How to run a leadership team meeting

Your CEO says the leadership meeting "isn't working" and asks you to fix it. Eight leaders take turns reading updates everyone could have read in advance, the one real decision of the week comes up with ten minutes left, and two days later you hear the CFO never agreed with the plan "decided" in the room.

You can see what's wrong. The hard part is changing it when everyone in that meeting outranks you. If your company has no rhythm at all, start with our operating rhythm guide; if you're new to the role, our Chief of Staff handbook gives you the wider picture.

What should a weekly leadership team meeting agenda include?

A weekly leadership team meeting agenda needs four parts: a quick check on last week's actions, metrics shown by exception, the decisions and issues that need the whole group, and a read-back of what was decided. Everything else, including department updates, goes in writing before the meeting.

Here is a 75-minute version for a company of 50 to 300 people. The scorecard and written updates go out the day before, so the room looks only at what's late, red or moved sharply.

# Leadership team meeting · [Day, date] · [time, length]
Chair: [CEO] · Agenda and notes: [Chief of Staff] · Pre-reads: [link to folder]

## Agenda requests (submit by [day, time] for this meeting)
Format: item · decide / discuss / inform · owner · minutes needed · pre-read link

Rule: no pre-read, no agenda slot. Inform-only items go in the written update.

## Run of show
| Time | Item | Type | Owner | Pre-read |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 0:00 | Open actions: late or blocked only | Inform | Chief of Staff | Action list |
| 0:05 | Metrics: reds and big moves only | Discuss | Each owner | Scorecard |
| 0:15 | Decision 1: [question as a choice] | Decide | [owner] | [link] |
| 0:30 | Decision 2: [question as a choice] | Decide | [owner] | [link] |
| 0:50 | Issue: [topic] | Discuss | [owner] | [link] |
| 1:05 | Read-back: decisions, owners, dates | Decide | Chief of Staff | |
| 1:10 | What we tell the company, and who tells it | Decide | CEO | |

## Parked for next week
- [item] · reason · new date

# Leadership team meeting · Mon, July 6 · 9:00, 75 min
Chair: CEO · Agenda and notes: Chief of Staff · Pre-reads: Leadership folder, July 6

## Agenda requests (closed Thursday, 3pm)
Five requests came in. Three made the agenda, one is parked and one went to the written update.

## Run of show
| Time | Item | Type | Owner | Pre-read |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 0:00 | Open actions: two late, one blocked | Inform | Chief of Staff | Action list |
| 0:05 | Metrics: reds and big moves only | Discuss | Each owner | Scorecard |
| 0:15 | Decision 1: pause the two open backend roles for the quarter, or keep hiring? | Decide | VP Engineering | Hiring plan memo |
| 0:30 | Decision 2: sign a second office lease, or extend the current one a year? | Decide | COO | Lease options memo |
| 0:50 | Issue: net revenue retention down three points | Discuss | VP Customer Success | Retention analysis |
| 1:05 | Read-back: decisions, owners, dates | Decide | Chief of Staff | |
| 1:10 | What we tell the company, and who tells it | Decide | CEO | |

## Parked for next week
- Q3 renewal pricing · needs more than 15 minutes · revenue deep dive, July 16
- Retire the reports feature · no pre-read yet · back to its owner with the questions it must answer

Why this order works

Updates are easy to prepare and safe to give, while decisions put the owner's judgment on display. Left alone, the safe items fill the room first, and the decision everyone came for starts at minute 70 of 90. The order above caps the safe items with a clock and puts decisions between minutes 15 and 50, when attention is highest.

The second problem is mixing tactics with strategy. Dora Nagy, former Chief of Staff to the COO at SoftBank, described on our podcast splitting the two. A Monday meeting covers KPIs, OKR status, priorities and issues. A separate weekly deep dive rotates through the six to eight strategic topics that matter most, so each comes back every five or six weeks and people know when to prepare. When both share one slot, she said, the team goes down a rabbit hole on a topic relevant to three of the ten people in the room.

