Top Tips on How to Run a Leadership Meeting

Pulling together the top executives and senior members of your business away from their desks and teams into a meeting room every single week might sound daunting but trust us, it’s one of the best moves your company will make. 

We get it, your leadership team is going to be incredibly busy but that’s exactly why regular leadership meetings are so vital. Often, their jobs require bigger discussions and debates, working together to find adequate solutions and innovative ideas. This can only effectively be done through a regular, face-to-face meeting which enables you to capture everyone’s full attention and assess business matters. 

Our tips on how to run a leadership meeting will ensure you get the most out of your allocated time slot, with examples of agenda action items that will help drive productivity, creativity and innovation.

What is a leadership meeting?

A leadership meeting is a regularly scheduled meeting with senior leadership and management teams. It brings together the team leaders to conduct a high-level meeting where organisational functions, strategy and key insights are discussed to make informed business decisions. 

Often held on a weekly basis, leadership meetings are essential to gain insights across all departments in order to make decisions, solve problems and align processes. Generally these meetings can fall into one of two categories; operational (running the business) and innovative (changing the business). Once this is established, you can build an agenda that helps drive an effective meeting.

Why is a leadership team meeting important?

Aligning processes across all departments isn’t easy. By regularly scheduling meetings to communicate asynchronously allows key information to be addressed and action points developed quickly. Setting importance on regular communication across departments also enables teams to be more productive, since they’re given the opportunity to understand what is happening across the business and coordinate goals. 

These types of meeting structures have become incredibly valuable to businesses, especially senior leadership teams as it drastically improves the way people work together. By holding them weekly, you provide your senior leadership 52 opportunities to identify issues before they become major problems— and work together to solve them. Set a weekly schedule with a recurring date and time and don’t move it.

But these meetings don’t run themselves. With big voices in the room, it’s key to have an effective structure to the meeting to help it run in a constructive way.

Leadership meeting agenda example

Having a defined agenda set up prior to the meeting will help guide the conversation in the right way. With many senior executives in the room, it can be easy to fall off-topic, however, with an assigned ‘meeting leader’ and clear structure, you can ensure you’ll run a successful leadership meeting. Here is an example of an effective leadership meeting agenda:

• Welcomes and victories. It’s vital to set the tone right for the meeting and spend a few minutes, in the beginning, to warm everyone up with personal updates and good company news. (5 minutes)
• Run through the agenda. Clarify how the structure of the meeting will run, giving clear cues to anyone who will lead a certain part of the meeting so everyone feels comfortable with their participation. (5 minutes)
• Review KPIs and insights. Each team leader can share an overview of their team’s progress and KPI updates since the last meeting. (5 minutes)
• Roadblocks. This is where we start to enter the real bulk of the meeting. What hurdles are your team facing? Quickly brainstorm how to tackle these roadblocks and whatever can’t be solved will move to the issues list - see below. (10 minutes)
• Quarterly priorities and progress. This differs from reviewing KPIs, as that was an opportunity to share individual team progress. Quarterly priorities are more about the overall company goals and targets. (5 minutes)
• Identify top issues. By reviewing quarterly priorities and KPIs, everyone should have a good idea of what is working well and what issues need addressing. This is a chance to prioritise the top issues and start to work on a process to tackle them. (10 minutes)
• Tackle top issues. This is where you drill down into your company strategy and build a roadmap to tackle the top issues identified. You don’t have to solve them all in one meeting but a course of action needs to be established so teams can continue to improve operations. (45 minutes) 
• Review. Wrap up the meeting with a review and confirm actions moving forward so everyone leaves the meeting clear. It’s best to have someone, perhaps a personal assistant available to send through meeting minutes post-meeting to ensure everyone has clear takeaways. (5 minutes) 

Tips on how to run a leadership meeting

Define the purpose of your meeting

Before entering the meeting, establish what needs to be achieved. Zoom out and then drill down. Look at the bigger picture of why you’re hosting weekly leadership meetings. This will be to align multiple teams in one session. Then drill down into the purpose of each meeting. Week to week you will have different goals and so it’s good to round up at the end of each meeting to establish goals for the following week. 

Set a clear agenda

We’ve provided an example agenda above, which will help drive your leadership meeting in the right direction. This can be tailored towards your purpose once it’s been established. If you’re driving an operational meeting, then identifying and solving issues will be the main bulk of your meeting. If it’s an innovation meeting then you’ll spend more time brainstorming and bouncing ideas off one another. 

Assign a note taker 

You want your executives to focus on the meeting, solve issues and assess processes so assigning a note-taker will ensure that key points don’t get missed and can be reviewed post-meeting. 

Be inclusive

Promote exclusivity by offering time for each attendee to speak during the meeting. We mention in our agenda example that providing speaker cues in the introduction can be a good way to ensure everyone has time to share opinions and ideas. Make sure to ask questions and encourage participation throughout. 

Remember: it’s a discussion, not a lecture

We discussed the idea of having a meeting leader to help drive the structure of the meeting and keep focused. But remember that these meetings are designed to promote collaboration and productivity. The agenda should have points that fuel productive conversations that allow everyone to dive into the discussion. This ensures everyone is able to participate, promoting a far more meaningful and constructive outcome. 

Don’t be afraid of feedback

The most important part of being a leader is being able to accept feedback. Since these meetings are a regular occurrence, it’s important to gain feedback on the style of the meeting to ensure you can maximise productivity in each one. It will allow you to understand the relevance and efficiency of the meetings and improve where needed. 

Find the right environment

Setting your leadership team up in the right environment is key to a successful meeting. Find a professional meeting room that is fully equipped to host your session, complete with superfast WiFi and the necessary technology to keep your meeting running efficiently. 

There are plenty of rooms that can be configured to suit your requirements and often, taking the leadership team offsite can help boost productivity and encourage fresh ideas. With catering options and onsite support, it’s a simple way to make a lasting impression.