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 areashas a 1-hour, weekly action review meeting. On this same day, I have a 30 to 60-minute, one-on-one meetingwith 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 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.