The Leadership Meeting Blueprint That Actually Works

Mike:

In this episode, we’re gonna talk about meetings, everybody’s favorite subject. I wanna talk about why meetings are typically so exhausting and yet so little actually gets done. So if your calendar is full of meetings and you still feel like nothing moves, this episode is for you. If you’re constantly saying, I’m in too many meetings, I can’t get my real work done.

This episode is for you. the problem is leadership meetings tend to drain more energy than they produce. They drain energy, but they don’t drive real actions. And especially for those of you senior leaders. Listening. if you’re a senior leader listening and you’re the complaint resonates.

I’m in too many meetings. I can’t get my real work done. I hope by the end of this episode, you understand that if you are a leader, meetings are where the real work gets done. So if your meetings are broken, or even if they’re not broken, but they’re not working very well, we’ve gotta figure out how to fix them.

So. 

Let’s talk about what is broken in most leadership team meetings in most meetings I’m a part of, there is too much status and not enough decisions, not enough drama. There should be drama in meetings like you’re watching a great movie. Meetings should be about answering key questions, and yet it’s a whole bunch of people saying, I did this.

I didn’t do that. I tried to do this. I left this voicemail. There’s no clear agenda or clear outcomes. For meetings, a lot of leadership teams gets just get together because they know they’re supposed to get together weekly or monthly or quarterly, but they’re not driving the right discussions. The same issues are rehashed every week, and they tend to be whatever is most urgent.

We don’t have time to discuss the important stuff that’s gonna impact where we are by the end of the year or by the end of three years. We’ve gotta talk about the big. Client problem we have right now. 

The other thing I see is that there is very little follow through on action items. Great ideas may be talked about, interesting,ideas come up, but we’ve gotta get through the agenda and we’re running out of time.

So. No action is taken and then you get these zombie decisions being made. Zombie decisions are decisions and issues. You think you killed. You think it’s done, you made a decision, but they keep coming back to life because you’re not having the right discussions as a team. And the emotional impact of all that is people check out, you know, it’s a vicious cycle.

Bad meetings lead to. Worse meetings because people check out and they don’t believe the meeting is going to be very useful. So they don’t even really try anymore. They don’t prepare for it. They’re just waiting for the meeting to be done. It leads to frustration. It leads to canceled meetings. Especially what I call the weekly accountability meeting, and we’ll talk about the weekly meeting and the difference between accountability meeting and a status meeting.

But too often the meetings are deemed so unimportant that more important things, presumably more important things come up and those meetings are canceled. 

So let’s talk a little bit about the four types of meetings. We are gonna talk about strategy slash planning meetings, progress slash execution meetings, ad hoc meetings, and one-on-one meetings.

So let’s talk about each one first. 

The strategy slash planning meeting. These are typically annual. Planning retreats, quarterly, offsites,or on sites doesn’t really matter where they are, although being offsite tends to be helpful ’cause you don’t get interrupted quite as much. This is where, Big decisions are made.

This is where priorities are defined. Talent is assessed. The objective of these strategy and planning meetings, whether they’re annual or quarterly, number one, is long-term vision. Making sure the team is aligned around a long-term, 10 to 15 year vision. For the company and to make sure the leadership team are all not, I don’t really understand that vision.

They’re evangelists of that vision for a point A. We need to know where point B is. When we’re having a tough day, we need to look up and say, ah, I remember why we’re doing this, because I know our core purpose. I know our 10 to 15 year big, hairy, audacious goal. So that long term or that almost never changing vision is something that you align around in an annual.

Planning meeting. Typically, you may talk about them in a quarterly planning meeting if maybe you need to change some things, but they’re typically defined in the annual planning meeting. And then you have your midterm vision and plan, which may be about a three year vision and plan on what you want your company to look like, smell like, taste like, feel like, sound like.

What are the numbers that you’re trying to hit in three years? What are your key initiatives? For the next three years and I use the word initiatives to mean three year priorities, so that’s important. Certainly in the annual planning meeting, when you define those and in the quarterly planning meeting, you’re gonna review those, make sure you’re on track, and maybe tweak and reprioritize if you need to.

In the annual and quarterly strategy and planning meetings, you’re also talking about. Issues and opportunities. Typically in a weekly meeting, you don’t have time. To really dig deep into the major issues and major opportunities going on. Great time to do that is the annual and quarterly planning session.

