9 Proven Meeting Tactics Exceptional Leaders Swear By
Good communication is one of the biggest keys to success.
Whether you’re building a business, launching a project, or just trying to get things done. You might have a brilliant idea, but unless you share it and improve it with others, it’ll never reach its full potential.
That’s why meeting and exchanging ideas (both at work and in private life) is so important.
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| Photo by Dane Deaner on Unsplash |
But let’s be honest: the way we do meetings in business isn’t always great.
They can easily turn into timewasters. Especially when someone thinks, “I’ll invite everyone who might be slightly relevant, just so I can say they were informed.” Or those meetings where you walk out thinking, “This could’ve been an email.”
Some meetings are just wasteful.
And the numbers are wild. In this Reddit article, for example, people say they spend 5 to 20 hours a week in meetings and many agree that a chunk of that time is wasted.
So, here’s the real question: How do great leaders run their meetings and what can we learn from them?
I recently came across a summary of smart meeting strategies and had to share them:
1. Follow-up Memos
Let’s start with a timeless strategy that’s nevertheless very powerful.
Alfred Sloan, the former CEO of General Motors, had a simple rule: every meeting should be followed by a written memo.
Why?
Because it helps wrap up the discussion clearly, set deadlines, and assign responsibilities. Just using this one habit could turn a lot of pointless meetings into productive ones.
2. Leadership Alignment
Satya Nadella, current CEO of Microsoft, has a, I’d say also, classic approach. He tends to schedule extended weekly meetings with his management team.
The core benefit of this approach is to create alignment on management level. A success factor of his strategy is also to involve performance dashboards to work with actual data (that isn’t older than a month).
3. One-to-One Meetings
Ben Horowitz (entrepreneur, investor and author) holds structured one-to-one meetings to encourage upward communication and idea sharing. The meetings are structured in such a way that the employees define the agenda and talk 90 % of the time. The part of the leader is active listening.
4. Preparation
Elon Musk values preparedness in meetings to maintain high standards and efficiency. We’ve all been there: a meeting where the person responsible isn’t prepared at all and starts just with an open discussion that leads to nowhere. But also, attendees should be at least somewhat prepared and familiarize themselfes with the topic.
Meetings are to discuss and not to inform.
5. Reading and Discussing
Jeff Bezoz, Amazon founder, takes this to the next level. In his meetings, he has meeting organizer to prepare a written summary of the content. Once everybody is sitting in the meeting, they all are quietly reading the prepared pages.
The meeting then progresses to a discussion.
With this approach it is ensured that everybody is aligned and reads the “pre-read”. If you’d just send it out, many will skip reading. But you can’t skip it if you sit in a room with everyone else.
6. Keep Meetings Small
Meetings should be as small as possible. This philosophy by Steve Jobs, founder of Apple enhances simplicity and productivity. If you organize a meeting, don’t include everyone just that they are informed. Include only those who can bring value to the topic and discussions.
7. Aggressive Meeting
Fomer Yahoo boss Marissa Mayer is known for her rather aggressive approach: if ideas were presented in a meeting the presenters had to be prepared for a machine gun fire of detailed questions about research and methodology.
With this approach she makes sure that the proposals are well thought-out and don’t just waste everyone’s time.
8. Immediate Decision Making
Larry Page, former CEO of Alphabet, ensured that decisions are made as quickly as possible by ensuring that every meeting has its designated decision maker.
This helps with agility and reduces delays. And let’s be honest: we’ve all been in a meeting where many ideas where discussed and then it took another 3+ weeks for a decision maker (who wasn’t in the meeting) to get the information she needed and actually make a decision.
9. Strict Agendas
Sheryl Sandberg, longtime Co-CEO at Meta, is known for running meetings with tight agendas and clear action items. It’s her way of keeping things focused and efficient.
Let’s face it: meetings often drift off course. Some people naturally bring up unrelated topics, which can be great for brainstorming. But if the goal is to make decisions, revisiting old discussions from weeks ago doesn’t help.
That’s why having a solid agenda (and actually sticking to it!!) is so important. It keeps the meeting on track and makes sure everyone leaves with clarity and decisions made.
Thanks for reading. I’m a big fan of LinkedIn: there’s a lot of great short-form content on the platform. Lately though, the quality has taken a hit, with a noticeable rise in purely AI-generated posts. Still, there are some gems out there. In fact, this article was inspired by one of them: a post by Marcell Vollmer.