How to run a weekly leadership meeting

Almost every leadership team I talk to has a weekly meeting, and almost every one of them would like it to be better. The usual story is that it started as a quick check-in, grew into an hour or more of people taking turns to report what their department did last week, and now finishes with a list of things nobody remembers deciding.

I think the weekly leadership meeting is one of the most valuable hours in a growing company, and also one of the most wasted. The difference between the two comes down to one question: is the meeting for moving information around, or for making decisions? This guide covers how I'd run it, with a 45-minute agenda you can use this week, the rules that keep it honest and how it compares with the Level 10 meeting from EOS.

What a weekly leadership meeting is for

A weekly leadership meeting has three jobs, and only three. It keeps the leadership team aligned on the goal, so that nobody drifts off in a different direction between the meetings. It gets the team to agree on what's holding the goal back, because that decides where the effort goes. And it makes the decisions that only the leadership team can make.

What it isn't for is telling each other what happened. That used to be a necessary part of the meeting, because there was no other easy way to get information from one department to another. It isn't any more. Shared tools and AI can now gather and summarise what moved continuously, which means every minute spent reading an update aloud in the room is a minute not spent deciding. I wrote about that shift in Information is cheap now. Decisions aren't.

Before the meeting: the pre-read

The single change that makes the biggest difference is moving updates out of the room. By the end of the day before the meeting, everyone should be able to read a short summary of where the goal stands, what moved last week, what didn't and what needs a decision. Keep it to a page. If each leader writes their own section, keep each one to a few lines and ask them to lead with anything that needs the rest of the team.

The rule that goes with it is simple: everyone reads it before they come in, and nobody repeats theirs in the meeting. It feels strange for the first couple of weeks, and then it becomes the reason the meeting is worth attending.

How to run each part

1. The goal (5 minutes)

Start with the one thing the company is trying to achieve, said in a line by whoever owns it. Are we on course? Is it still the right goal? Most weeks the answer is a quick yes, and that's fine; the point is to say it out loud so that it stays at the front of everyone's mind. Once a month or so, take a few more minutes and ask properly whether the world has changed enough that the goal should too. If you need help with the goal itself, see How to write good company goals.

2. What moved (5 minutes)

Questions on the pre-read only. If someone needs more context on something, this is where they ask. If nobody has a question, move straight on, which is a sign the pre-read is doing its job.

3. What's in the way (15 minutes)

This is the heart of the meeting. Look at the top three to five constraints holding the goal back, in order. Is the top one clearing? What's the evidence? Has something new appeared that belongs above it? Should the order change? This is where alignment is really won or lost, because agreeing on the goal is easy and agreeing on why you're not there yet is hard. There's more on how to find and order constraints in Remove constraints, don't add initiatives.

4. Decisions (15 minutes)

Take up to three things that need the leadership team, and no more. Each one should end in a decision, or in a named owner and a date when it will come back with what's needed to decide. If you get to the end of the fifteen minutes with one item left, give it an owner and a date rather than overrunning. Three is a deliberate limit: a team that tries to decide ten things in a meeting usually decides none of them well.

5. Commitments (5 minutes)

Go round the table once. Each person says what they'll move this week and which constraint it clears. Write it down somewhere the whole team can see it, not just in someone's notes. Next week's pre-read starts from this list, which closes the loop.

Five rules that keep it working

• Same time, same length, every week. Start on time even if someone's late, and finish on time even if you haven't finished.
• No updates read aloud. If it's in the pre-read, it doesn't get repeated.
• Every action has one owner. "We'll look into it" isn't an action. A name and a date is.
• Decisions are written down where everyone can see them, including the people who weren't in the room.
• Work that doesn't clear a constraint is labelled as other work. It can still happen, but nobody should mistake it for progress on the goal.

