The Most Effective Meetings For Your Business
If your company is growing, or if you’re already a decent sized business…and you are trying to have more effective meetings, then this video is for you.
I recently spent a month looking into how, and when to have the most efficient business meetings. I also wanted to know what kind of meetings produced the best results for my business, or any business really.
Here are a few of the books that helped me with my research…
– “Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable…About Solving the Most Painful Problems in Business” by Patrick Lencioni
– “Meetings Suck” by Cameron Herold
– “Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It…and Why the Rest Don’t” by Verne Harnish
– “Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business” by Gino Wickman
I found that all successful, fast growing companies have something in common when it comes to when and how they conduct internal meetings. All of their meetings have a regular rhythm, cohesive structure, and they don’t meet at random times.
They have very specific times set aside for daily, weekly, and quarterly meetings…for both one-on-one, and large group gatherings.
A lot of people ask me what we do for meetings, here at LinkedSelling. I tell them that we have most of our meetings on Mondays.
Every Monday, each of our business areas has a 1 hour, weekly action review meeting. On this same day, I have a 30 to 60-minute one-on-one meeting with all of my direct reports.
It’s a lot of meetings at the beginning of the week, but you really get to start the week off on the right foot when you do it this way. It allows you to focus on your company’s priorities, goals, and projects for the rest of the week.
For the rest of the week, we have daily huddles. These are around 15 minutes long…depending on how many people are in them. We have two different kinds of huddles. We have 1 for our senior leadership, and then 1 for each different business area.
Our COO and I will bounce in and out of the various business area huddles throughout the day. This means that we could be meeting with marketing on Tuesday, customer service on Thursday…or we could be sitting in with the training division on Friday.
We do have a 1-hour company-wide meeting. This includes every single person in the company. We only have this meeting once a week, and it is on Wednesday.
There are a lot of smaller sized businesses that have daily company-wide meetings. We don’t do this because we have 25 people in the company right now, and this approach just isn’t effective for us. If you have over 10 people on staff…daily meetings really become inefficient.
Our company has really been energized ever since we implemented these very specific meeting structures. Every week, everybody knows exactly when and where their meetings are going to be. Everybody on our team has really loved it. It’s made us all a lot more productive, and it’s really increased the level of communication that is happening within our business.
That is a great idea. Structure is the key to building.
And structure is the hardest thing for entrepreneurs to implement. We’re used to things being flexible and fast-paced.
Great piece, Josh.
Another great book to help with meetings are the early chapters in Chet Holmes’ The Ultimate Sales Machine. Great ideas on how to turn meetings into powerful problem solving sessions for everyone on the team..
Good stuff from you as always, Josh,
Henri Schauffler
Sales QB
Very timely my friend! We are in rapid growth so we are balancing high-touch communication with efficiency and time/energy management…quite a balancing act.
As a company team, we have pretty structured and planned weekly and quarterly meetings.
We get challenged with the amount of client interaction meetings that can fill up our calendars. Since they are client based meetings, traction and expected outputs are sometimes not met or clear to both parties.
The senior leadership team also keeps Friday pretty clear for any overflow that the week may produce, so that most things can be taken care of within the week.
Great post!
Thanks!
Cyndi
Hello Josh!
I am also researching teams and meetings. I am reading a book called You Win in the Locker Room First. I am researching the team building because I believe it takes a winning team structure to keep a business intact. This book is laid out for sports teams as well as corporate teams. Thank you for your awesome information on meetings!
Tiffany
Thanks for posting the vid. I am going through the same process re meetings within Cmi. The format of the meeting is proving challenging to create;, stand, sit, limited time per subject, premeeting provision of information, preupdates , etc
Do you have any thoughts on the meeting structure ?