Executive Staff Meeting Agenda: Fill & Download for Free

There are a lot of models of running an executive staff meeting ... most of them are bad.Executive meetings are very costlyGiven that your executives are usually the highest paid people in your company, an hour meeting will likely cost the company tens of thousands of dollars ... per meeting. In some cases, a year's worth of meetings will cost the company over $1 million. So be sure to use that time wisely.Understand the objective of an executive meetingDepending on your team and company, you might want to optimize for different things at the executive meeting.Many companies optimize for information distribution. This is a good strategy if you have low trust of your executives. If you have high-trust, you can distribute information to execs in written form and require them to read it.Another good use of executive meeting is to make key decisions. This can be very important ... but you also want to be cognitive of trying to get the right people in the room to help make each decision. Many decisions only need a subset of executives to be made (and often also involve members of the team who are not on the executive team). In those cases, an ad hoc decision meeting might make more sense.For all decisions being decided at the Executive Committee meeting, make sure it is worthy of all the executives time.Another potential use for Executive Committee meetings is to have a brainstorm discussion. This can be very useful if the members of the executive team are engaged.Cadence and lengthOne question is how often should you have Executive Committee meetings and how long should they be. Every organization is different and everyone has their own answer.Personally, I prefer meetings to be weekly (with a regular time slot on the calendar). I like all execs to participate (even if they are remote or on vacation). And I don't want meetings to be more than hour (generally people get agitated in meetings over 60 minutes). If there is more to decide than the hour, one can spread the discussion over multiple weeks or create an ad hoc meeting.Make-up and SizeThe larger the Executive Committee meeting, the harder it is to make decisions. And just because someone is an executive (and has a C-level title or reports to the CEO), does not mean you need to invite that person to the Executive Committee meeting. Try to find ways to keep the meeting small and make sure everyone there is adding useful contributions.One thing that is incredibly difficult to do is to un-invite people to executive meetings (as the company changes). But this will be 100% necessary. Some of the most important people in the company should not be at the meeting.As a CEO, you are a capital allocator and part of what you need to do is to protect the time of your best people. If someone does not need to be at a meeting, let them know they can have their time back.Agenda, planning, and readingAll good executive meetings have an agenda. Ideally the agenda is sent out 24 hours ahead of time with all the reading. Ideally the agenda helps point to clear decisions that need to be made.Everyone attending the meeting should come prepared. Executives who do not prepare for the meeting should not be invited to future meetings (or should be let go from the company entirely). The meetings only work if everyone comes prepared.All reading for the meeting should be short, precise, and to-the-point. People sending information to all the execs should respect the time of the other execs and keep their materials short. There is rarely a need to send a long deck or a 12-tab spreadsheet to the entire exec team. The more concise the information, the more likely it will be full read.Limiting presentations. Read beforehand. Weekly updates.Exec meetings should generally not have long presentations. It should not have weekly updates by each exec. You should not go around the table on each topic.Exec meetings are ideally about making hard decisions. People should have the opportunity to ask each other questions based on the reading they did BEFORE the meeting.Additionally: all execs should know what is going on in the company. Ideally every team is responsible for reporting out to all the execs what happened the week before (good and bad) and what is happening this week. A weekly update report for the execs (or if you are small, you can send to the whole company) will give everyone an understand of what is happening. No need to use the precious E-Staff hour for live verbal updates.

I was a Google APM back in 2004-2005. I'm sure APM training has evolved a lot since then, but here are the 3 key things that helped me grow and learn as part of the APM program.Ownership of big, important projects -- There's no better way to learn than to be given a huge challenge and plenty of autonomy, and being forced to rise to the occasion. Even though the APMs were fresh out of school and totally inexperienced, Google was willing to give APMs the chance to manage important projects such as Google Image Search, Google Local, Froogle (Product Search), Logs, iGoogle (personalized homepage), etc. I will always be grateful that Google gave me that opportunity. I'm sure I made a ton of mistakes on Google's dime, but I also worked my ass off and eventually learned how to be a productive PM. The whole time I kept thinking, "Wow, I can't believe they're letting me own something so important. I better get my shit together and prove myself."APM chain gang tasks -- The chain gang tasks were essentially gruntwork tasks that senior PMs/leaders wanted to offload to highly motivated, eager beaver APM types. However, they were also great learning opportunities. For example, I was assigned to be VP Product Jonathan Rosenberg's deputy at his Monday morning staff meetings, which involved preparing the agenda, taking notes, organizing paperwork, etc. It wasn't glamorous or rocket science, and I often had to stay overnight on Sundays to get it done, but the cool part was that I got to sit in on his staff meeting. I got valuable exposure to what the PM senior leadership discussed, like hiring packets, how slotting worked, what problems various products were having, etc. If I hadn't been assigned that chain gang task, it would have taken me years to earn my way up the ladder to participate in those meetings.Ad hoc mentoring and good role models -- Another good way to learn is to have a coach. Although we were officially assigned management coaches, I only ever met with mine twice when I was at Google. What I found most useful was getting coached by the older APMs in an unofficial capacity. A lot of them were great role models that you could just observe, copy, and learn from. One APM I learned a lot from was Bret Taylor. I saw that he was well respected by his engineers because he wrote code and was highly technical, so I started writing code as well. I observed that he was great at public speaking and great at talking to reporters, so I asked him for tips. (Turns out I am still bad at this though :P) Google was brimming with smart engineers and PMs, so there were plenty of talented people to observe. All you had to do was watch them in action and learn.All in all, the APM program was like startup school for me. I'll always be grateful to Google for that opportunity, so now I try to pay it forward by creating the same kinds of opportunities for folks at my current company, Polyvore. Our culture is transparent and designed to maximize learning, especially for folks who want to start their own company one day.

These meetings are generally started months before they happen. Staff members of both the Executive and the Ministries of Foreign Affairs (or equivalent) start talking to each other once the decision that a meeting will occur has been made. That decision might be reached through discussions between an ambassador and the ministry, or it might happen with just a phone call between executives, depending on the relationship between/among the countries involved.The meetings tend to be very carefully scripted. A full agenda is prepared and people tend to stick too it. Both parties will actually know to a great degree of certainty what the other will say.If there are things to be negotiated, then they can take place at the main table or be conducted by staff meeting in side rooms. If agreement is reached, then both sides will discuss a joint statement for public release (if they want to do that).It often happens that two heads of state will leave the group to talk one-on-one. This is less scripted, but both parties will keep to their message. Unless, of course, one party is making a change.