You also may do that a little bit in a monthly meeting and in an ad hoc meeting, but we’re talking about the annual and quarterly meetings, the strategy and planning meetings. Right now, certainly in your annual meeting, you’re gonna create your annual plan. the numbers, the annual priorities.

In a quarterly meeting, you’re gonna review that annual plan, make sure you’re on track, reprioritize if you need to in a strategy and planning meeting. You also need to look at organizational. Readiness from a structure standpoint. and I use something called the functional accountability chart to look at what are the functions of the organization, who’s accountable?

How are we measuring success for each of those functions? And then of course, if you’ve listened to any episodes or read any of my books, we talk. Every quarter and every annual planning session about talent density, we assess the performance of everybody’s direct reports on productivity, on culture fit.

Are they high performing, medium performing, low producing, low culture fit? Come up with actions. Calculate your talent density indicator, your percent high performing individuals, minus your per percent, your percent low performing individuals so we can benchmark how we are doing. On people growth. It’s not just, let’s come up with a plan and assume we’re gonna execute on it.

In strategy and planning, we need to look at organizational readiness from a structure and a talent and a performance standpoint, and whether it’s a quarterly plan or an annual plan. 

In these strategy and planning meetings, the quarterly plan. Is most important. The last thing you should do as part of your annual planning is your quarterly plan.

The last thing you do in each quarters, planning session is you do your quarterly plan. I say it’s most important because it’s these 90 day sprints where shit really happens. If you, when you have a plan for a year out for three years out for 10 or 15 years out, that’s great and that’s important, but 

There’s too much time there. There’s too many things that can change in a year or certainly within three years or more. So that quarterly plan is a 90 day sprint where the world is not gonna change terribly much, typically in a 90 day sprint. And there’s enough urgency to get real work done, and there’s enough time to add real value.

To the business. So that’s the first type of meeting is the strategy and planning meeting. 

The second type of meeting is progress or execution, and I would put monthly and weekly leadership team meetings into that category where strategy and planning was annual and quarterly. Progress and execution is typically monthly and weekly.

I’m actually gonna start with the weekly. Meeting I call my weekly meetings with my leadership teams weekly accountability meetings. Some have started calling them WHAM meetings. WAM. The objective of the weekly accountability meeting is accountability. It’s not status. Status is boring. Nobody cares.

We all have real work to do. Accountability is owning up. To those things you committed to do. And in, in my world with my clients, it’s the KPIs you’re accountable for. It’s the rocks, which is my word. And a lot of people use this term for quarterly priorities. We wanna hold each other and hold ourselves accountable in the weekly meeting.

To our rocks and our KPIs, and any tasks that we committed to get done. So we’re gonna focus on rocks, KPIs. If someone is behind, if someone is in the red or the yellow on a rock, or a KPI, we may quickly talk about roadblocks. What’s in their way? What help do they need for us, from us to move things forward?

We wanna make sure that if someone’s behind that they have a plan. Now in the weekly meeting, which is typically 45 minutes or an hour, we may not have time to dive deep. We certainly won’t have time to dive deep everywhere someone has a challenge, but that’s where we need to prioritize and talk about what’s most important.

But again, that will weekly meeting is at about accountability, not status. The weekly meeting is the place where accountability either lives. Or dies. If you don’t have the right week, weekly meeting, or you cancel the weekly meeting, you can come up with a wonderful plan, but without that weekly accountability meeting, there is very little,accountability for actually getting things done.

It’s too easy. At the end of a month or the end of a quarter to say, Ooh, too many other things going on. Too many fire drills. Those are excuses. We need weekly accountability meetings. N

ow let me go back to the monthly meeting, which is part of the progress and execution type meeting. So you don’t have to have a monthly meeting when you have a weekly meeting.

So it’s kind of a rhythm where you’ve got weekly, monthly,weekly, monthly. You know, monthly,quarterly, annual. You get it. So in the monthly meeting, part of, and the monthly meeting is typically if the weekly meeting is maybe an hour, 45 minutes or an hour, the monthly meeting may be a half a day.

For some of my clients, they actually have a full day monthly meeting. And before you think of that and say, ah, that’s overkill. Let me tell you what’s in the monthly meeting. So first off, there is a weekly meeting inside a monthly meeting. So everything you do in the weekly meeting around accountability for rocks and KPIs and tasks, what I call who, what, whens that happens in the monthly meeting.

