Bursts of Color - The Weekly Staff Meeting
Most companies with more than 20 employees also have some version of a recurring executive staff meeting. These meetings are important, but some are time-better-spent than others. Here are my suggested defaults for making the most of them.
Note that while this is written for a CEO's exec staff, I think most of the same defaults apply for any recurring team meeting.
WHY have this meeting?
Just like Slack, email or all-hands meetings, the exec staff meeting is a communication channel that is well suited to certain things. I find that this staff meeting is best for:
explaining company news and decisions with more nuance than is easily shared broadly and
building relationships between your leaders, so they work together better and build lines of communication between their respective teams
WHO runs the meeting?
The meeting should have a single owner who oversees the agenda, chooses the participants and facilitates each session. This typically means the CEO, though another leader (e.g., co-founder or COO) can be the meeting owner if she is sufficiently empowered and seen by others as being “in charge.”
If the meeting owner is unavailable in a given week, cancel.
WHO should attend?
The company’s most senior leaders should attend the meeting. Preferably this means ten or fewer participants, who represent all the company’s major functions. This group is often similar to, but not the same as, the CEO's direct reports.
As the business grows, the right mix of meeting attendees will change. Adding new people is easy, but it also requires the uncomfortable work of uninviting some people who, while often still important to the business, are no longer in the top ten company leaders. If you don’t do this pruning, your meeting will quickly get large and unproductive.
WHEN should we meet?
Most companies start with a weekly, one-hour leadership meeting on Mondays. These are all logical defaults unless you have some strong reason to do things differently. Weekly allows good frequency, since you’ll end up canceling some for conflicts anyhow. An hour provides time for discussion, but doesn’t crush schedules like a 2+ hour block.
Start and end on time so as not to waste your executives' time. This is an expensive meeting, after all.
WHERE should we meet?
I recommend doing as many of these in-person as possible, as the sidebars and hallway banter are a big part of getting to know one another. Food also tends to bring people together, so lunchtime can work well.
WHAT is on the agenda?
The CEO (or other meeting owner) should set the agenda each week based on what’s new and relevant to the company. Depending on the week, this will probably include a subset of:
· Industry or company news
· Updates from one or more participants
· Context behind a CEO decision
· Collecting input before a decision
· Metrics review
· Discussion or brainstorming
PSA: Try to avoid the “let’s go around the room and all share an update” format. This tends to be painfully boring; it also means you’re peanut-buttering time across participants, rather than focusing on a few key topics. These general department updates can be easily shared and digested in writing.
HOW can I make these meetings effective?
Prepare for the meeting. Remember that you’re going to invest 10 hours of senior leadership time in this meeting (10 people x 1 hour), so 1-2 hours of your time spent on preparation will be highly leveraged.
Send reading material 24 hours in advance. Please don’t make your top execs sit around while you read bullet points to them.
Mix up the format. Review the relevant metrics when something’s new. Have your product lead do a walk-through before launch. Ask your sales head to share a fresh customer story or video. Do an occasional brainstorm or solicit group feedback before a decision. Just don’t do the same thing every week. If your format gets rote, people will tune out and your communication channel will lose value.
Wrap Up
The exec staff meeting is a valuable communication channel for your company. Just like the product, office space and team itself, it will probably always feel like a work in progress. And just like those other things, you’ll get out of it what you put into it.
"Just don’t do the same thing every week"++
To avoid that, my workflow was to maintain a list as I went through the week and make a note of the specific subtopic of any mtg that the rest of the leadership team might find interesting. If a few leaders do this who see across the company, they can easily surface enough topics to choose from to keep it fresh without scrambling the night before the mtg.