Leadership Meeting Agenda

An important ritual for high performing organizations is to have a weekly management meeting where the top leadership gets together and discusses the most important matters together. This is a time for decision making and reaching consensus on important issues.

This meeting is typically made up of very busy people with limited time in their week, so it’s crucial to make the meeting count and prepare a worthwhile agenda. Often the person preparing that agenda is the CEO, COO or Chief of Staff. Let’s breakdown how you should assemble and distribute the agenda:

1. Review the current month and quarter objectives

The best teams have a regular cadence of planning: often big annual objectives for the year that then get cut into smaller quarterly initiatives that then get further cut down to monthly and weekly tasks. During the leadership meeting, you have an opportunity to dive into specific objectives to handle issues that have arisen, or make adjustments if priorities changed.

2. Pull top objectives and concerns from written updates

In order to keep your meeting efficient, your team should in advance submit a quick written recap outlining their progress, plans and any problems encountered over the last week. This recap serves as the “status update” so you don’t need to allocate time on your meeting agenda for updates. The written update is a great source of agenda items, particularly the “problems” or “concerns” section. You can read updates in the Weekly Update dashboard.

3. Look through employee feedback and concerns

If you gather regular employee feedback regularly through anonymous surveys, culture software or town hall meetings, some issues that were brought up might be worthy of getting time on the agenda for leadership discussion.

4. Request input from each of the leaders

To help the leadership team feel ownership over the meeting agenda, ask them for their input. A few days before the meeting, you can reach out and ask if there is anything specific they’d like to discuss. You can also make this a question on their written update form.

5. Share the agenda at least the night before

Once the agenda is prepared, it’s time to share it. I recommend emailing it to the group at least the night before the meeting so each leader has time to review and prepare. Ideally, each of the leaders had an opportunity earlier to provide their input and suggest items to cover during the leadership meeting.

6. Stick to the agenda during the meeting

In order to keep your meeting productive, it’s important to stick to the agenda and prevent one person from steering the meeting in a different direction by introducing a different topic. You put thought into making the agenda in order to keep your executive team productive during the meeting — stick to it!