25 tips to run your executive meeting

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Great meetings don’t just

Great meetings don’t just happen, they’re meticulously crafted. 

A good executive meeting strengthens the bonds of your leadership team, surfaces mission-critical problems facing the business, and carves out plans for the future. 

When wrestling with thorny challenges, heated debates can quickly derail the conversation without a resolution. Annual plans are crafted with care, but without rigorous focus, the business can lose steam. 

The executive team’s time

The executive team’s time is worth a lot, so it’s a shame to waste it. 

Charting a less choppy course requires careful planning, with tons of prep work.

There’s an endless difference between an energizing meeting and one that leaves your executive team feeling deflated. 

Here is a detailed guide for constructing your own inspiring, effective executive meetings. 

Build the foundationPut on

Build the foundation

• Put on your designer hat. Think of yourself as a designer and the meeting attendees as your customers, then design the best experience for them.
• Don’t just wing it. Don’t wait too long to formalize your executive team and start meeting regularly
• Consider bringing in reinforcements. If ideas don’t come naturally to you, look to partner with someone on your team who can help you or take over ownership of the meeting.
• Be strategic about where it falls on the calendar. Resist the urge to change a regular meeting when they have a full plate. Try to keep the date and time exactly the same — even if that means you’re calling in from 5 a.m. in Tokyo or 10 p.m. in Portugal.

Set the stage for

Set the stage for success

• Submit your homework ahead of time. Create frameworks and documentation beforehand to spend less time just communicating your idea.
• Enforce the pre-reads. Use pre-reads to streamline meeting topics and enforce them strictly.
• Get specific with guest speakers. Get the guest speaker coming in to submit a pre-read 24 hours in advance, specifically outlining what they’re looking to get out of the meeting.
• Avoid surprises. A good rule of thumb is if you’re anticipating conflict, give people a chance to think about the topic well ahead of time.

Decide who’s in the

Decide who’s in the room 

• Be selective from the start. Limit the number of people in the room from the start — you can always add more later.
• Try sticking to the core group. Outside speakers can often end up dominating the meeting so stick to your core group for important meetings
• Be clear about why you’re scaling back. The best way to implement any kind of change is to acknowledge that change is hard.
• Share the agenda across the org. Have a running project that lists the topics that are up for discussion and then fill that in after the meeting with any decisions that were made or the next steps.

Make the most of

Make the most of your time together

• Start with a check-in. Go around and check-in on how members are doing and how they’re showing up to the meeting.
• Rotate your roster of metrics and dig into the why. Rotate the objective, keys and results you review each week, as a forcing function for deep thinking.
• Stir up healthy conflict. Create a culture where people feel comfortable disagreeing on different ideas that are both reasonable and well-informed.
• Focus on the right time horizon. For each item on the agenda, it’s important that everyone in the meeting knows the time horizon that’s being discussed. 

Grab your stopwatch. A

• Grab your stopwatch. A five-minute time limit is particularly ambitious, so start with 10 minutes to build up rapid-fire discussion muscles.
• Ditch the slide decks. After folks are done reading the brief, jump immediately into discussion. Otherwise, the person leading the brief will often try to add additional thoughts.
• Tie up loose ends. When a loose end pops up, add a note to the doc with the next steps. Documentation is key to making sure nothing slips through the cracks.
• Lean on your async tools. Have a lot of dashboards that as many people at the company have access to. Keep executive meetings exclusively on non-obvious, important decisions.

Continue evolvingTake a pulse

Continue evolving

• Take a pulse check. Create a short survey to send around to folks on the executive team and keep them in check.
• Give changes time. Whenever you implement changes, try to stick with it for at least three months.
• Write down your meeting norms, and revisit them often. Have staff norms written at the top of all meeting documents, so there’s a constant reminder of what you expect folks to bring to the table.
• Develop a shared language.  Personality tests help people develop a language for articulating what causes them to respond in certain ways and build new approaches to interacting with others.
• Look for meeting inspo. Lean on the supportive network of fellow startup leaders. And if you find someone that’s particularly admired for hosting top-notch meetings, don’t be afraid to ask to join in.

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