Alexis Summit, who was Chief of Staff at Kroll when we spoke, said on our podcast that she kept the monthly agenda for Kroll's service line leaders deliberately predictable: performance, people, and the sales opportunities others could help with. When the agenda holds steady, leaders prepare.

A worked example: building one week's agenda

This example is a labeled illustration. You support the CEO of a 140-person software company with nine leaders and a 75-minute Monday meeting. On Thursday afternoon your decision queue holds five items:

1. Pause two open engineering roles for a quarter? Needed by Friday. Pre-read ready.
2. Raise renewal prices in Q3? Needed in three weeks. Pre-read half written.
3. Sign a second office lease? Needed in two weeks. Pre-read ready.
4. Retire an underused product feature? No date, no pre-read.
5. Offsite dates. Inform only.

Items 1 and 3 become the two decisions, because both have a date and a pre-read. Pricing needs more than 15 minutes, so it goes to the next revenue deep dive. The feature item goes back to its owner with a note on what the pre-read needs to answer, and offsite dates go in the written update. Net revenue retention is down three points, so that takes the issue slot. You agree the draft with your CEO in your Monday-morning slot and publish it by noon.

Five items arrived and the meeting hears three. Filtering the queue before anyone walks in is most of what a Chief of Staff adds to this meeting.

Judgment calls on the agenda

The first call is one meeting or two. Under about 30 people, one weekly meeting with a strategic item at the end is enough. Once the same strategic topic has overrun the weekly meeting twice in a month, split out a deep dive. I'd rather add one focused meeting than let a 90-minute meeting grow to two hours.

The second is a queue that never empties. If more than three items need the whole team every week, the team is deciding things one owner could decide with a heads-up. Ask your CEO which items could be delegated with a rule, such as "spend under $50,000 inside an approved budget goes to the functional lead".

The third is what counts as an exception. Agree thresholds once, such as red means more than 10% off plan, and print them on the scorecard. Without them, every leader explains every number.

Adjust for size and setup. A founding team under 30 can run 45 minutes with no metrics section; at 500 people and up, "what we tell the company" becomes a cascade note each leader takes to their own staff meeting. Remote teams should type the read-back into the meeting chat.

Moving updates into writing has a political cost: leaders who used update time to show the CEO their work lose that stage. Hold the line with one rule your CEO agrees to in advance: if it isn't in the pre-read, it doesn't get airtime. A short reply from the CEO on a few written updates each week keeps the work visible. When the CEO breaks the rule with a last-minute item, let it go ahead, have its owner send the one-pager the same day, and raise the pattern in your 1:1 if it becomes weekly.

This week, take last week's agenda and mark each item as decide, discuss or inform. Count the minutes that went to inform: that number is your case for the change.

What is an L10 or huddle meeting, and do you need one?

An L10 (Level 10) meeting is a weekly 90-minute leadership meeting format from EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. Each attendee rates the meeting from 1 to 10 at the close, and the aim is a 10. It runs at the same time every week in a fixed order, with short reviews of metrics, priorities and to-dos, then most of the time on solving issues, a step often shortened to IDS: identify, discuss, solve.

A huddle is a 10 to 15 minute check-in, daily or a few times a week, for a launch, a crisis or a fast sales quarter. Keep it to three lines: what's blocked, who can unblock it, and by when. I'd only start a daily huddle with an end date, so it doesn't outlive the reason for it.

If your company already runs on EOS, use the L10 as designed and put your energy into the issues list. If it doesn't, borrow the two strongest habits: a fixed time and order every week, and most of the meeting spent on issues.

Whatever you adopt, introduce it slowly. Ryan Kelly, the first Chief of Staff at Veremark, described on our podcast presenting a full set of weekly, monthly and quarterly meetings early on, and the CTO rejected it in front of the room. On reflection, it put too much governance into the same week for how fast the business moved. His advice: learn the business before you apply a template.

Before you change a leadership meeting's format, walk the plan through with each leader one to one, starting with the one most likely to object.

Who runs the leadership meeting, and what does the Chief of Staff own?

