As a high growth company, it’s sometimes challenging to consistently bring together leaders from across your business. Yet when you do have the opportunity to meet as a leadership team, it’s crucial that you focus your time on the areas of your business that are the most meaningful. 

Too often leadership meetings can turn into either a weekly standing meeting that involves your team simply going through the motions or it can turn into a wasted hour spent talking about things that won’t have a substantive impact on your business. In thinking about your executive meetings, you can begin by even outlining an effective meeting checklist to ensure you aren’t getting lost on the areas that aren’t important. 

Here are a few important tips for effective meetings: 

• Create a regular rhythm for meeting that is firmly established on calendars. Moving meetings around, rescheduling them, or even just not attending, can be the fastest way to set a tone of unimportance for your leadership meetings. 
• Provide an area for people to provide topics beforehand to ensure relevant topics don’t get lost over the course of your work week.
• Build a flow for your meetings, and stay consistent. Jumping around from topic to topic or creating a sense of ambiguity in your meetings will lead to unengaged and structureless conversations. 

These are a few important tips you should keep in mind if you are looking to run meetings for executives. If you show executives that you value their time and place an emphasis on the time you are all spending together to solve challenges, they are more likely to be active participants during the meeting. At the same time, there are several other important points you should know if you want to get the most out of your meetings. Here are some of the other key points to successfully running your team meetings. 

Effective Meeting Guidelines

There are a lot of effective meeting guidelines you need to follow. If you want to follow effective meeting strategies, you need to set ground rules for both in-person and virtual meetings. A few ground rules you may want to specify include:

• Try not to move meetings. This puts an emphasis on the importance of the meeting, and the value you are placing on your team’s time together. 
• Everyone comes prepared with their updates. Whether you run OKRs, EOS, V2MOM, or a variation of another operating framework, no one should come to these meetings without an update on the main objectives they are responsible for reviewing. 
• Create a flow within your review of key priorities. For most companies, we recommend a structure that includes reviewing main company themes, executive team objectives, a company scorecard, and then topics and action items. This focuses the conversation on what will have the most impact on the company. 
• Submit topics to be discussed before the meeting. This isn’t to say that you can’t add topics, but so often topics surface during the course of the work week. This provides an avenue to ensure those topics are captured. 

If you keep these meeting preparation tips in mind, the meeting should flow smoothly. Remember that you need to focus on the executive team meeting purpose. It is easy for meetings to get outside of their scope. Make sure this does not happen. You have to keep the meeting on track. That way, you show everyone just how much you value their time.

Finally, it may be worth considering using a software solution to help add structure to your meetings. Software solutions can provide a mutually agreed upon structure and rhythm for how your team chooses to meet, and more importantly, can also help surface the right information to your leadership team for your meetings.

How To Structure Executive Meetings

If you are wondering how to structure executive meetings, it is critical to have an effective meeting agenda. If you take a look at a weekly management meeting agenda or a monthly team meeting agenda, you should learn more about how to conduct an effective meeting. At the same time, there are a lot of important points you need to keep in mind when you are trying to put together your executive meeting. Below are some of those meetings tips: 

• The meeting should be focused on reviewing company objectives. What are a few important metrics that are going to determine whether the company is meeting its goals or not? These should be the objectives.
• You should also take a closer look at the company's scorecard. How are individual departments doing when it comes to meeting their goals? Are all KPIs and OKRs being met? If not, is there something that can be done to rectify the situation?
• What are a few important topics that individual executives wanted to discuss? Make sure these have logical locations in the meeting. Make sure the person who is going to be speaking on those topics is prepared to talk about them.
• What are important action items? It is important to close with when the next meeting is going to be. It is also important to make sure that any individual tasks that have to be taken care of have been assigned to a specific person.

Whether you are holding weekly or monthly team meetings, leadership should be focused on the main priorities of the business. Executives need to know how to delegate appropriately. They do not have to be doing everything on their own.

It is normal for people to have questions and concerns about how they are going to stay on topic. That is why it is a good idea to work with a software platform that can help everyone stay focused on their goals. Elate was built to help automate a lot of the tracking that used to be manual or done in excel. With Elate, Executives can focus on other important areas, knowing that the platform is going to handle a lot of the goal tracking for them.

Leadership Meeting Topics

It is important to focus on leadership meeting topics. There are lots of management meeting topics that need to be covered, but your leadership team should be thinking about how they can link topics together with the main priorities of your business. If the meeting jumps from place to place without having any rhythm, it is easy for people to get lost and confused. If you do not stay on track, you will lose the audience. How can the executive link topics together during the meeting?

This is another area where Elate can be helpful. Elate provides business leaders with a way to link topics to the main priorities of the business. The meeting has to focus on the most important priorities at hand. That way, major areas can be addressed and everyone understands what the main focus is going to be between now and the next meeting. Even though topics need to be thoughtful, they also need to be relevant to the business. Executives should not spend too much time on any one topic. There comes a time when executives need to be able to delegate responsibilities to someone else.

When it comes to managers meeting agenda topics, it is important to make sure every important task has been assigned to someone by the end of the meeting. Again, rather than using excel spreadsheets or another project management tool, this is where unifying updates in a single location can be helpful. 

Elate can be used to assign certain tasks to team members throughout your company. In addition to understanding the objective hierarchy structure within your company to assign action items, you can also set due dates or even comment on specific objectives. This provides a seamless solution for executives who are looking for ways to delegate responsibilities and automate the tracking process.

How To Make Meetings More Effective

In the end, there are a lot of leaders who are looking for ways to make meetings more effective. It is helpful to take a look at leadership meeting ideas that should be included on the leadership team meeting agenda. Having a strong weekly team meeting agenda template is a good place to start. That way, executives can think about the information they need to include if they would like to streamline the operations of their individual meetings.

At the same time, it is important for companies to take a closer look at software solutions that can help them get more out of their meetings. As we’ve shared throughout, Elate was built for high growth companies looking to centralize their data and take action on areas most impacting their business. By automating follow-ups, goal tracking, and percent attainment, Elate can help any company double-down on how they think about growth. 

Furthermore, Elate can also be used to set meeting agendas, track goals, and automate a lot of the feedback processes. That way, leaders do not have to worry about reaching out to individual people to ask them how everything is going. They can rely on a solution that helps surface challenges, blockers, or even opportunities to double-down. 

If you are interested in learning more about how Elate can help your team run more effective leadership meetings, reach out to our team today. We’d love to hear from you and share how we are working with leading strategy and operations leaders.