No More Boring Meetings

by Scaling Up Coach, Mark Fenner

How to Structure a Meeting Rhythm that Makes Sense for Your Business

The old joke around the internet is that too many meetings could have just been emails. You’ve been in those meetings, right? Maybe you’ve even run a handful of those meetings. If you’ve ever stepped out of the conference room and wondered what the point of the last hour was, you are not alone. 

Boring meetings, or worse, ineffectual meetings, are more commonplace than you might realize. But meetings will always be a part of every business so the real question is, how do you make them effective? After all, good meetings are the heartbeat of every successful organization. Structured with care, intention and focused on outcomes, great meetings can transform organizations and even turn an entire industry on its head.

Take Wal-mart. The largest retailer in the world wasn’t always that way. In the early days, Sam Walton instituted a Saturday morning meeting. The purpose was to stay days ahead of the competition by reflecting on results and strategies from the previous week and then set goals and display strategies they could execute in the upcoming week. Sam felt that this discipline would help them crush the competition–and he was right.

But those early Wal-mart meetings weren’t just about reporting what was going on. They were true brainstorm meetings. Store managers asked good questions. They weren’t afraid to passionately debate ideas and most importantly, when a strategy failed, it wasn’t the end of the world. Instead, those meetings celebrated failure just as often as success. And the Saturday morning meeting gave the team time to execute on their new strategies to see exactly what worked. That discipline, consistently applied over years, is what turned Wal-mart into the juggernaut it is today. 

In 1974, Wal-mart had 778 stores. It’s closest competition was Sears, with 851 stores nationwide. The leader in the space was K-mart, with 1,326 stores. Fast forward to today and Wal-mart is a global empire with more than 10,500 stores in nearly every developed country in the world. They employ more than 2.3M people and in 2021 raked in $559B in revenues and $13.7B in net income. Not bad for a neighborhood market from Bentonville, Arkansas. 

Today, K-mart is bankrupt. They have only 10 stores left and after merging with Sears in 2005, were divested in 2019 leaving them almost completely out of business. Sears too, faces an uncertain future, constantly shuttering stores and going through rounds of layoffs.

Those weekly Saturday meetings started back in the early days of Wal-mart built an organizational muscle of discipline, creativity and hard work, values the company still relies on today. As they do, other organizations like Sears and K-mart left their discipline behind and ultimately, lost their grip on their industry and on their business. 

The lesson here is simple. As your meetings improve, your strategies improve and you can scale faster.

Too often, meetings in organizations are undisciplined. Think about it. When was the last time you came out of a meeting saying, “that was fantastic!” or even being energized by the meeting. Maybe a few times in the last year but that seems to be the exception, rather than the norm. So, how do you develop meetings so they become the heartbeat of your organization? How do you build a meeting schedule that makes sense, drives innovation, and ultimately builds discipline and strategic focus within your company that can help you out-execute your competition? 

Here is what I suggest.

 There are 3 key meetings you need to hold. Everything else is just filler.

• Daily Huddle

• Weekly Huddle

• Monthly Management Meeting

Let’s talk more in detail about each of these individual types of meetings and how you can make them successful

Daily Huddle

Purpose: This meeting removes bottlenecks, and helps eliminate delays, mistakes, and dropped balls. This meeting should happen in each team or department every day. It’s a great way to keep people accountable as well, making sure that the team is all moving in the same direction.

Time: 5 to 15 minutes

Agenda:

• Daily Number Review (one or two at most)

• What is number one priority for the day?

• What are your challenges or potential roadblocks?

Best Practices:

• Avoid generalities. Encourage each member to be brief, but specific.

• Don’t go past the 15 minute mark. If a longer discussion needs to be had, hold an after meeting.

• Make sure key team members and stakeholders are present and that everyone has a voice.

Weekly Huddle

Purpose: Stay focused on the main thing. Gather intelligence about customers, employees, competitors, and the marketplace. Leverage your collective intelligence to solve problems and deliver on your plan. Be flexible and open to opportunities as they arise. After all, this meeting is time to reflect on what is working and solve short term problems. 