How this compares with the EOS Level 10 meeting

If you've come across EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System from Gino Wickman's Traction, you'll know its weekly meeting, the Level 10. It runs for 90 minutes with a fixed agenda: a short segue, the scorecard, a review of each person's Rocks, customer and employee headlines, the to-do list, a long block called IDS for identifying, discussing and solving issues, and a conclusion where everyone rates the meeting out of ten.

The Level 10 gets a lot right. It runs on a fixed rhythm, it gives most of its time to solving issues and it insists on clear owners. Where I'd differ is in how much of the 90 minutes goes on gathering information: the scorecard, the Rock review and the headlines are mostly reports, which made sense when a meeting was the only practical way to collect them. With a good pre-read, most of that can happen before anyone sits down, and the meeting can be half the length with the same amount of real decision time. If you're weighing EOS up, I've compared it in EOS and Clearahead and looked at the alternatives to EOS.

Common mistakes

• The round-the-table update. The most common and most expensive. Six leaders taking ten minutes each is an hour gone before anything is decided.
• No goal at the top. Without the goal stated first, the meeting drifts towards whatever is most urgent rather than what matters most.
• Problems without an order. A long list of issues with no agreed priority means the loudest one wins.
• Decisions that live in one person's notes. If the rest of the company can't see what was decided, the meeting only aligned the people in the room, and only for the afternoon.
• Cancelling when it's busy. The busiest weeks are when the team most needs to agree on what matters.

How Clearahead fits around your weekly meeting

We built Clearahead so the pre-read writes itself and the meeting can be about decisions. Your goal, the constraints holding it back and the moves under each one sit on one page the whole team can see. People tell AJ, the AI inside Clearahead, what happened in a sentence when their work moves, and AJ keeps every item current and files the evidence. Every Monday, This week from AJ gives everyone the wins, what moved, what you learned and up to three things that need a decision, which is the agenda for parts two to four above.

Some teams keep their weekly meeting and use This week from AJ as the pre-read. Others find they need it less often once everyone can see the same picture all week. If you'd like to see which fits the way your team works, the cadence planner asks eight quick questions and suggests a rhythm, and The weekly rhythm shows the five-minute habit behind it.

If you coach leadership teams, the same idea works for your sessions: read the pre-read first and start on the real conversation. See How to prepare for a business coaching session.

Questions people ask

How do you run a weekly leadership meeting?

Send the updates as a pre-read before the meeting, then spend the time on decisions rather than status. A good 45-minute agenda is: five minutes on the goal, five on questions about what moved, fifteen on what’s holding the goal back, fifteen on up to three decisions and five on what each person will move this week. Start and end on time, and write down every decision and owner.

What should be on a weekly leadership meeting agenda?

The company goal and whether it’s on course, questions on the pre-read of what moved, the top constraints holding the goal back, up to three decisions that need the leadership team, and each person’s commitments for the week. Leave out anything that is only an update; that belongs in the pre-read.

How long should a weekly leadership meeting be?

Forty-five minutes is enough for most growing companies when the updates are shared beforehand. EOS’s Level 10 meeting runs for 90 minutes, which suits teams that use the meeting to gather information as well as decide. If yours regularly runs over, the cause is usually status updates being read aloud.

How do you stop a leadership meeting turning into status updates?

Make updates a pre-read that everyone reads before the meeting, and agree that nobody repeats theirs in the room. Then give most of the agenda to the constraints and the decisions, so the time goes on the things only the leadership team can do.

What is a Level 10 meeting?

The Level 10 meeting is the weekly leadership meeting in EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. It runs for 90 minutes with a fixed agenda: a segue, the scorecard, Rock review, customer and employee headlines, the to-do list, a long block for identifying, discussing and solving issues (IDS), and a conclusion where everyone rates the meeting out of ten.

Do you need a weekly leadership meeting at all?

Most leadership teams need somewhere to make decisions together each week. What they often don’t need is a meeting to share information, because AI and shared tools can now gather and summarise it continuously. Keep the decisions, and move the updates out of the room.