This page is a work in progress, part of a multi-year effort to capture and share learnings, frameworks, tools, and processes to run organizations. See Running Organizations for more.

Meeting Rhythm

A consistent meeting rhythm is one of the most important elements of an effective operating rhythm. This section breaks down a list of common meetings in successful operating rhythms.

Daily Meetings

Stand-Ups/Scrums/Huddles

In fast-moving organizations, a daily huddle can remove blockers to getting things done. Huddles are held at the team level and work best for teams delivering on high-impact projects while working at high velocity.

If a huddle is focused on issue identification and collection, this can build up agenda items for a longer, problem-solving weekly meeting.

Real-time stand-ups don't work well for teams that work across multiple time zones. Who cares what I did yesterday if it's already 3 PM in my time zone? A bot-prompted, asynchronous written sync is a good alternative for remote teams in need of tight feedback loops.

The Daily Cafe is another interesting option.

Weekly Meetings

Weekly Leadership Meetings

The Weekly Leadership Meeting is an operational meeting with the leadership team. This meeting unblocks critical work in the organization in order to keep the business running efficiently and effectively. These meetings should be set on the calendar for the same time each week.

These meetings are primarily information-sharing meetings and should be a pulse check on performance and issues in the organization. They can include a decision-making component. This must be an arena for having hard conversations about key issues.

If you have a defined purpose for your leadership team, the agenda should reflect that purpose. If you're using a One-Page Plan or roll-up reporting, those tools should be at the heart of the performance portion of the meeting.

Don't let this meeting get hijacked by strategy discussions. When these meetings stray into a strategic concern, shift the conversation back to operational concerns, and add the strategic issue to the Monthly Leadership Business Review (or take it to a separate one-off meeting).

Some leadership teams like to use time during the meeting to have guest speakers (i.e. other leaders & managers) speak about an area.

Weekly Department/Team Meeting

Teams should sync on a weekly basis, and departments may find a weekly or fortnightly meeting useful. Weekly meetings can be anywhere from 15 minutes to 90 minutes, depending on the team and the project. The goal of these weekly meetings is to make sure everyone is on track (information sharing), and solve any mission-critical problems (decision-making) within the meeting.

4DX's Weekly WIG Session is a 20-30 minute meeting with an Agenda of reporting on weekly commitments, reviewing the scoreboard, and planning for new commitments.

Weekly meetings increase collective intelligence and create team environments that one-on-ones with a manager could never accomplish. When the manager is the “hub”, the team learns to rely on the manager, instead of one another. When the team is the center, individuals can apply appropriate peer pressure to induce performance. This allows the manager to coach, guide, support, and facilitate rather than control.

Mondays, before people get into their work week, are good for weekly meetings. Mondays can be disruptive, too - some people feel like they're "catching up" on Monday, and that a meeting will delay work further.

Fridays at the end of people's workdays can work, especially for reflection/retrospectives. Fridays tend to not be great for planning, as a lot of fidelity gets lost over the weekend and a lot of people take Fridays off to extend their weekends.

Weekly Managers Sync

At a certain size and scale, you'll want managers working with one another to solve operational issues as they arise. A format similar to the Weekly Leadership Meeting, with rotating facilitators, can work well.

Weekly 1:1s

1:1s are essential relationship-building and people development meetings. They unblock, they allow the direct report to be heard, and they're opportunities for coaching and mentoring. These are especially important in remote work settings, where people can become isolated.

Managers should work to bring the focus back to the big-picture for each of their direct reports. This is NOT a time for direct reports to list off everything they're doing and everything they're thinking about. Managers should work to create time every month to coach and develop and put their people's long-term personal goals and growth in the frame.

Some key executives have daily meetings to keep in touch. Certainly, in very small teams (< 10), having daily meetings, whether morning syncs or breakfast or lunches is a very powerful conduit for building intimacy, connectedness, and motivation. Walking meetings or "walk-and-talks" can work in person or in a remote work setting.

For more on 1:1s, see Designing Management

Weekly All-Hands Meetings

Weekly All-Hands Meetings are great for building and reinforcing the culture in small and scaling organizations. As headcounts grow, these meetings can move to fortnightly or monthly. All-Hands can be performance-focused or transparent and insightful, or celebratory, or otherwise. They should fit and reinforce the culture you're working to build.

All-Hands Meetings should include updates from each department to increase collective knowledge and shine a light on wins and learnings from each area. They often include a Q&A/Town-Hall format at the end of the meeting. In a small organization, this is a great forum for new hires to introduce themselves.

Public celebration is an important component of these meetings. Publicly acknowledging people can be done through Slack/chat tools throughout the week, but a public acknowledgment in front of a captive audience can have a greater impact and resonance.

