Build Confidence Into Your Leadership Team Meetings

I was recently on a call with a founder/CEO who stated:

“I used to have team meetings with my (global) team but no one found them to be any good, so I stopped them and now just have 1:1s with everyone.”

A lot to unpack there. For the sake of this post, I’ll stick to why it’s imperative that if you want to work as a team you, as a leader, are responsible for ensuring your team plays well together, and, obviously, the right team meetings are a super-effective use of everyone’s time. 

I asked him if he would be open to bringing team meetings back on the table if we worked together on trying a new approach. They are now successfully having team meetings, where the effectiveness of the meeting is a shared accountability and not the responsibility of one 

Here’s what we did (and have done for many other clients):

The Basics

The process I’m about to walk you through assumes you have set clear business priorities for the company. Not department-led goals but business-led goals. Email me if this distinction is not clear.

And, just so we are all on the same page, here’s why we think it’s a good idea to have team meetings in the first place. Great team meetings:

• Help the leadership team align on priorities

• Promote healthy and sometimes heated conversations about priorities and how we are going about working on them

• Are a discussion on trade-offs and resources in order to * actually* prioritise

• Are a chance to align on company internal and external comms to ensure you’re all singing from the same hymn sheet

• Create a company-wide team health check and check-in on how you are doing as a leadership team

They should not:

• Be status updates that could have been an email.

Let’s be real, these are expensive meetings ($ hourly salary x # of people x # of hours of meetings). So you need to ensure they are worth their while by doing the following:

• Share accountability by having a rotating chair, give freedom to allow the chair to run the meeting as they see fit as long as you achieve the outcomes

• Set some rules of engagement, like; no phones, laptops, distractions. If an emergency comes up, you let the team know instead of splitting your focus. As much as we think we can, we can’t actually listen and do something at the same time.

• Note keeper - do not assign to the person that puts their hand up (probably a woman, and probably in HR) or your EA and do not put those that say “you’re so much better at note-taking than me” off the hook. This is your LEADERSHIP team, if they are in the room, they should be capable of capturing notes. However, have a note-taking framework so that the notes have consistency.

• Set some pre-reading and pre-engagement so those that don’t like being asked to make a decision on the spot can review the information in advance and you as a team will get better at making data driven decisions. And no, it doesn’t have to be 8-pages long.

The Process

Here’s how we set up effective team meetings for our clients. This is based on an OKR process but applied to any goal-setting framework. We suggest a top of the week check-in call and an end of the week check-out call.

The Check-In Call

Let’s assume you have aligned on top-level company goals - no more than 5, but preferably 3 to make it uncomfortable, yet focused. You then need to set up a confidence scoring sheet. You can take a copy of OTL’s here. Before every team meeting, each member of their team scores their confidence in the company’s ability to meet that goal.

GREEN - on track!

YELLOW- with some tweaks, I think we can make it work.

RED - Absolutely not happening.

You can define your own colours but you get the gist.

In the meeting, you jump straight to the “red” and discuss “what would we need to do to move a red to a yellow” and thus an engaging conversation usually ensues.

If you find that you’re seeing a lot of green, before you pat yourselves on the back, if I was in the room I’d say that goal isn’t stretchy enough and to make it more ambitious.

Here’s a google template of our confidence scorecard.

If these discussions take up too much air time, move any bigger discussion into an action to set a meeting specifically to address that and use the rest of the time to check that you’re not burning people out or compromising quality. Share what each priority is for the week.

The Check-Out Call

This meeting aims to shift the mindset of your team to “progress over perfection” by creating a ritual that celebrates small wins and thus builds confidence and optimism.

It is as simple as:

Part 1: Progress

• What have we achieved?

• What has been completed?

• Demo time if required

Part 2: Team Vibes

• Who did we make happy this week?

• What made us happy/proud this week?

• Shout outs and thank yous (either in the team or from the whole business)

It might sound and feel a bit cringe, but it’s in these meetings where I have seen the most transformation happen in a team.

Make it yours.

Whenever we introduce a framework like this to our clients, 3 outcomes tend to happen:

1) The team follow it by the letter

2) The team take parts of the process they like and shape it to work better for them

3) The team go back to running bad meetings

You are free to do what works best for you, but I would urge you to empower your team to shape the meetings that create engagement, effectiveness and drive you towards the outcomes you need to deliver.

At the end of the day, you run your meetings how you want to, but just remember:

• Bad meetings are a time and money waster,

• Good meetings are a temperature check,

• Great meetings excel you forward as a team and therefore, as a business

And don’t get me started on board meetings…...

*A note here, company level priorities means as a business this is our focus to move towards our strategy, if a department isn’t reflected in those top 3, it does not mean they aren’t important or they don’t do any work. That department’s priorities should reflect what they are doing to ensure business priorities are being met.