How to get the most out of your executive meeting
The best executive team meetings are those that maximize efficiency while producing actionable items and inspiring your leaders to keep driving your organization forward. Shockingly, many meeting organizers seem not to understand this. Executive meetings often lack direction, focus and more closely resemble a talk shop than a decisive center of activity. This can cause problems to fester and stall progress toward organizational goals.
Continue reading to better understand the real purposes of an executive team meeting and to learn the four critical ingredients for a highly productive one.
The purpose of an executive team meeting
What it is
Your executive team meetings are a chance to bring the major leaders from all parts of your organization together to make decisions, raise and resolve issues, ensure alignment and create visibility across each department.
Executives should meet on a regular basis — perhaps as often as a weekly meeting — to guarantee constant alignment, maintain consistent progress toward goals and help identify issues before they grow. More than that, good executive team meetings help resolve conflicts between different leaders and create stronger bonds between them, building camaraderie and boosting the cohesiveness of your leadership team.
What it isn’t
Most people have sat through a team meeting that left them wondering, what was the point of that? The unfortunate reality is that many executive meetings are poorly organized, lack focus and direction, and produce few tangible results leaders can take back to their teams.
Unproductive meetings are often due to poor planning — like failing to stick to the meeting agenda — but many executive meetings also lack a concrete vision or purpose. Your leadership meetings shouldn’t just be a standing talk shop where department heads raise issues and talk about progress.
They need to produce clear, actionable items, whether those are decisions on key initiatives or a game plan to tackle a problem. Whatever it is, your leaders should feel like they’re going back to their teams having made real, meaningful progress.
What to discuss in an executive meeting
Holding a leadership meeting that your leaders look forward to and leave feeling a sense of motivation and direction requires good planning. Here are five of the core features that should guide each of your executive meetings:
- Metrics: A substantial portion of your meeting should be devoted to discussion of key performance metrics. Cover progress and results on specific projects and initiatives, and ensure that each department is on track to achieve their specific tasks.
- Key successes: One of the most important functions of your leadership team meetings is to inspire and motivate every other employee in your firm. An effective way to do this is to share and praise the wins and successes of individuals and teams.
- Important messages: Transparent leadership is effective leadership — your executives should use these meetings as a chance to transmit key messages, updates or other communications that the rest of the organization should be aware of.
- Issues: Your executive meetings are an important opportunity for leaders from different departments to raise issues that are impeding overall success. This is a good time for the team to manage and resolve conflicts between teams and departments.
- The personal side: It pays to take your leaders’ focus off of work, even for just a few moments. Spend a little time at the beginning or end of each discussion on personal items of interest, like family news, weekend plans or even just the last TV show watched.
Four critical ingredients for productive executive team meetings
High-performing leadership meetings don’t happen by accident. They are the result of deliberate and careful design and, done right, help leaders feel energized. Here are four critical ingredients necessary for productive executive leadership team meetings:
- Right agenda: Productive executive meetings start with the right agenda. Too often, meeting agendas are packed full of presentations and information sharing, and meeting organizers fail to stick to allotted time slots. Ensure your agendas are maximizing your team’s time by allocating space for key decision-making and problem-solving initiatives.
- Courage: One of the essential ingredients that keeps everything moving smoothly, leaders need to have the courage to speak up in meetings when things start to veer off track and not every agenda item is getting due attention. Some leaders might feel uncomfortable holding their counterparts accountable in such a setting. Don’t. A productive leadership meeting requires each of its members to ensure things keep moving along.
- Enterprise view: Leadership teams sometimes suffer from too much compartmentalization. That is, department heads come to the meeting prepared only to discuss issues from the standpoint of their own departments. But every member of the leadership team doubles as a leader of the entire organization. They should always be encouraged to look through the lens of “what’s best for the business” as opposed to the too narrow “what’s best for my function” view.
- Trust: A leadership team that lacks trust is inefficient, lets problems fester and is ultimately self-destructive. Leaders who don’t trust each other will withhold information from each other, preventing your team from getting anything done and allowing resentment and animosity to seep in. Leaders should be encouraged to support their colleagues as opposed to undermining them, leading to more authentic and efficient conversations and decision-making.
How The Bailey Group can help
The good news is that the skills needed to transform your executive team meetings and drive your organization forward can be learned and cultivated over time.
That’s where The Bailey Group comes in. Our trained advisors and consultants have the tools and experience your executive team needs to start making decisions, resolving conflicts and driving strategy execution. Contact us and let’s talk about how to reverse the cynicism and discouragement caused by unproductive meetings.
Sources:
https://www.business.com/articles/7-powerful-tips-for-highly-productive-online-meetings/
https://www.strety.com/blog/leadership-meeting-topics-agendas
https://soapboxhq.com/blog/meetings/items-for-your-leadership-team-meeting-agenda
