Learn how to structure your next executive meeting to be effective, action-driven, and worthwhile. ✅
A methodology for amazing meetings. Say goodbye to boring, long, and unproductive meetings.
In a world where 9 out of 10 people say they space out during meetings, creating an effective meeting plan is vital. This is even more so the case when it comes to an executive team meeting, where high-level employees will be taking time out of their busy schedules to attend.
If you’re looking to host an effective executive team meeting, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll be answering the following questions:
Let’s get right into it.
<div id="1"></div>
An executive team meeting gathers everyone in the senior leadership team together in one place. Depending on the internal structure of your business, the people in the room may change. For one organization, this might include every department lead, while for another, the executive team might include the people in positions above this.
No matter who is going to be involved, an executive meeting involves senior figures to:
These executive meetings provide valuable time to make decisions, plan for the future, and make sure your business is moving towards its organizational goals.
<div id="2"></div>
There are two camps of thought when it comes to hosting executive meetings. While some believe that an executive meeting should be a weekly task, ensuring that all of your leaders are on the same page each week, others believe once a month is more than enough.
Let’s walk through the potential benefits of each meeting type.
The primary benefit of a weekly leadership meeting is that your team will be much better informed.
As this form of leadership team meeting includes all of your executives, they’ll be able to relay any important information down the line to the people on their team. Additionally, if any team is having problems, your leadership team will be able to work together to overcome them.
With a weekly meeting frequency of leadership team meetings, you can establish a recurring time and day for when the meeting will occur. By doing this, you’ll be able to create a schedule for your team that is much easier to follow, boosting the number of executives you can gather into one room.
On the other hand, one of the most significant benefits of monthly meetings over weekly ones is that this saves valuable time.
By reducing the number of meetings from four times a month to once a month, you’re essentially saving up to three hours every month per attendee. Considering that your leadership team will often be incredibly busy, this is definitely not a benefit to overlook.
That being said, only meeting once a month might also lead your executive team to be forgetful and have less time to establish executive priorities.
Some businesses push this even further and choose to have one annual meeting, which can often lead to more communication issues than when meeting more frequently. If you’re off track and no one realizes for an entire year, many things can go wrong before anyone has the chance to fix it.
No matter how busy your executive team may seem, no one is too busy to schedule one hour a month for a meeting with your company’s most important individuals.
{{vital="/blog-inserts"}}
One effective way of blending both weekly and monthly meetings is to do both, but have different priorities in each.
In your weekly meetings, you’ll be able to review team activity, resolve any issues they’re facing, and provide guidance. Whereas in monthly meetings, you’ll be able to address more critical issues that the business is facing.
This blended approach gives you the best of both worlds and allows every executive team meeting to be as effective as possible.
<div id="3"></div>
As with any effective meeting, you’ll want to do a little prework and postwork to ensure that you’re not wasting anyone’s time. There are three elements that encompass good prework and postwork meeting strategies. Remember to always:
By conducting these three strategies, you’ll be able to cover all of your bases, making sure that your weekly meetings go off without a hitch. As you’ll be constantly improving, your team meetings will become even more efficient over time.
<div id="4"></div>
Depending on the type of executive meeting you’re looking to run, the agenda you will want to set will vary. We’d recommend taking a look at the full collection of executive meeting agendas that are on Hugo, with the extensive range providing a great pool of inspiration.
That being said, if you want to create your own executive meeting agenda, we recommend that you include the following:
By including a variation of these four central strategies, you’ll be able to create an effective leadership meeting that makes every minute count. If you have meeting notes for your weekly meetings, make sure to publish them so that everyone knows what went on in that leadership meeting and can refer back when needed.
While your leadership meeting agenda will vary, the core tasks and goals you’ll want to set out will remain pretty similar. Knowing this, you’ll be able to look at Hugo’s agendas and then mold them to your individual meeting goals.
Especially with all of the important people in the room, you don’t want your weekly or monthly executive meeting to be a waste of time. By using the tips in this article, like having a clear agenda, you’ll be on your way to creating fantastic executive team meetings.
Streamlining this process will enable you to synergize your departments, construct a clear vision for your company’s future, and start tracking progress more effectively. When done right, an executive meeting can be valuable time that significantly boosts the future success of your business.
{{start-having-better-meetings="/blog-inserts"}}