The difference of between the monthly meeting and the weekly meeting is a few things. Number one, it gives us a chance to dive much deeper on rocks and KPIs that are not going well. Rocks and KPIs where we’re not in the green, we’re in the red or in the yellow, or maybe something where we’re in the green, but we’ve got an opportunity to do more, or we see danger ahead of us where we’re predicting we’re not gonna be in the green much longer.

We can dive deeper. We can dive deep. Into issues and opportunities. I said we talk about those in the annual meeting, in the quarterly meeting, but life moves too fast. The world moves too fast to wait until a quarterly or an annual meeting to discuss an issue or an opportunity. So you wanna make time in your monthly meetings for that.

And then lastly, in the monthly meeting is reprioritization. So when we come up with our quarterly rocks and our KPIs, and who’s accountable in our quarterly meetings or our annual meetings. Like I said earlier, the world changes and it’s changing faster and faster, especially with AI and just what’s going on in the world.

So part of what we wanna do in the monthly meeting is look at our three rocks, three most important rocks for the quarter, and who’s accountable and say, are those still the right things? Do we need to reprioritize? Is anybody being stretched too thin? Is there anything in the red or the yellow where we need to?

Get more resources on it and maybe deprioritize something else. In a quarterly meeting, we may look back at the annual priorities. We certainly wanna look back at the annual priorities and say those still the right annual priorities. I very rarely see annual priorities that stay the same throughout the year, because when you are 3, 6, 9 months into the year, typically something has changed in the world, in your industry.

More opportunity, less opportunity, more issues, less issues that cause you to change those priorities. So. The monthly meeting is about accountability. It’s about issue and opportunity discussions. It’s about reprioritization and that’s not a rushed meeting. You need to take some time and do that.

So we talked about first type of meeting strategy slash planning meeting. Second is your progress slash execution meeting. 

The third is ad hoc meetings. and this one will be a little quicker ’cause there’s no one set agenda for an ad hoc meeting, but. Four issues that arise or opportunities that are in front of us.

Just like I said, we can’t necessarily wait until a quarterly meeting or a annual meeting to talk about those things. We may not wanna wait for a monthly meeting to do that either. And there’s typically not enough time in the weekly meetings to really dig deep into those things. So where you’ve got a significant issue or a significant opportunity, there should be ad hoc meetings throughout the month, throughout the quarter, where you need it to say, Hey, let’s schedule a separate meeting.

We’re gonna get together for 90 minutes. and just. Figure out how we’re gonna attack this major opportunity that’s in front of us, or how we’re gonna solve this issue. and by the way, when, in identifying issues and opportunities, just a little side tip, I always like to state an issue or an opportunity in the form of a question.

If we say we’ve got an issue around, company communication. What is that? You know, even if you get more specific and say, we’ve got an issue around, you know, communicating, you know, internally to junior level team members. It’s a nice topic. What are you gonna talk about? But if you turn that into a question.

And the question might be, you know, how do we get our junior team members more aligned with our quarterly priorities? You know, how do we ensure leaders as we cascade down through the organization, understand what’s most important and are also communicating it to their teams? Questions get you more specific.

So we’ve talked about three types of meetings, strategy, planning, progress and execution, ad hoc for issues and opportunities. 

And the last one and one that is definitely. Screwed up most of the time, and the biggest screw up is not having them at all is as a leader, we should be having weekly one-on-one meetings and if weekly is too much, then start off every other week.

If every other week is too much, then. You got a bigger problem than you shouldn’t have anybody reporting to you if one-on-one meetings with your people every other week is too much. but I really do suggest weekly, they might only be 30 minute meetings. They should not be long meetings. They don’t have to be, but the one-on-one meetings is where the coaching and development and, you know, one-on-one accountability, the difficult discussions, the feedback where all of that happens.

And if you do that right. We can do way with the worst invention ever created in business, which is the annual performance review. Or if you do it four times a year. You do a crappy process four times a year, annual and quarterly performance reviews are just not timely enough and not actionable enough.

And just why are we waiting? We can’t afford to wait 90 days or 365 days to sit down and have the formal important discussion about how someone is doing. We need to be doing that almost continuously. And part of that is through the one-on-one meeting, and I believe there’s two types of one-on-one meetings with two very different objectives.

