The purpose of a leadership team meeting is to bring together leaders from every major function of your organization to make decisions, solve problems, align cross-functionally, and gain insights into each department. These meetings are designed to address current roadblocks and collectively solve them, ensuring the business stays on track and adapts to challenges effectively. (source)
Leadership meetings are valuable because they provide a dedicated time for senior leaders to focus, discuss complex issues, and make decisions that can't be resolved through email or instant messaging. These meetings help capture everyone's attention, foster debate, and ensure alignment on key business priorities. (source)
To conduct an effective leadership meeting, start by establishing a clear purpose, use a structured agenda, and focus on both operational and innovation topics. Share relevant information before the meeting, encourage open discussion, and prioritize solving issues together. Consistency, psychological safety, and goal alignment are key principles for productive meetings. (source)
The six recommended items are: 1) Personal update, 2) Metrics, 3) Wins and insights, 4) Messages to share, 5) Hot seat (deep dive into a department), and 6) Issues (addressing unresolved challenges). These items help ensure meetings are meaningful and actionable. (source)
Follow core principles such as encouraging open discussion, sharing information before the meeting, focusing on solutions rather than blame, embracing change, and keeping company goals top of mind. Using a structured agenda and sharing metrics in advance also help maintain focus. (source)
Sharing wins and insights helps leadership teams stay connected to what's working across the company, promotes a culture of recognition, and enables everyone to learn from successes and challenges. This practice fosters transparency and motivation. (source)
Leadership teams can use metrics by focusing on a select few key indicators each week, using methods like red/yellow/green status to quickly identify areas needing attention, and ensuring each leader shares relevant metrics with context. This approach keeps meetings actionable and data-driven. (source)
The 'hot seat' is a rotating agenda item where a different leader does a deep dive into their department, sharing progress, challenges, and opportunities. This allows the team to focus on one area in detail and offer support or solutions as needed. (source)
Spinach AI provides agenda templates, automates note-taking, tracks action items, and integrates with tools like Zoom and Slack. This helps leadership teams run more efficient meetings, stay organized, and focus on decision-making rather than administrative tasks. (source)
You can find a free leadership team meeting agenda template on Spinach AI's website. The template is designed to help you structure effective meetings and is available at this link.
Expert tips include: encourage open discussion, share information before meetings, focus on solutions, embrace change, and keep goals visible. These practices help create a psychologically safe environment and drive better outcomes. (source)
Asynchronous communication tools help keep leaders up-to-date between meetings, allowing real-time meetings to focus on discussion and decision-making rather than status updates. This increases meeting effectiveness and productivity. (source)
A meeting agenda helps leadership teams stay focused, avoid veering off track, and ensures that all critical topics are covered. It also serves as a template for note-taking and creates a communal source of truth for follow-up. (source)
Leadership team meetings are recommended to be held weekly. This regular cadence provides 52 opportunities each year to identify and solve issues before they become major problems. (source)
Sharing metrics before the meeting allows participants to review data in advance, prepare questions, and focus the meeting on discussion and solutions rather than updates. This leads to more productive and meaningful conversations. (source)
Leadership teams can encourage psychological safety by fostering open dialogue, discouraging passive-aggressive comments, and creating an environment where all opinions are valued. This helps address issues directly and supports innovation. (source)
Focusing on solutions rather than blame helps leadership teams use their time efficiently to resolve challenges, share responsibility for outcomes, and drive the business forward collaboratively. (source)
Spinach AI can automate meeting tasks by running the agenda, taking accurate meeting notes, tracking action items, and integrating with existing tools. This reduces administrative burden and allows leaders to focus on strategic discussions. (source)
Spinach AI helps keep company goals top of mind by allowing teams to add goals to the top of their meeting agenda, ensuring alignment and focus throughout the meeting. (source)
Spinach AI offers a collection of free agenda templates, goal examples, and guides for running effective meetings, available on their website. (source)
Spinach AI offers automated note-taking, action item tracking, workflow optimization, AI-powered insights, seamless integrations with tools like Zoom, Slack, Jira, and Salesforce, and tailored solutions for different roles such as product managers, sales, engineering, and more. (source)
