How to Lead a Meeting

It’s one of the most common complaints I see: there are too many meetings. Meeting fatigue (or Zoom fatigue, for those who work from home) can set in as calendars become a solid block of meetings. And too many meetings mean you have to look to your off-hours to complete the tasks on your to-do list. 

The solution is simple: have better meetings, and you can have fewer of them.

Over my decades as a leader, I’ve honed my approach to meetings until I found a style that works for me. Everyone is different, but I find that this framework helps me to get the most out of my meetings.

My first rule: create an agenda. Agendas are essential for a few reasons, but the first one is existential: why do you need to have this meeting? In creating an agenda, you answer that question. For standing meetings with my direct staff, we keep an open doc that they review and contribute to ahead of the meeting each week. Often they’ll add their own items, make a comment with a clarifying question, or remove a topic that’s being addressed in another forum. I find a collaborative agenda to be the best way to ensure everyone understands the goals of that meeting, and everyone feels a sense of ownership for it.

That spirit of collaboration is important for my staff meetings, which include team members from across the organization. Everyone in staff gets to weigh in on the topics we’re discussing, whether that’s the CTO weighing in on an editorial issue or our marketing lead sharing his opinion on a new product design. With an open meeting style like this, having an agenda becomes especially important to keep us focused on the essential topics we need to cover and structure how we’ll approach them.

I break my agendas into three sections: inform, discuss, and decide. 

The inform section is for important updates that need to be shared, but don’t require any action. We tend to move through this section quickly, as it’s often status updates about deals and projects.

The discuss section is more open-ended. This tends to be the longest section of the meeting, where ideas that need additional thought and feedback are shared. It’s here that we brainstorm and shape the strategies that the team will execute, and it’s here that everyone is given a chance to contribute and provide feedback. 

The decide section comes last, and is where we make decisions on lingering topics that we haven’t yet come to a consensus on, but that need to get done. As great as collaboration is, sometimes you just need someone to make a decision, and as the CEO, I make that final call when necessary. I tell my staff that they may not agree with every decision, but once it’s made, they and their teams need to support it and do everything they can to make sure it’s successful—that’s what being on a team is all about.

Breaking topics into these sections provides essential clarity for those attending the meetings, so they know where they’ll be asked to share ideas, where they’ll be asked to provide updates, and where we just need to decide and move on.  

During the meeting, we update the agenda as we discuss it to document our decisions and map out next steps. It becomes a living document that allows us to review previous discussions, follow up on action items, and make sure none of the work we’ve done in the meeting gets lost. 

Creating a framework for your meetings might sound like one more thing on your to-do list, but it more than makes up for it in making your meetings more productive and valuable, which hopefully means you can have fewer of them. ;)