So if you’re doing it weekly, then you might have one of these as odd weeks. One of them is even weeks. So the first type of one-on-one meeting is the feedback and accountability. Meeting feedback and accountability meeting is exactly what it sounds like. If you are a leader, the agenda is yours.

You’re sitting down with a direct report and you are giving them feedback. On what you’ve seen and their mind may not always be feedback and it’s certainly not always gonna be negative feedback. The feedback could be, you’re doing amazing. You know, you our, you know, you are doing a great job living our, we lift each other up, core value, and lemme give you two examples.

and I really hope you keep doing that because it’s such a boon to our team. So it could be very positive feedback, it could be feedback on a behavior you wanna see changed. So it’s feedback and it’s accountability. Accountability is over and above that weekly accountability meeting with the team.

What do you need to speak one-on-one to this person about, and again, it doesn’t mean it has to be negative. Could be very positive. It’s around accountability for the priorities, the rocks, the KPIs, the who, what whens that someone is accountable for. It may be reprioritizing some of their work, but when leaders have one-on-one meetings, it typically looks kind of like the feedback and accountability meetings.

So that’s only one type of meeting. And as the leader, that’s your agenda. You drive that meeting. Second type of meeting is the coaching meeting. The coaching meeting is not your agenda as the leader, it’s the direct reports agenda, and that’s a time where they come to you with something that they need.

Help with an opportunity that they need help moving forward on an obstacle that’s in their way or relationship at work they’re having a problem with. Maybe it’s a career planning aspiration. Maybe they wanna be challenged more. Maybe they wanna be challenged less. It’s something they’re coming to you with that they need help with.

And your job as a leader is not to give them advice as much as it is to coach them. Pure coaching is asking. Questions. The best book I’ve ever read on that type of coaching is The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier. By asking them questions versus giving them advice, you are not only helping them surface the right action for them, you’re not only making sure you’re solving the right problem, but you’re also modeling a way for them to think so.

Those are the two types of one-on-one meetings. Now, by the way, the complaint I hear, the concern I sometimes hear about the,about the coaching meeting is, well, what if a direct report is coming to me every coaching meeting and saying they really have nothing they want to talk about. Well, that might send you a few messages.

One message is maybe you’re not challenging them enough so they don’t have any challenges or opportunities they need to talk to you about. And in that case, look in the mirror and maybe challenge them more. It may be that they don’t feel like they could be open and honest with you. That’s a problem as well.

It may be they’re not very coachable. It maybe they’re having problems, but they don’t want any coaching on it, or, you know, they’re afraid of you challenging them more. they just want to kinda hide, you know, outside that bright light of accountability. It maybe they don’t even know they’re having issues.

They don’t know what they don’t know either way. That’s a problem with coachability. So four types of meeting. Strategy and planning, progress and execution.Ad hoc, and then the one-on-one meetings. So. 

Two more things I wanna talk about. I wanna talk about meeting culture a little bit, and then some of the tools.

So from a meeting culture standpoint in making sure people have the right mindset and attitude in meetings. Um, I have, well, well, number one, I like to start all meetings, um, from the weekly meeting all the way up to the annual meeting. I like to start all meetings with good news. And we don’t have to spend a lot of time on good news, but going in around the room and getting quick good news is just a good way to start on a positive.

Even when companies are just going through quarter after quarter,of just low performance, it’s really important to, to shine a light on, Hey, there are actually some good things going on that we can leverage. and I truly believe that you get more of what you focus on. So starting with good news is just a great way to, to start a meeting.

Um, I also use three ground rules in my meetings. Number one, brutal honesty. It’s important to, to make sure everybody knows if they are sitting around this team table, this leadership team table, that they’re there for a reason. They’re there because we need to hear their voice. Brutal honesty doesn’t have to be brutal, but it means say that thing.

Especially when it feels difficult because that difficult thing, that thing you’re not sure how the team is gonna take, is probably the most important thing the team needs to hear. So ground rule number one is brutal honesty.

Ground rule number two is no shame, no blame.

So when we’re being brutally honest, it’s never to point the finger at anybody. It’s not to hurt some somebody. It’s not to shame anybody. It’s always to figure out how we could be smarter moving forward. Now, it may mean that brutal honesty is. Holding someone accountable for something they screwed up for, something someone is doing that’s hurting the team.