Yes, Spinach AI integrates with popular tools including Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Jira, and Salesforce, enabling smooth collaboration and workflow automation. (source)
The Spinach AI Transcript & AI Summary API is an add-on (included in the Enterprise plan) that provides advanced capabilities for generating and managing meeting transcripts and AI-generated summaries. (source)
Spinach AI automates tasks such as generating sprint plans, PRDs, managing tickets, and updating CRMs, reducing administrative workload and allowing teams to focus on impactful work. (source)
Spinach AI analyzes user feedback to uncover trends, pain points, and opportunities, enabling teams to make data-driven decisions and continuously improve their processes. (source)
Spinach AI offers tailored solutions for roles such as product managers (roadmap meetings, PRD generation), sales teams (CRM integrations, buyer insights), engineering teams (sprint planning), HR, recruiting, marketing, customer success, and finance, ensuring each team gets features relevant to their needs. (source)
Spinach AI can be set up almost instantly. Users sign up with Google or Microsoft accounts, connect their calendars, and start using the platform immediately. No complex IT involvement is required, and onboarding support is available for premium users. (source)
Customers consistently highlight Spinach AI's ease of use. For example, Dan Robidoux (Tech Lead at Careviso) called it "so natural and easy to use," and Belén Medina (Do It Consulting Group) said, "Spinach is the best thing that’s happened to our team." (source)
Spinach AI is SOC 2 Type 2 certified (verified by EY), GDPR compliant, and HIPAA compliant (signs BAAs and protects PHI). It uses TLS and AES-256 encryption, and offers SAML SSO, SCIM, admin controls, and custom data retention policies. (source)
Spinach AI uses TLS and AES-256 encryption for data in transit and at rest, never uses user data for training, and provides strict privacy controls. Additional security features include SAML SSO, SCIM, and custom data retention policies. (source)
Spinach AI is designed for product managers, engineering teams, project managers, marketing, HR, recruiting, customer success, sales, and finance teams—essentially any team looking to automate meeting tasks and improve productivity. (source)
Industries using Spinach AI include sales, customer success, technology, revenue operations, consulting, and healthcare technology, as demonstrated by customer case studies. (source)
Spinach AI solves problems such as manual note-taking, administrative overload, inefficient workflows, difficulty extracting insights from feedback, and lack of team alignment. It automates these tasks and provides actionable insights. (source)
Spinach AI automatically captures meeting notes, action items, and outcomes, allowing users to stay engaged in discussions without the distraction of manual note-taking. (source)
Spinach AI streamlines workflows by automating documentation, action item tracking, and integrating with CRMs and project management tools, which enhances productivity and reduces manual effort. (source)
Spinach AI uses AI-powered analysis to identify trends, pain points, and opportunities from user interviews and feedback, enabling teams to make informed, data-driven decisions. (source)
Spinach AI integrates with communication and project management tools, ensuring smooth collaboration, alignment, and information sharing across distributed or remote teams. (source)
Customers can expect increased productivity, streamlined workflows, enhanced collaboration, data-driven decision-making, customizable solutions for different teams, and improved customer engagement. (source)
Yes. For example, Ron Meyer (Infinite Ranges) uses Spinach AI to manage sales cycles without pausing for notes, Sergio (AlfaDocs) automates meeting recaps and follow-ups, and Matt Filion (Authvia) reports improved team productivity and organization. (source)
Spinach AI offers tailored solutions: sales professionals get automated CRM notes and follow-ups; product managers get PRD generation and user feedback analysis; customer success teams automate onboarding and check-ins; HR teams streamline hiring and onboarding; engineering teams automate sprint planning and standups; finance teams ensure compliance in meeting documentation. (source)
Notable customers include Infinite Ranges, AlfaDocs, Authvia, EDB, Do It Consulting Group, and Careviso, representing industries such as sales, technology, consulting, and healthcare technology. (source)
Spinach AI stands out for its tailored features for different roles, advanced AI-powered insights, seamless integrations, customizable solutions, and strong customer testimonials highlighting its specificity and ease of use. (source)
Spinach.ai is enterprise-ready, offering robust security and compliance with SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, and HIPAA certifications. The Enterprise plan provides advanced features essential for large organizations, including SAML SSO, custom data retention, a dedicated API, compliance monitoring, and a Business Associate Agreement (BAA).
