Meetings take up a significant portion of the workday. Last year alone, hybrid teams met for over 283,000 hours. While meetings can be a great time to brainstorm, budget, and check in with team members on progress, they can also cut into valuable time that could be spent accomplishing tasks that need to be done. 71% of senior managers from a variety of industries report that meetings are inefficient and unproductive. 65% feel that meetings keep them from completing their own work.

Executives spend 40-50% of working hours in meetings. That's a lot of time. When used the wrong way, that can be around $177,000 per meeting being thrown away. Luckily, with the right tools, leadership meetings can be efficient, cost-effective, and productive. Putting time into planning meetings, considering how much meetings cost your company, is worth it in the long run.

What Is a Leadership Team Meeting?

Leadership or executive team meetings are a regularly scheduled meeting among your company's heads of each department. For companies of different sizes, this meeting can look different. It may consist of a marketing manager, sales leader, product manager, and the president/CEO. Perhaps it's a large conference room with some folks video calling in and includes the CEO, Chief Sales Officer, Chief Operations Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Director of Human Resources, and Director of Product. Leadership team meetings are a time for company leaders to discuss strategy and make key decisions about the past and future of the business.

Why Hold a Leadership Team Meeting?

Team alignment is essential for company leaders to make strategic decisions and set goals and priorities for the company. If executives don't confer and meet with each other, initiatives can be delayed and goals can be missed. By creating a scheduled time for your company's leaders to brainstorm and hear each other's successes and challenges, you will find creative solutions and unlikely sources of what could be your next big project. Leadership team meetings should be held on a regular basis, but to be mindful of executives' busy schedules, monthly or quarterly is usually a good cadence.

When/Where/How Often: Leadership Team Meeting Housekeeping

As with many meetings, we tend to over-book and over-schedule executive team meetings. Rather than putting a weekly meeting on the calendar without asking your leaders, send out a survey and gauge if your current schedule is too frequent or not often enough. Then adjust to what your team needs. If you find that your current weekly meeting is over in 10 minutes, push it to every other month or once per quarter. If you always run over the allotted time, try longer meeting blocks, or leadership all-team off-sites.

Leadership Team Meeting vs. Board Meeting: What’s the Difference?

Leadership teams consist of the highest-up member of each team within a company. Board meetings are for the board members of privately held companies or non-profit organizations. Leadership team meetings tend to be for company updates and decision-making and focus on sales and marketing, HR and company culture, investors, and progress. Board meetings are more budget-focused and while still internal-facing to the board, and are more formal than a leadership team meeting.

Leadership Team Meeting vs. Company All-Hands Meeting

Leadership meetings differ from company all-hands meetings based on those in attendance and the material covered. Leadership meetings are for problem-solving and trying to figure out solutions to low sales numbers, hiring droughts, and other large-scale, high-level company problems. Company all-hands meetings are often inspiring company-wide meetings held quarterly to update employees on company growth, accomplishments, and individuals who have gone above and beyond goals.

How to Plan Leadership Team Meetings

The most important things to take into consideration when you're planning a leadership team meeting is what you do and don't want to include in the meeting. Harvard Business Review research reveals that over 65% of leadership team meetings aren't called for the purpose of making a decision, but for information-sharing and operations updates. Instead, leadership team meetings should be dedicated to strategy, with separate avenues dedicated to discussing operations, to make the best use of executives' valuable time. We recommend a two-week planning window for these meetings, to include memo-writing, agenda-setting, and a strategic discussion around key challenges and decisions that will impact the business the most.

Leadership Team Operations vs. Strategy Meetings

For large organizations, you might be best served holding leadership teams operations and strategy team meetings. For smaller organizations, the memo system we detail below may be thorough enough. Team operations meetings should be dedicated to reporting on past and present performance, team updates, and resource requests, whereas team strategy meetings should be focused on future planning, debating, and decision-making. The leaders of different departments should be sourcing updates from managers within their team on individual team performance and achievement, which they then use to inform the decisions they make with other company leaders that will impact the entire business.

Leadership Team Meeting Memos

To help focus your leadership team meeting on strategy more so than operations, we suggest asking the representative leaders from each department to fill out an operations memo about their department's successes and challenges, progress made toward goals, roadblocks to success, and any upcoming priorities that need attention. Once everyone completes their memos 1-2 weeks before the leadership team meeting, assign everyone participating in the meeting to fully read and digest the memo contents, and you can use the contents of the memos to set the actual meeting agenda. (We have a memo template you can use below.) This way, all meeting attendees will have enough context into other departments and their performance so they can participate in informed debate and decision-making. You can use the contents of these memos to provide an enterprise view to meeting attendees prior to diving into discussion and debate. This should consist of a high-level look at performance, resource allocation, successes, challenges, and insights from the Board of Directors to provide company leaders with context, too.

Leadership Team Meeting Agenda-Setting

Once you receive completed memos from the department heads participating in leadership team meetings, you should read the memos a couple times through and look for similar challenges, roadblocks, and success stories. Use the commonalities between different departments to bring different options and decisions to the table during the meeting, which the team will then discuss and debate. For example, if the support team's ticket volume is so high that they're unable to meet goals, the leadership team might need to discuss allocating more headcount to the support team, or digging into ongoing issues with your product or service. If the product team's schedule isn't properly aligned with the marketing team for launching new products, you might need to re-evaluate revenue goals for that year. Set the meeting agenda to discuss a few of these core questions and decisions to be made, and share the agenda with attendees in advance. If time doesn't allow you to touch on every challenge team leaders are facing, you, your COO, and those specific leaders can sync in a separate meeting.