The CEO chairs the leadership meeting. The Chief of Staff owns everything around it: the agenda, the pre-reads, the timekeeping, the record of decisions and the follow-ups. In some companies the Chief of Staff also facilitates while the CEO participates as a decision maker.

The chair holds the authority to close a discussion and make the call. If a Chief of Staff chairs, leaders read it as the CEO stepping back, and hard decisions drift to side conversations. Owning the agenda gives you more influence anyway, because you decide what reaches the room and in what order. I'd stay out of the chair even when the CEO offers it.

Once leaders see that the agenda decides what gets the CEO's attention, they'll lobby you for slots. Make the rules public: requests by a set day, a one-line description of the decision needed, and a pre-read before it's scheduled. Write the agenda calls you can make alone into your mandate. Alexis Summit set Kroll's agendas jointly with her principals, so a no came from both of them.

The table shows how the meetings around a leadership team usually split in a company of 50 to 500 people. These are our recommendations; adjust them for yours.

Your 1:1 with your principal makes the others work. Use it to agree the leadership agenda before it goes out, so the CEO is never surprised in the room; our weekly update guide covers moving status out of the 1:1 to make room. Tristan Lim, a former Chief of Staff at Commsor, described on our podcast keeping some 1:1s with executives agenda-free, which is where you hear what leaders won't say in the meeting. For offsites, read our post on mastering offsites.

How do you prepare a leadership meeting without becoming the bottleneck?

Prepare in a fixed weekly sequence: collect agenda requests by a set day, build the draft with your principal, chase pre-reads 48 hours out, and send the final agenda and pre-reads 24 hours before. When everyone knows the deadlines, you stop chasing people one by one.

The core of preparation is a decision queue: a running list of decisions waiting for the leadership team, each with an owner, a date needed and whether the pre-read exists. Urgent items that come up mid-week go into the queue with a date, and each agenda is the top of the queue. That keeps the meeting from being set by whoever shouts loudest.

A good pre-read is one page: the decision needed in one sentence, the options with a recommendation, the trade-offs and who was consulted. If a leader can't write one page, the item usually isn't ready; send it back with a note on what's missing. Our decision-making post covers framing the decision, and our briefing guide has a pre-read template.

KJ (Kartikeya Jaiswal), who led strategy and operations at Bifrost AI when we spoke and was its Chief of Staff before that, described on our podcast running each recurring sync, from finance to hiring to pipeline, on its own schedule with scheduled routines or agents that have the pre-reads ready on time. Keep a person checking every pre-read before it goes out.

Have owners write and send their own pre-reads to a shared folder, and check only that they arrived and are one page. If every pre-read passes through your hands, every late one becomes your fault, and writing them for leaders teaches them to stop. Once the agenda is out, resist changing it in the room: the chair decides whether a new item bumps something or goes to next week's queue.

How do you take notes and decide what to record?

Record decisions, owners and dates for every leadership meeting, with a short note of the reasoning behind each decision. Full recordings and transcripts should be the exception, agreed by the group in advance, with rules on who can access them and when they're deleted. I'd default to notes and a decision record, and record only when the group asks for it.

A transcript of 90 minutes of senior people thinking out loud is a permanent record of half-formed views, disagreements and comments about people. Leaders who know every word is captured speak more carefully, and the candid disagreement the meeting exists for moves to private messages.

AI notetakers make this urgent, because they arrive one person at a time. Ryan Kelly described on our podcast notetaker bots appearing in Veremark's meetings within weeks, until the company told everyone to use the one approved, more secure transcription tool on its existing stack. In the Chief of Staff Network's Chief of AI Report, security, compliance and ethics were the most common concern about adopting AI, at about 41% of responses, and one CTO described stopping AI use in internal strategy meetings over it. A leadership meeting covers deals, people decisions and numbers that aren't public, so it is the meeting most likely to cross a line.