Attendance can be optional or mandatory. Record each one so that people who miss one can watch it later. If you have remote workers across time zones, consider changing the time on a regular basis to be inclusive of all team members.

These meetings can get stale. One way to avoid that feeling is to have different people run the meeting each week, on a rotating basis. Another is simply to spend a lot of time preparing. At Square, Keith Rabois spent five hours every week prepping for All-Hands Meetings.

"If he was able to communicate a single idea that affected how everyone at the company made decisions, then it was absolutely worth it." (Source: Lessons From Keith Rabois)

Leader Office Hours

Office Hours can be a powerful tool for leaders to connect with employees and make themselves available for problem-solving. They're agenda-less calendar-blocked times at which anyone can join.

Office Hours can be held by Executives, department leads, or by any individual who wants to make themselves available for discussion with others on the team.

Weekly Workshops

Workshops and Show-and-Tell meetings are powerful tools for building culture. They encourage cross-functional collaboration and knowledge-sharing, and they help connect people who would otherwise not be connected in the day-to-day.

These meetings mostly take on a presentation format, with team members preparing slides and answering Q&A at the end. They can be teaching opportunities, Q&A sessions, or classic show-and-tells.

I've found that 30 minutes or an hour right before, during, or after lunch hour works well as a way to break up one workday during the week. Happy hours can work, too, but not across multiple time zones.

Monthly Meetings

Monthly Leadership Business Reviews

A Monthly Business Review is a Leadership Team Meeting to review the prior month's performance, confirm the existing strategy, and ensure you're on track for the current quarter. This can be a one or two-hour meeting and can be held immediately after the Weekly Leadership Team Meeting.

This is your opportunity to zoom out and level-set on business performance (not just operational KPIs) and to discuss strategy at a high level. In this meeting, overly ambitious OKRs/Rocks can be assessed and trimmed back or cut completely, to focus resources on just the most critical objectives.

Monthly Management Meetings

Connecting managers at all levels on a monthly cadence allows a midsize organization to work on key issues and increase collective intelligence across the organization. This is primarily an information-sharing meeting but can include an Issues component.

Including all managers, from the CEO to the frontline manager, allows all of management to interface with the people at the top of the organization. It's also an opportunity for the leadership team to transfer principles, core values, and vision directly to the middle on a regular basis.

These meetings are usually 60-90 minutes. As they include a lot of people in the room, they should be planned in advance, well-structured and well-facilitated.

Monthly Committee Meetings

If your organization has committees, like culture committees or Culture Clubs, a monthly meeting cadence is common. These meetings generally focus on recaps of events or metrics from the last month and planning for how to use resources/budgets in the coming month.

Monthly Town Halls

If you've outgrown the usefulness of Weekly All-Hands Meetings, then holding monthly Town Halls where everyone can ask questions and hear public responses is a viable alternative to more frequent weekly Q&As held during All-Hands meetings.

Quarterly Meetings

Leadership Off-Site

Leadership Off-Sites are typically quarterly events held for two days. Two days together gives the leadership team time and space to think through hard problems and deepen relationships with one another. When teams are new or in flux, the ability to spend time together, even agenda-less time, is critical for the operational problem-solving you'll do in Monthly and Weekly Meetings. The outcome of the Leadership Off-Site is a plan and goals for next quarter.

Agendas include a full analysis of last quarter's performance, a strategy discussion, and a plan for next quarter. For more on Leadership Off-Sites, see Planning.

Retrospectives

If you want to build a learning organization, a transparent organization, and a group that communicates well, then retrospectives (also called post-mortems), are critical. Stopping and reflecting on work over the past 90 days is a common cadence.

Retrospectives are also held after any major milestone is completed, or after a large client leaves or a project fails.

Retrospectives have to be about learning, not about assigning blame. To focus on learning, you must focus on individual learning, not trying to force "universal learnings," which can end in blaming external circumstances, or worse, other people on the team.

Quarterly All-Hands Meeting

The Quarterly All-Hands is an information-sharing meeting that runs down the wins, the progress of the last quarter, and the plans for the next quarter. The Quarterly All-Hands is an important culture builder and alignment tool. They should be held close to the start of a new quarter.

The format usually centers around a presentation. This should not be a CEO or Leadership Team monologue, and it should not be boring. Include a diverse set of voices, including non-Manager voices, if possible. Keep the energy high. Rotate MCs/hosts if that helps.

I've found 90 minutes to be the right length and is about as long as people can sit still without needing to take a break. You can introduce breakouts and exercises and extend the meeting, but not without adding breaks.

Standardize your slides so that contributors know what to expect and how to contribute. Be willing to change up the overall template to match an annual theme (i.e. Thematic Goals) or represent your high-level goals.