But again, we’re not doing it to shame them or blame them or gang up on them. We’re doing it so we could be a better team moving forward. And then the third ground rule and disagree and commit, and this is sometimes the hardest for leaders to really get it, is really important that we disagree as a team.

I had a leader say to me once, if we’re in a meeting with six people and everybody agrees, we’ve got five too many people in that meeting. So disagreement, conflict is really important. In fact, I did a recent podcast all about conflict as a strategy. For a team. Um, so disagreement is important, but once a decision is made and everybody’s voice has been heard, we need to leave that leadership team room committed to executing on that decision and making it work.

It doesn’t mean going back to your team and saying, oh, I’m so sorry. They decided to go with option A. Let’s make the best of it. That’s not disagree and commit. Disagree and commit is going back to your team. Even if you didn’t agree initially with that decision, you would’ve gone with option B, not option A disagree and commit is going back to your team and saying, Hey, we decided not.

They decided. We decided option A. Let’s figure out how to make it work.

Some quick tools that I like to use in meetings that are really helpful. Number one, some form of planning tool. I don’t care what you use. And it may be a bunch of Google docs or it may be a system made for this, like metronome growth systems or, and that’s one I tend to use with a lot of my clients, some form of planning tool where when you’re getting together weekly.

And you’re holding people accountable for rocks and KPIs. You’re not doing that by bringing up a picture of the flip chart from the quarterly planning meeting. You’ve got some way of storing these long-term strategies, plans, and visions, and your annual priorities and your quarterly priorities and your KPIs.

So you need some form of planning tool, or it becomes impossible to track things or hold people accountable. You need an issues list as issues come up. If you don’t have an issues list, you tend to do two things. Either dive into that issue right then when it may not be the highest priority way to spend your time in that moment, or you forget about the issue and it comes lurking back three months later.

So make sure you have an issues list and then in your monthly meetings, quarterly meetings, annual meetings, bring up that issues list, make sure you’ve got some time, as I said, to talk about issues and opportunities. You could grab one or two right off the issues list. Similarly have a priority parking.

Sometimes things come up as potential priorities, potential quarterly rocks, potential annual priorities, but they’re just not a top priority in that quarter. There are more important things that need to happen First, it may be that you have a real visionary CEO that has a thousand ideas and you can’t possibly implement them all right away, but some of them are really good ideas.

You need a place to put them. So have a priority parking lot to put those ideas. And then lastly, and I kind of alluded to this earlier from a task standpoint, one simple tool I use with my clients is called a who, what, when, a who, what, when is when something comes up that sounds like somebody should be doing something by next Tuesday or yeah, let’s schedule a meeting to talk about that.

Or I’ll go summarize what we talked about and get it out to the group. There’s some specific action. A who, what, when, very simply is who’s accountable. For that action, what actually are they doing? When is it getting done? Keeping an ongoing list. It could be a very simple three column spreadsheet. Keep an ongoing list of your who, what whens.

So in wrapping us up, my call to action for you then, by the way, this whole thing I call the planning and communication rhythm, um, audit your planning and communication rhythm. Are you having meetings? The four different types of meetings or something similar that works for you? Do you have the right objectives and agendas in those meetings?

Audit your meeting culture. Do you have a set of ground rules? Are people afraid to speak up? Do you have very little conflict in meetings? Are people disagreeing and not committing? Audit your meeting tools. Do you have a planning tool? Do you have a place for issues, a place, a parking lot for priorities, a place for tasks or who, what, when, audit all those and choose one change.

Just take one thing, maybe have a better agenda or say, Ooh, we have weekly meetings, but we don’t have monthly. We should have a monthly meeting, but just make one change to improve your planning and communication rhythm. 

Go back to an earlier problem I hear very often, which is a leader saying, I’m in too many meetings.

I can’t get real work done. If you are a senior leader, again, meetings are where the real work gets done. If you do meetings the right way, you can’t build a great leadership team on lousy meetings.

Fix those meetings and you’ll fix a big chunk of strategy, planning, and execution. Fix those meetings. You’ll have a better leadership team. Better leadership team means a better company, whether a better ability to grow, top and bottom line, to create a growing, fulfilling environment and to have true impact.

Talk to you soon. 

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