Management Meeting
Meetings are an essential part of every business — whether it be a small startup or a large corporation with buildings and departments spread out worldwide. A meeting is a highly effective way of ensuring that all employees are able to be on the same page and are aware of what is going on in the company. Because of this, there are many different types of meetings — and not all types of meetings are appropriate for all times. For example, there are more informal meetings — such as weekly/biweekly update meetings — that are made to ensure that everyone is kept up-to-date on projects, policies, and anything else that is going on, and there are more formal meetings — such as management meetings.
Each type of business meeting will have its own objectives, and therefore it is essential to address every meeting separately. There are five types of meetings in total, team meetings, one-on-one meetings, formal meetings, project meetings, and client meetings. Each of these five types of meetings has individual meeting types within it — for example, team meetings can be sales meetings, marketing meetings, customer support meetings, or HR meetings, and formal meetings can include things like executive or management meetings and board meetings. The critical thing to note is that a management meeting agenda is likely going to differ wildly from a weekly one-to-one check-in, and because of this, management meetings serve an essential function that is different from other types of meetings.
In other words, a management meeting is one of the many types of meetings that a company will have, but it serves a distinct purpose that is different from each of the other types of meetings. When talking about management meetings or executive meetings, in particular, you are talking about the meetings that gather the leaders of your organization into a single space. This is where they can assess and address any problems that your organization may be experiencing and work to boost company morale and productivity. These meetings can often include things like strategy sessions and quarterly reviews of the business. In addition to all of this, management meetings work to ensure clear and open communication between company leaders so that all departments and teams can be on the same page and more equipped to work together effectively. They can also set the tone for creating a positive and healthy workplace culture.
Management Meetings
There are many different types of meetings, and it can be challenging to know what each of them is and what kinds of benefits and drawbacks there are associated with the different types. Because of this, you may be wondering what is “management meeting” means in the greater scheme of business meetings? The term management meeting can be used as an umbrella term for the more formal types of meetings — such as operation meetings or executive meetings. Sometimes the term executive meeting is also used as this same umbrella term so that it can get confusing, but the important thing is to recognize that if you are having a leader meeting, it is going to fall in that management meeting or formal meeting category.
Management meetings are oftentimes going to be highly goal-oriented because they are meetings that need to have all leaders available. This means that these meetings will likely be more straightforward and to the point because finding the time and place where company leaders can all get together can be tricky, so it is essential to use all of the meeting time wisely. At the beginning of the meeting, you will likely be laying out the meeting agenda as well as the goals and expectations of the meeting, and all participants should be prepared for the meeting before it begins. Again, these management meetings are where the big picture of the company or organization is being addressed, and therefore, these meetings have different benefits than a weekly team meeting would.
There are numerous benefits of weekly team meetings because they ensure that all team members are on the same page and able to address any problems that come up, but management meetings have their own set of benefits. What those benefits are can depend on the specific type of management meeting that is happening — for example, an operations meeting will likely be discussing any operational problems and improving them, whereas an executive meeting may be focusing on new strategies or reviewing the last quarter to determine how the business is operating currently and how to improve it for the future.
What Makes A Good Meeting
Each business or organization likely has its own preferred strategies and techniques for making sure meetings are productive, but more often than not, these strategies may not be doing what you’re hoping they will. While the best strategies may differ from meeting type to meeting type, in general, there are a few practical meeting guidelines that you can follow to ensure that you are able to have more productive and successful meetings. These strategies are broken down into before the meeting, during the meeting, and after the meeting. But, before discussing how to ensure that you have productive meetings, it is crucial to ensure that you have valuable management meeting topics to discuss. After all, simply scheduling a meeting to have a meeting on the books is not a good start, and it is likely to produce a distracted and unproductive meeting.
Luckily, figuring out your management meeting topics and objectives can be a part of your before the meeting checklist. In addition to finding meeting topics to discuss, you will also want to ensure that you have set a meeting goal, invited the right people to the meeting, created an agenda, organized topics based on priority and in a logical order to avoid distractions, and offered time to collaborate on all of these points. Then you will want to share your agenda with everyone attending the meeting so that everyone can be on the same page and you are ready to start your meeting. Once in the meeting, focus on collaboration, staying on topic, and setting expectations at the beginning. You can also use the time during the meeting to ensure that all tasks are assigned to the right individuals or departments, and you can also include time at the end to summarize and review what your next steps are. Lastly, once the meeting is over, you will want to share a recap of the meeting — the meeting minutes — with everyone who attended as well as others who were not in attendance but would be affected by the meeting decisions and get started working on any tasks that were assigned to you, and be prepared for the next meeting.
Conduct The Meeting
You may have the best executive team meeting agenda template in your toolkit, but without allowing collaboration, you may be sabotaging your meetings before they even begin. People like to be part of things. If you want to have a productive meeting, allow collaboration during the meeting. This could be in the meeting notes, bringing in specific team meeting topics for discussion rooms, or even coming up with fun meeting topics together that will stimulate discussion and improve communication and productivity. Adjusting your management meeting structure to include collaboration can be incredibly useful because it can take a generic weekly management meeting agenda or a monthly management meeting agenda and transform it into something that is more engaging and personal to your company.
This being said, it is vital to ensure that you have a solid monthly or weekly leadership meeting agenda in place before each meeting so that you can ensure you are staying on topic during your meetings. Not implementing a weekly manager meeting agenda can lead to a disorganized and unproductive meeting. Because of this, you want to ensure that you have topics, agendas, and goals for each meeting before you even begin it.
Management Meeting Purpose
There can be numerous reasons for holding a meeting, and that purpose will often determine the type of meeting being held. If you are looking for a status update on a project or policy, you wouldn’t bring out a CEO meeting agenda. On the contrary, you’d probably opt for a more informal check-in type of meeting agenda to assess the progress of whatever policy or project you are checking in on. On the other hand, if you are conducting leadership team meetings or management meetings, you will want to break out the senior management meeting agenda format.
A general manager meeting agenda will likely be more strictly structured because management meetings tend to stick more closely to them because all of the meeting time that is scheduled is valuable and should be used thoroughly. In order to have effective leadership meetings, you will need to ensure that you and all other members of your team who are attending the meeting are clear on the purpose and goals of the meeting.
Leadership Meeting Cadence
You may be wondering how often you should be having these more formal leadership meetings. Well, this can depend on your organization. Some find that having a weekly meeting between company leaders is the right frequency because it allows them to always be on top of any problems that are occurring in their business, but others may prefer to discuss monthly manager meeting topics on a monthly basis rather than adhering to a weekly meeting schedule.
In reality, a monthly, biweekly, or weekly management meeting will likely be effective because it provides a reliable and predictable schedule for all company leaders or higher-ups to address any issues. You may find that simply meeting once a month results in always having too many things to discuss and not enough time to examine them, or you may find that you do not have enough to discuss each week. This will be dependent on your business and what problems or improvements you may be working on. But, so long as you have a regular schedule that gives you the time you need to address the concerns you need to, any regular meeting schedule should be adequate.
No matter the cadence, using a meeting intelligence platform like Docket can help you plan, prep, collaborate, and share meeting objectives and outcomes within your organization for progress and alignment.
