Running management team meetings as CEO

Of all the meetings I ran as a CEO, the one that made me most nervous was our weekly management team meeting. It was one of the most “expensive” meetings we held given the number of people involved and the aggregate compensation of our executive leadership team. The pressure to make this time well spent was very high. This was also the only regular forum where all of my direct reports would interface with each other so the stakes were high to deliver a productive agenda. In hindsight, I’m sure I made many mistakes in running the meeting but wanted to share my learning and reflection with other CEOs. 

First, decide how you will use the meeting. In my experience the purpose of this meeting is to inform, discuss, and decide. Much of the meeting may be used to get everyone on the same page which means the CEO sharing an update with her management team and each executive sharing an update on their function. In the process of information sharing, inevitably there will be strategic and tactical decisions that need to be made or discussed. One follows the other - if you don’t create the space for people to inform / share information, it will be very hard to have a discussion that captures enough nuance to be helpful to the decision maker. One way to ensure good information sharing is to develop a set of prompts for each person to have in mind when they give their update (similar to a daily standup meeting). At NatureBox, we used the following as prompts: what is your team’s main focus, where could you use the support of the rest of the company, and what can the company do to support / help key team members including open hires. You might decide on something different but the point is to give everyone a sense of what kind of update you expect and would be most actionable for this setting. 

Second, determine who should attend. From my point of view, an effective management team meeting includes all the top level leadership of the company. This often overlaps with CEO direct reports but not always - you might have a COO with several executives reporting to her but determine that it makes sense for those folks to be involved. While this is a decision that should be specific to your company org structure and culture, there are a few watch outs worth noting. An interim head of a function should be included; in my experience, during executive transitions it is most important to make sure that consistency. Also, CEOs may want to be explicit about how meeting attendees are determined. If you have decided to limit the group to your direct reports, just be explicit about it to avoid any politics. It always surprised me when someone wanted to be included but wasn’t - who wants another meeting on their calendar?! But in hindsight, it makes sense that people would wonder about what they missed out on. Since a productive meeting has a limit to the number of attendees, you can’t invite everyone but you can make sure that there is a clear and explicit determination for who is needed for the meeting. 

Tactically, I suggest setting an agenda in advance. It is important to clarify that while the CEO runs the meeting, everyone contributes to the meeting. Using Google docs or Notion where others can see the agenda and add items in real-time can be very effective. Additionally, having someone be a designated note taker (sometimes the CEO’s executive assistant) can be helpful for memorializing decisions and sharing notes with the rest of the company. It took us a few years to realize this but sharing the meeting notes (with only highly confidential items redacted) with all employees in the company was a great way of practicing transparency and getting engagement across all levels of the company. The notes offered employees a view into the most important topics facing the company and served to highlight areas where we were tracking above or behind goals. 

I believe the most effective way to kick off the executive meeting is for the CEO to give a “state of the union,” touching on what they believe the highly important and urgent topics of discussion are and any positive or negative developments worth calling out. In this state of the union, the CEO is sharing her purview with the rest of the management team. Note that these developments may be internal or external; CEOs should comment on what is happening in the market and address the elephant in the room that may not be put on an agenda. For example, when Amazon bought Whole Foods, every CEO of a food-tech company was addressing the acquisition with their team and their board. This section will be shorter or longer depending on the current events of the business. 

Next, having a dashboard with company KPIs and goals will help provide context for the functional updates that follow. It is hugely important that everyone knows how the business is performing against plan or goal so I encourage CEOs to do a dashboard review every time the executive team meets. Often most KPIs will be tracking to plan but on the occasional under/over projection, the responsible executive can chime in with some added context to help the rest of the team understand what is being done to drive that metric.

After functional updates (described above), you may have time and mental bandwidth for 1-2 deep dive / strategic discussions. Ideally you leave the meatiest topics for this forum. A good rule of thumb is whether the topic affects multiple departments of the company and requires cross functional support / alignment; if it does, it probably belongs on the agenda. It helps to have a bit of standardization around what a good discussion looks like - from structure to ground rules. For example, you might decide that the owner of the topic presents the context leading up to the discussion, their recommendation, the implications of the decision (cost/ROI), and how to determine success. The expectation is that everyone else provides input and asks questions but ultimately the decision is made by the responsible individual. Every company will tune this based on their style, the key is that some structure often yields more productive discussions than no structure at all.

The weekly executive team meeting is one that evolves quite a bit as a company scales. Testing different formats and ideas can be a great way to figure out what works for your company. I hope this post gives you a starting point. If you’re facing a unique situation in this domain and need someone to chat through it, please drop me a line!