Do you ever find yourself repeating yourself? I do. Since we work with so many owner-led businesses, we see a lot of similar struggles and tend to repeat ourselves occasionally.

I recently sent the email below to one of our clients who shall not be named. I participate regularly in their organization’s leadership meetings to provide strategic marketing leadership. It’s not my meeting, and my role is to provide the answers they need, but we had a growing frustration among the group from the lack of productivity. I wanted to be transparent with this frustration and work toward a solution.

I’m a big fan of the book Traction and locally, Alex Freytag of ProfitWorks LLC, so I went online to quickly find their tools, which I reference frequently.

After I sent the email, I realized this just might help someone else, so my now-less-frustrated-client and I would like to share it with you.

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Dear Client – per my earlier email:

I’m really struggling with our Exec Meetings and I said I’d send over some thoughts, much of it is based on EOS, or Entrepreneurial Operating System.

If you haven’t read Traction, I highly recommend it. Locally, Alex Freytag is the guru (alex@profitworksllc.com, 614-571-8826) and you might enjoy having coffee with him and learning about his philosophy toward generating employee “ownership” of entrepreneurial business issues.

The links go to some really good stuff…If you do nothing else, watch the first video… Can we try this for tomorrow??

Level 10 Meetings (video) – basically, this is a time management tool!!! The leadership team should use this to work ON the business. Build an Issues list. 90% of the To-Dos should be dropping off every week.

5 Key Points for Effective Meetings – I know you know this. We really need to commit to making it happen.

1. Same Agenda
2. Same day
3. Same time
4. Start on Time
5. End on Time

8 Tips to Propel Your Meetings to the Next Level – note the part about introverts – that’s me.

How many Meetings Do We Need?

How do we decide what to meet about? We need to stay focused. I’m personally losing focus when we get distracted by details every single time we talk.

Solving the Big Stuff – How many things can we IDS in a single meeting and which ones should we but on a list for a) other meetings or b) individual to-do lists? We should keep an Issues list, NOT try to solve every issue in each meeting. This is really important because I’m not seeing us REALLY SOLVING the problems in these meetings. We are trying to get answers, but because it’s not the focus of the meeting, we tend not to give it the attention it deserves to truly SOLVE anything, and we end up coming back several times later.

1. Identify
2. Discuss
3. Solve

I’m also attaching the EOS suggested weekly agenda for running 90-minute leadership team meetings. One of the biggest components is for attendees to prepare in advance. I felt like our last meeting was simply an all day reading of my marketing update. There were really only a very few items that really needed discussion, but we spent most of the day re-hashing what was really a re-cap.

Check-ins May be the Cure to Your Lousy Meetings

Rocks for All

How to get on the Same Page Meeting (video)

Level 10 Meeting Agenda

I hope this helps. I’d love to discuss it with you further.

Sincerely.