Time: 45 to 90 minutes

Agenda:

• Discover (15 minutes)

  • Good News (personal and professional)

  • Intelligence and Trends (employees, clients, marketplace)

  • Review KPIs

  • Status of the current quarter’s priorities

• Discuss (15 minutes)

  • Issues

  • Brainstorm solutions based on the collective intelligence gathered

  • Pick one issue, commit to make a decision and resolve the issue

• Decide (10 minutes)

  • Align around the decision made

  • Commit to a timeline for action and reporting

• Delegate (10 minutes)

  • Assign a point person

  • Determine any needed resources

• One Phrase Close (5 minutes)

  • Wrap-up the meeting with inspiration and motivation, but be genuine)

Best Practices:

• Go deep in one or two areas instead of shallow in all areas

• Postpone long-term strategic topics and potential obstacles to a separate meeting or in the monthly meeting

• Mine for conflict to drive discussion and debate. But remember, debate ideas and not people.

Monthly Management Meeting

Purpose:

• Assess progress against quarterly plan

• Problem solve leveraging the collective intelligence of the team

• Educate and train leadership

• Share best practices and wins

Time: 2 to 8 hours

Agenda:

• Share Good News

• CEO Update – Set the tone, drive focus, and state the meeting’s focus

• Stories – Share stories of customer success and employees who have lived and exemplified the core values of the organization

• Review progress against plans

  • Annual and quarterly targets

  • Rocks, critical numbers and open tasks

  • Departmental dashboards

• Solve problems – leverage the collective intelligence of the team

• Education – share new knowledge, discuss values, connect to new ideas

• One-phrase or one-word close

Best Practices

• Use this meeting as a way to align leadership to core values and objectives

• Focus on wins but don’t be afraid to bring up the hard problems

• Debate the things that matter most

• Take as much time as needed but take breaks

​​The Takeaway

Your goal should be to establish a meeting rhythm that will help the organization get things done, solve problems and grow. Too often, meetings are a hindrance to actual work. They are boring, there are no clear goals and they become a tiresome exercise in futility and frustration. Meetings can kill culture, but good meeting rhythms are often the secret behind an organization’s success.

But beyond having a good agenda and being timely and consistent, there are three things a good meeting rhythm provides:

• Good Peer Pressure – It’s much harder to hold people accountable in a one-on-one situation. But when peers hold each other accountable, work gets done. Foster that accountability among the team and watch meetings go from a meandering mess to something much more productive.

• Collective Intelligence – Outside of meetings, executive teams should spend the bulk of their time gathering intelligence on employees, customers and the marketplace. Encourage your team to listen and then bring back the stories they hear and the data they found which will give you the insight you need to make sound business decisions.

• Clear Communication – Concise meetings, focused on outcomes and discussion topics that matter, force everyone, including the executive, to speak clearly and concisely on the topics at hand. Clear communication in meetings leads to a team that doesn’t waste time on the next random idea. Rather, it keeps everyone focused on the discussions that matter most.

If your team lacks accountability or is continually missing targets, the first place you should evaluate is your meeting rhythm. Likely, you have too many unfocused meetings on too many topics. Focus on your team meeting schedule, get into that all important rhythm and watch your productivity grow.

In brief

• Focus on the purpose and outcomes of your meetings

• Treat meetings as an opportunity to collaborate and leverage collective intelligence

• Gather commitments, public commitments tend to be lasting commitments

• Leverage meetings as a tool to scale further faster instead of some necessary evil

That’s all for today.  But you can go deeper into this topic with my webinar replay on Meeting Rhythms – Setting the Heartbeat of the Organization.

If you have questions or want to talk further about how I can help you build a meeting schedule that will grow your business faster, let’s talk. Until then, keep scaling!

Learn more about Coach Mark Fenner by clicking here.