Here are some ideas to up level you’re your weekly leadership team meeting:
Meeting Team Size
For the most effective weekly team meeting, your weekly leadership meeting team should consist of 8-10 people. If your group is too large, consider who truly should be part of the leadership team meeting. Your goal is to avoid unproductive meetings by inviting too many people for the entire leadership meeting, when they might only be relevant for a portion of the meeting.
Meeting Framework
The leadership team should be using your quarterly plan as the framework for the meeting. The plan should consist of 3-5 key business initiatives. Owners of those Priorities should have statused them red, yellow or green prior to the weekly keeting. You need to discuss long term growth initiatives, not just the “urgent” items from your daily firefighting.
The Agenda
Once the leadership team is in place with a plan, leadership weekly meetings should cover three things: Your business, yourself, your customer/employees. You should keep the same date and time each week.
Talk About Your Business
Spend time talking about the priorities in your plan that are struggling – the yellows and reds. There is no need to spend time discussing status on the greens. Call on the collective intelligence of the group to solve problems on a regular basis.
Talk About Yourself
Each person in the meeting should get 2-3 minutes of individual talk time. Each person should share their Progress from the week that just ended, their Next Steps for the week ahead and anything Issues they may have. The objective is to look for efficiencies (are 2 people working on the same thing?) and clear Issues off everyone’s plate. Hold the team to 2-3 minutes each or the group will start to check out. If an Issue involves a bigger conversation for 2 people, ask them to move it outside the meeting.
Talk About your Customer/Employees
Ask the team to share any positive or negative feedback they have received from customers or employees that they feel needs to float up the leadership Team. Use this time to help keep the leadership team connected to the front lines and team members at the departmental team level to maximise information sharing departments.
By using the tips above, and having a facilitator to keep everything on track, your weekly meetings will become more efficient and productive.