When you change the format, take time to rehearse with every presenter before presenting to the whole organization. If you're holding it virtually, use Zoom features like Chat and Polls to your advantage.

After the meeting, send out the slides and upload them to your Knowledge Base so that people who missed the meeting can get the information they need, and so that new hires can see past All-Hands.

Board Meetings

A lot of the success of board meetings is about prep work for good conversation. That prep work includes not just preparing reports but meeting with board members individually to understand where they stand and how they might be of help. A meeting where the CEO just presents metrics and takes suggestions and criticism will waste everyone's time.

The CEO should prep a summary report, rolled up from Leader's quarterly reports and from Finance. Work may not need to be doubled up if you can use the same work from the Quarterly All-Hands Meeting.

The agenda should stay focused on the organization's strategy, plans and goals, not on tactical or operational concerns.

Quarterly Skip-Level Meetings

Skip-Level Meetings are meetings held between managers/directors and people one level below the people they manage. They're typically one-on-one and held for 30 minutes, but can be done in a group setting if a given manager has too many to fit into the schedule.

These meetings help leaders get a more well-rounded understanding of what's happening in the business, get feedback about their managers, and build relationships with people they don't manage.

Skip-Levels can be intimidating for direct reports - be clear and up-front in your calendar invite about exactly the purpose of the meeting and what questions you'll ask.

Start these meetings with a personal question - What's going on in their personal lives? What are they excited about?

Quarterly Performance Review Meetings

A Performance Review Meeting is a meeting between Manager and their direct report, to discuss the direct report's performance in the last quarter. Most organizations have some form of performance management meeting every quarter, though some go with twice-yearly performance management cycles. If you use with quarterly Rocks/OKRs, you can have performance discussions every quarter. If you have a quarterly peer or manager feedback process, these meetings cover that feedback, too.

Performance Reviews should focus on reviewing wins, reflecting on the quarter, discussing learnings, and addressing any positive or critical feedback received in the quarter.

Quarterly Pricing Meetings

Pricing is such a critical component of running a financially healthy organization, that it must be looked at on a regular basis by your Leadership Team. A 1% price improvement results in an 11.1% increase in operating profit.

Running a Quarterly Pricing Meeting means you revisit pricing four times per year, so while your expenses may continue to rise throughout the year as you hire, promote and give raises, your operating profit doesn't shrink away by Q4.

Hackathons

If you want an organization that can produce creative and innovative work, an easy way to drive that is to schedule Hackathons or "Tinker Time." Annually, or twice yearly is a good cadence for a one-or-two day Hackathon. Off-sites can work if the team is small.

This time allows team members to work on projects that help the company but that they don't necessarily have time for in the flow of daily work. There's no reason this has to apply to the entire company or be done by all departments at the same time.

Make sure you leave time for teams to produce presentations of the work they completed so that everyone can see the payoff of the time invested.

Annual Meetings

Annual All-Hands Meeting

Annual All-Hands Meetings take a similar shape to Quarterly All-Hands Meetings but cover a wider scope - last year's results, this year's plan, as well as coverage of last quarter and this quarter. These are usually held in early-to-mid January after the holidays are over and financial results have been compiled for last year.

These can take a half-day or full day, with room for team-building activities and breaks throughout the day. Remote-first organizations often make this meeting the centerpiece of an organization-wide retreat.

Retreats

Many organizations hold annual retreats for the entire staff, and most remote-first organizations hold once or twice-yearly retreats for several days or a full week. A retreat can and should serve multiple goals - including relationship building, strategic direction, and celebration.

Talent Planning & Succession

Turnover and hiring happen fast for growing organizations. For large and fast-growing organizations, including an Annual Talent Planning meeting as part of Planning discussions could be critical to staffing for growth.

At 50+ employees, staffing for a complete management team, for specialized roles, for anticipated turnover throughout the calendar year, and for expected growth make talent planning an important rhythmic conversation.

Meeting Advice

Three Meeting Modes

Ask of each of your standing meetings - Is this meeting an Information Sharing Meeting, a Creative Discussion, or a Consensus Decision-Making Meeting?

Some meetings can include all three modes, but being clear on what you're trying to accomplish is a good start to making meetings more productive.

Information-Sharing

Most meetings are information-sharing meetings. Information can flow laterally, between peers on a team, or between teams. Information can flow up to management/leadership, or it can flow down from management/leadership to frontline team members.

All-Hands, Department Meetings, Business Reviews, Town Halls, and Workshops are all examples of information-sharing meetings. Nearly every meeting has an information-sharing component.

Creative Discussion

Creative discussion is about generating ideas and options. These discussions typically involve group ideation - Post-Its, markers, and whiteboards. Being creative requires openness, playfulness, and generative thinking rather than critical thinking.

