important.

The military understands this. In the British Army, if you're not 5 minutes early, you're late. There's nothing more important in your business than having a high-functioning leadership team solving problems and driving growth.

Treat your weekly leadership team meeting as one of the most important things in your business.

3 - Have A Nominated Meeting Master
A sports game needs a referee, and that referee has a watch. Your meetings are the same.

They need to be kept on track by someone with designated power. Without this, keeping everyone happy becomes the name of the game.

That might sound nice, but what it translates to is each section of your meeting going over by 5 minutes so people can finish telling their stories.

What that leads to is half of 80% of the people in the meeting being bored and your problem-solving time being significantly reduced.

Your meeting master's job is to keep the meeting flowing on time, and they have designated power to abruptly cut people off and move on to the next section. It sounds harsh, but it works, and everyone will learn to appreciate it.

4 - Have Clear Sections
Your meeting needs predefined sections.

The bulk of your meeting should be spent on problem identification and solving.

But before that, you should have short, sub-5-minute sections to check in on things like business KPIs, business objectives and progress, key employee issues, and key customer issues.

Don't let these sections turn into long discussions—they should be top-level summaries. Detailed discussion can come in your problem-solving section.

5 - Strictly Stick To Timings
A bit of repetition here, but it's an important note. Define when your meeting should start, when it should finish, and how long should be spent on each section.

Remember, the bulk should be spent on creative problem-solving.

It should be a non-negotiable that everything stays on time and that your meeting master has full power to keep the meeting on time without any fear of kickback.

6 - Make The Bulk About Problem-Solving
Having all of your leadership team in a room together is valuable to your business.

To capitalise on this, the bulk of your leadership meeting should be spent identifying and addressing key issues.

When we teach teams this process, we get them to identify and then prioritise key issues. Then we start with the top issue and work down until our time is up.

The team can't move on to the next issue until the previous one has been solved and actions agreed upon.

If that means only one issue is solved in the time, so be it. The rest are carried over to the next meeting if still appropriate.

The value in this meeting is giving time for your best people to solve problems, so the bulk of the time should be spent on that.

7 - Don't Discuss Anything That Doesn't Need Everyone's Presence
You want to completely avoid any time where you've got people sitting in your meeting thinking, 'this has nothing to do with me.'

If there is an issue to be discussed or solved that only needs two people from the room, they are to agree on a time outside of the meeting to make that happen.

You want to maximise the amount of time in the meeting that high-level problems are being solved or progress towards business-level goals is being made.

8 - Record Commitments
Every week, people will commit to doing things based on what is discussed.

Your meeting master should record those commitments in a table that everybody has access to afterwards.

The following week, the previous week's commitments should be brought up and checked off to see if they have or haven't been completed.

This creates a high level of accountability amongst your leadership team and prevents the situation where people overcommit and under-deliver, with nothing being said about it.

9 - Have a Company-Level Scorecard
Opinions are subjective; numbers aren't. Everyone in your leadership team should be able to assess the performance of your business with a quick look at 5-10 numbers.

This is your business-level scorecard.

Bringing this into your meeting will help keep your leadership team on track with what really matters and be honest with each other about what's going on.

Without a scorecard, it's easy for your team to take their eye off the ball and not talk about what really matters.

You can outline a company-level scorecard in less than an hour.

10 - Score Your Meeting
At the end of your meetings, get everyone to score it out of 10.

Scoring your meetings turns them into a self-improving process.

It also gives people the opportunity to share any frustrations they might be harbouring about the process, which is a good thing.

Implement these 10 simple steps into your weekly leadership team meeting process, and you'll be ahead of 90% of the competition in leadership.

If you'd like to find out more about how to embed systems that empower your leadership team to run your business for you and increase your business value, check out the video below or use the button to request a call with my team.

Thanks for reading,
Mike Jones
The Fractional Integrators | Co-Founder