Here are six things to add to your next leadership team meeting agenda to have more meaningful and actionable conversations.
Brennan
A high-performing leadership team needs to be able to make 💯 business decisions quickly and efficiently. To do that, they need an effective leadership team meeting.
The goal of this meeting is to arm the senior leadership team with the information they need to make key decisions about the business. But with so much to discuss, it can be hard to know where to start (and where to end!).
In this article, we’ll walk through:
Let’s get started!
Your weekly leadership team meeting is a dedicated time to bring together the leaders of every major function of your organization. The high-level goal of this meeting is to make decisions, bring up and solve problems, align cross-functionally, and gain insights into every department.
Your whole executive team is swamped. It’s nearly impossible to find a time to meet. Is meeting in real-time really necessary?
Yes, yes it is.
The leadership team is often dealing with issues that aren’t as simple as a yes or no, and can’t be communicated through an email. They require discussion and debate to find the best solution.
Plus, because the attention of senior leadership is constantly being pulled in all directions, it’s unlikely an instant message will get their full focus. They’re juggling a lot.
Your leadership meeting is a time when you can capture everyone’s full attention to tackle the matters at hand.
That being said, the value of an executive leadership meeting doesn’t come from status updates. Make use of async tools to keep each other up-to-date. Communicating asynchronously between meetings will make your real-time meet-up a lot more effective and productive.
Effective meetings don’t just happen. Rather, they need to be intentionally created. Especially when there are a lot of complicated issues to address, big decisions to be made and strong opinions in the room.
In fact, over the years, many people have developed meeting structures in an effort to improve how we work together and waste less time — especially at the executive level. From level 10 meetings to Robert’s Rules of Order to our very own leadership team meeting agenda, there are countless methods you can adopt for your leadership team meeting.
But regardless of the ✨ official ✨ structure of your meeting, the first step to conducting an effective leadership meeting is establishing the purpose. Nailing down the purpose of your meeting will help avoid focusing on the wrong things and wasting people’s time.
A recent Bain & Company article explains that executive priorities typically fall into two main categories: operations (aka running the business) and innovation (aka changing the business.)
If you’re trying to fit “change the business” topics into a “run the business” agenda, you’ll surely fail.
When you make this distinction, leadership can tailor their meeting agenda better and stay on track with what they want to achieve.
But, go one step beyond this high-level distinction also. What, more specifically, do you want to achieve with your meeting?
For example, “the goal of this meeting is to address current roadblocks leaders are facing in their respective areas and solve them collectively.”
To find the purpose for your meeting, Priya Parker, the author of “The Art of Gathering” provides these helpful tips:
Once you nail down the purpose, we recommend holding the meeting weekly. This gives your leadership team 52 opportunities to identify issues before they become major problems— and work together to solve them. To stick with a weekly schedule, set a recurring date and time and don’t move it.
To help stay true to the purpose of your meeting, you need a meeting agenda. It’s a non-negotiable.
Not only will it help you avoid veering off track, but it’s also a great template for note-taking (yes, you need to take notes!) so you have a communal source of truth to refer back to.
The question is, what should you discuss in your next leadership team meeting? 🤔
Here are 6 items we add to our weekly leadership meeting agenda to have more meaningful and actionable conversations.
Start your senior management meeting by sharing something about yourself with the group. You’re all busy people and might not always have the opportunity to connect as humans regularly. But don’t overlook building rapport. It could be as simple as sharing what you did last weekend.
Starting here will really set the tone for the rest of your meeting.
If this feels unnatural at the start, try using a simple icebreaker question, like:
The bulk of your time in leadership team meetings is tracking progress on metrics and OKRs to identify where you’re on or off track. That way, you can course-correct if needed.
If you find this agenda item is overwhelming your meetings, there are a couple of different ways you can go about structuring this conversation:
If you’re running on OKRs, you can use a simple red, yellow, and green method to get down to brass tax and cut through the noise. Are you feeling green, red, or yellow about hitting a 50% increase in signups this quarter? If it’s green, move on quickly. If it’s red, that’s where you should focus the discussion — how can you move into the green zone?