Knowing that the meeting you're planning or entering into is a creative discussion makes all the difference in the quality of the output of that meeting, as switching between being creative and critical thinking is difficult.

To limit critical thinking, it's helpful to explicitly state before the start of a creative discussion that no decisions will be made.

Consensus Decision-Making

Consensus Decision Meetings are meetings where decisions are made by a group. Many decisions can't be made by consensus, and even more require significant conflict before a decision can be arrived at. Decision-making meetings can happen at all levels of the organization.

If consensus can't be formed in the timeboxed meeting, a decision can be made using a decision-making framework (like RAPID), or it can be assigned to the most appropriate manager-level team member present.

Good Meeting Practices

Define a Goal

Every meeting should have a goal. Even a happy hour or holiday party has specific goals - culture and relationship-building, for example. Some meetings have multiple goals - acknowledging all of those goals allows you to tailor the agenda appropriately, and apply guardrails when conversations veer outside of the purpose.

Standing Agendas

You can't develop organizational discipline without agendas for each meeting. Agendas help people know what to expect and how to prepare. An agenda that evolves and improves over time leads to meetings that start and end on time and help you reach your goals.

Check-In, Check-Out

Don't jump right into your agenda items without acknowledging the people in the room. The simplest way to start is opening with "What's on your mind?". If people can get out what's bothering them and clear their minds to focus on the meeting, you'll have more productive meetings.

An easy way to end meetings is by finishing with "What did we learn?" or "What's one thing you're taking away with you?" If our meetings focused more on individual and team learning, we'd create organizations that learned faster and performed better over time.

Facilitator + Note-Taker

Meeting note-takers and facilitators are critical for running productive meetings. Facilitators make sure that all voices are heard and that no one withholds from hard topics. They keep the group focused on the agenda and keep the meeting on track and on time. Note-takers curate the major discussion items and document the action items, including their accountable parties and due dates.

You can open meetings by assigning a note-taker and a facilitator, or if it's a rhythmic meeting, you can rotate through the roles.

Visuals & Whiteboarding

Putting substantive visuals in front of a group during meetings focuses the group on what matters in your organization and can raise the level of discussion. Can you articulate your purpose, vision, values/principles, strategy, and goals with visuals and keep them in your meeting documents?

Use shared digital tools to your advantage.

How Many Meetings Should We Have?

Cultures that resist meetings can often benefit from more meeting time. Cultures that default to meetings would be more productive with fewer meetings. Remote-first cultures try to meet less often, and the inverse seems to be true for in-person cultures.

High Growth = More Meetings

Fast-moving high-growth organizations generally require more meetings to account for more launches, more headcount growth, and more change. A higher volume of meetings allows for tighter communication and alignment, and faster decision-making.

"If you're growing less than 15% per year, you can treat each year like a year from a strategic-thinking standpoint. If you're growing 20% to 100% a year, view each quarter as if it were a year." - Verne Harnish (Source: Scaling Up)

% of Time Spent In Meetings

Scaling Up says that meetings shouldn't take more than 10% of senior leadership time, 5-7% of middle manager time, and 3% of individual contributors' time.

Reduce Status Update Meetings

Status Update Meetings Are Dangerous

Status Update meetings are Information-Sharing Meetings that can spin out of control as an organization adds heads. We tend to default to status update meetings in the name of "accountability," but then waste employees' time by carving up their days with meetings where managers try to look smart or lend advice where it's not needed.

How many of your meetings could be replaced by writeups via documents, emails, or Slack responses?

The trap of Status Update meetings is that they're too easy to create and too hard to quit. Tobi Lütke explains this phenomenon:

"No one wanted to cancel them because someone was responsible for its creation. The person requesting to cancel would rather stick it out than have a very tough conversation saying, 'Hey, this thing that you started is no longer valuable.' ...we ran some analysis and we found out that half of all standing meetings were viewed as not valuable." (Source: Tobi Lütke)

Send Information Ahead of Time

Video recordings sent ahead of the meeting, a collaborative Google Doc, an email memo, or a Slack comment can go a long way toward saving meeting time from endless status updates.

Zapier uses automation to improve efficiency:

"We have automations that create an agenda, send it to participants ahead of time to complete and review, and send people a Zoom link ahead of the meeting...we can focus on discussing ideas rather than inputting and reviewing updates." (Source: The Rise of the 15-Minute Meeting)

Foundation

PurposeMissionVisionCore ValuesStrategy

Designing The Organization

Understanding CultureCultivating CultureOrganizational DesignOrganizational StructureOperating PrinciplesLeadership TeamsDesigning ManagementEffective Teams

Operating Effectively

Operating RhythmGoalsPlanningInternal CommunicationMeetingsMetricsBusiness ProcessResolving IssuesDeciding & Delegating