Executive Meeting Agenda: Optimize your Weekly Executive Meeting

For the most effective weekly team meeting, your weekly leadership meeting team should consist of 8-10 people. If your group is too large, consider who truly should be part of the executive team meeting. Perhaps some people should participate at the departmental team-level weekly staff meeting only if they aren't part of the strategic planning process.  You can always invite them into the executive meeting when they have an important project that you need to discuss when it is time for an important update or discussion.  Your goal is to avoid unproductive meetings by inviting too many people for the entire executive meeting, when they might only be relevant for a portion of the meeting.

Executive Meeting Framework

Also, the executive team should be using your Quarterly Plan as the framework for the meeting. The plan should consist of 3-5 Strategic Company Initiatives and 3-5 Personal Priorities each. Owners of those Priorities should have statused them Red, Yellow or Green prior to the Weekly Leadership Team Meeting.  You need to discuss long term growth initiatives, not just the "urgent" items from your daily firefighting that need to go through the executive decision-making process.

Executive Meeting Agenda

Once the Executive Team is in place with a Winning Plan, Executive Leadership Weekly Meetings should cover three things:  Your Company, Yourself, Your Customer/Employees.  You should schedule the meeting time at least 30 days in advance to ensure attendance or keep the same date and time each week.  Management meetings need to be planned farther in advance than typical meetings due to the tight schedules of the executive team.

Talk About Your Company

Spend time talking about the Priorities in your plan that are struggling - the Yellows and Reds. There is no need to spend time discussing status on the Greens. Call on the collective intelligence of the group to solve problems on a regular basis.  Engage the entire team - even if the struggling priority is outside of their world. Work together on the proposed Action Plan to Green.  Talk about how your daily work ties to your strategic planning session.

Talk About Yourself

Each person in the meeting should get 2-3 minutes of individual talk time. Each person should share their Victories from the week that just ended, their Priorities for the week ahead and anything they are Stuck on. The objective is to look for efficiencies (are 2 people working on the same thing?) and clear Stucks off everyone's plate. Hold the team to 2-3 minutes each or the group will start to check out. If a Stuck involves a bigger conversation for 2 people, ask them to move it offline.

Talk About your Customer/Employees

Ask the team to share any positive or negative feedback they have received from Customers or Employees that they feel needs to float up the the Executive Team. Use this time to help keep the Exec Team connected to the front lines and team members at the departmental team level to maximize information sharing across departments.  Feel free to adjust any agenda item to suit your needs, and make sure that you keep track of action items to ensure team and leadership accountability. 

By using the tips above, and having a facilitator to keep everything on track, your Weekly Meetings should become more efficient and productive.  If you want to make your weekly leadership meeting productive and solve the biggest challenges facing your company, make the effort to take it to the next level.  Our strategy execution software automatically creates an executive meeting agenda, as well as one for each of your departments, to help power your annual plans and strategic initiatives.  See how our software fixes weekly meetings. 

Need help facilitating effective weekly meetings?  Ask questions, we are here to help.