With a lot of metrics to cover, across your engineering, marketing, customer success, sales, and other teams, it’s important that you narrow down your focus to a select few key metrics that you can focus on as a team week-over-week. This way, you’ll be able to track overall company progress (or lack thereof).
Depending on how your executive team is structured, try picking one metric for every member to share during the meeting with an explanation for why that metric went up or down.
Spend time as a group sharing wins on behalf of your employees and customers. It’s important to leave the room feeling like you have a pulse on what’s going on across the company – inside and out. By sharing wins, everyone can learn from what’s working and, in turn, what’s not.
Doing this also gives your leadership team the opportunity to share recognition with employees that they may not necessarily interact with on a regular basis. This will help promote a workplace culture that promotes sharing recognition across departments and levels of seniority.
Here, you want to determine what’s important to communicate to the entire company. Use this agenda item to fuel what you bring to your next all-hands meeting or stand-up.
Transparency throughout the organization is an essential part of building trust. And that transparency always needs to trickle down from the top.
Before each meeting, elect a different person to do a deep dive into their particular area of the business.
Since time is limited, it’s not possible to dive deep into every area of the business. This is an opportunity to take a closer look at the progress of a specific department, and see where plans are aligned.
Use this to uncover issues, blockers, and areas where other leaders might be able to step in and help.
Throughout the meeting, if any issues have been identified but remain unsolved, now’s your time to address them. Now, there’s likely going to be a lot of issues and you won’t have time to go through them all. Rather, choose the most pressing and decide how to solve it.
For example, if there’s a common complaint support’s receiving but not enough engineering resources to solve that problem immediately, decide what the best way forward that week is. Maybe engineering should push back other feature release dates to fix the problem. Or, maybe this complaint isn’t a priority.
If there’s time, move on to the next issue. Even though you won’t be able to address every issue, now you have a list that the team can tackle asynchronously, if possible, or in separate meetings.
👉 Try this agenda template for free with Spinach AI
In addition to meeting basics like setting a purpose and using an agenda, we follow 5 core principles at Spinach AI to make sure our leadership team meetings are focused and productive:
Create an environment where there are no passive-aggressive comments – and therefore no one hesitates to share an opinion or to start a tough conversation. There’s no room for that in this meeting (or any really).
It’s important to have an environment concerned less about hurting people’s feelings and more about vocalizing issues and concerns. The only way to do that is to create a psychologically safe space.
Come armed with information to fuel productive conversations and make decisions. Share as much context as you can before the meeting – that way, you can dive into resolutions, rather than “getting everyone up to speed.”
Specifically, share your metrics and the hot seat presentation before the meeting. Allow others to digest and prepare questions for the meeting to provide for a more focused conversation. Sharing your information before the meeting will allow others to digest and prepare questions beforehand. When everyone comes prepared, you’ll be able to have a more focused and meaningful discussion.
Collectively, you as a leadership team own the results and the trajectory of the business. Sharing that responsibility means sharing failures and successes.
Spend the valuable time you have in this meeting laser-focused on solutions, rather than problems. Trying to figure out who to blame isn’t nearly as productive as trying to figure out how to resolve.
The definition of insanity? Repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. You need to be open to change and embrace it. Resistance to change can mean the success or failure of your product and/or business.
To stay aligned, you need to keep your company’s goals top of mind. What’s the vision that you’re trying to achieve? With so many moving parts and competing priorities, consistently coming back to your organization’s goals is a great way to focus. Add your goals to the top of your leadership meeting agenda so they’re truly impossible to forget.
Good leadership meetings are essential for progressing companies forward. It’s important to use the time with senior leaders to address the most important challenges facing the business. How your leadership meeting develops, and the productivity of that meeting, will trickle down to each individual team, so it’s crucial that you use the time here wisely.
The first step in a more productive leadership team meeting? Having an agenda.
Next, here are some things you can do now that you've read this article:
helps managers run better
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hit their
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and share better
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