How to Run Meetings

The first thing you need to think about when it comes to meetings is who’s going to be there, and how long it will be. If there will be eight people there and it’s an hour long, that’s eight hours of your company’s time that is in that meeting. Does everyone need to be there? Is the result you are going to produce worth eight hours? Or is the meeting an hour long by default because that’s how our calendar is set up? These are questions you need to ask yourself.

Whoever calls the meeting is in charge of the meeting. You will need to come with an agenda and help everyone know what is going to be discussed in the meeting. Make it a rule to have really clear expectations for your meetings. Show up on time and end on time. Bring people back to the main topic.

Try not to have multiple items to cover in one meeting. Because sometimes we bring in different people for different topics and the meeting is not relevant for everyone and they have to sit through the whole meeting. Instead you need to do separate, shorter, and smaller meetings that will be much more effective.

Meetings at The Life Coach School

Weekly Team Meetings: At The Life Coach School, we have a meeting with the whole company every week. It’s half an hour and everyone gets a couple minutes to give an update on what they are doing. We introduce new hires and make fun of ourselves. Everyone looks forward to this meeting. And it’s super powerful because we all learn what’s going on in our company. The end result is to make sure everyone’s on the same page.

Monthly Meetings: We also have meetings once a month with our executive managers to talk about what they’re working on and any issues they’re having with their employees. These are also just half an hour.

Quarterly Team Meetings: Every quarter we have an in person meeting with the whole team. These are usually working meetings. This means we work for an entire day and create all of our new goals, products, and the processes we’re going to use, and then we get into our teams and actually create the documentation we’ll need for the quarter.

Quarterly Reviews: Each quarter we have reviews with each employee. We evaluate each other on the three core values and on the three goals we’ve had over the quarter. This meeting is usually 30 minutes and there is no beating around the bush. We get on the call, give each other feedback, and that’s the end of the call.

Annual Team Meetings: Once a year we get together as a whole team to review the vision and the goals for the year. We usually have this meeting at a fun, remote location where people can get away from the office to really focus and reflect on what they want to accomplish. We also use the annual meeting to discuss and train on items that will help take the team to the next level.

Other Meetings: There are other times when we need bigger, longer meetings to brainstorm, to create results, to document processes, and all of those meetings are done by meeting requests. So if someone wants to meet, they send a meeting request and we either accept it or tell them to go ahead and take care of the issue themselves.

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