To help focus your leadership team meeting on strategy more so than operations, we suggest asking the representative leaders from each department to fill out an operations memo about their department's successes and challenges, progress made toward goals, roadblocks to success, and any upcoming priorities that need attention. Once everyone completes their memos 1-2 weeks before the leadership team meeting, assign everyone participating in the meeting to fully read and digest the memo contents, and you can use the contents of the memos to set the actual meeting agenda. (We have a memo template you can use below.) This way, all meeting attendees will have enough context into other departments and their performance so they can participate in informed debate and decision-making. You can use the contents of these memos to provide an enterprise view to meeting attendees prior to diving into discussion and debate. This should consist of a high-level look at performance, resource allocation, successes, challenges, and insights from the Board of Directors to provide company leaders with context, too.Leadership Team Meeting Memos
Once you receive completed memos from the department heads participating in leadership team meetings, you should read the memos a couple times through and look for similar challenges, roadblocks, and success stories. Use the commonalities between different departments to bring different options and decisions to the table during the meeting, which the team will then discuss and debate. For example, if the support team's ticket volume is so high that they're unable to meet goals, the leadership team might need to discuss allocating more headcount to the support team, or digging into ongoing issues with your product or service. If the product team's schedule isn't properly aligned with the marketing team for launching new products, you might need to re-evaluate revenue goals for that year. Set the meeting agenda to discuss a few of these core questions and decisions to be made, and share the agenda with attendees in advance. If time doesn't allow you to touch on every challenge team leaders are facing, you, your COO, and those specific leaders can sync in a separate meeting.Leadership Team Meeting Agenda-Setting