Before any notetaker joins your leadership meeting, agree five rules with your principal and your legal or security lead:

1. Which tool, and only that one. One approved tool, under the company's account.
2. Consent. Everyone in the meeting knows it's running and can ask for it to be paused. Recording consent laws vary by state and country, so check with your legal team before recording anyone outside the company.
3. Never-record topics. Discuss these with recording paused, and let the notes say only that the topic was covered: people decisions and performance, compensation, health or personal matters, legal matters and disputes, and anything under NDA or not yet public, such as deals and board matters.
4. Access. Who can read the full transcript, and who sees only the summary.
5. Retention. How long transcripts are kept before deletion, set with your legal team.

Write the notetaker rules before the first bot joins. Once three tools are running, every rule becomes a negotiation with someone's habit.

Used this way, notetakers save time. Maria Mejia, who was Chief of Staff at Emmerson Capital when we spoke, said on our podcast that her team uses an AI meeting companion for its longest meetings because it produces the summary and the action items. Check every decision and owner in that summary before it goes out, because a summary that records a decision nobody made does more damage than no notes. Our AI guide covers the wider policy questions, and the AI setup guide covers connecting an approved notetaker to your other tools.

# Leadership team meeting notes · [date]
Present: [names] · Absent: [names, and who briefs them] · Notes: [name]

## Decisions
| Decision | Owner | By when | Who needs to know | Can be reopened if |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| [what we decided, in one sentence] | [name] | [date] | [teams, people] | [new information that would change it] |

## Actions
| Action | Owner | Due |
| --- | --- | --- |
| [verb + outcome] | [name] | [date] |

## Still open
- [topic] · next step · back on the agenda on [date]

## What we tell the company
- [message] · sent by [name] · by [date]

## Notes-off topics
- [topic covered; no detail recorded]

# Leadership team meeting notes · July 6
Present: CEO and eight leaders · Absent: VP Marketing (Chief of Staff briefs her) · Notes: Chief of Staff

## Decisions
| Decision | Owner | By when | Who needs to know | Can be reopened if |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Pause the two open backend roles until October 1 | VP Engineering | Recruiting and both hiring managers told by July 8 | Recruiting, hiring managers, finance | Q3 bookings come in above plan |
| Extend the current office lease by one year; no second office | COO | Landlord notice by July 31 | All staff, finance | The headcount plan changes |

## Actions
| Action | Owner | Due |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Tell recruiting and both hiring managers about the pause | VP Engineering | July 8 |
| Update the hiring forecast for the pause | VP Finance | July 10 |
| Bring a one-page retention plan | VP Customer Success | July 13 |

## Still open
- Net revenue retention · VP Customer Success brings causes and a plan · back on the agenda July 13

## What we tell the company
- We're staying in our current office next year · CEO · Thursday all-hands

## Notes-off topics
- One senior hire discussed; no detail recorded

How do you make follow-ups actually happen?

Make follow-ups happen with three habits: send the decisions and actions within two hours of the meeting, keep one action list that every meeting reads from, and open the next meeting by reviewing only the actions that are late. Owners then hear about their commitments from a list, on a schedule, without you chasing them individually.

Actions die for predictable reasons: the room agreed a direction but never an owner or a date, ownership spread across "we'll look into it", or nothing brought the action back before its deadline. The follow-up email tests whether the decision was real. Sent the same afternoon, it gets corrected while people remember the meeting; sent three days later, it gets ignored or reopens the debate. Ask people to reply within 24 hours if anything is wrong.

Keep a single action list for the leadership team, in whatever tool the team already opens every day, with an owner and a date on every line. Decisions go in a separate log that records what was decided and why; our guide to managing context has a template for it. Then open each meeting with late and blocked actions only, because reading the whole list teaches people it's a formality.

The risk for you is becoming the team's nag. Once your name is on every reminder, leaders treat a late action as a disagreement with you. Ask your CEO to own the consequence: when an action is late twice, the CEO asks about it in the meeting. If your CEO won't, report the on-time rate monthly in your weekly update and let the number do the asking.

A worked example: one decision over three weeks

Back to the illustration above. On Monday the team decides to pause two engineering roles. The read-back says: "Pause the two backend roles until October 1. Owner: VP Engineering. Recruiting and both hiring managers told by Wednesday."

At 2pm you send the follow-up. By 4pm the VP Finance replies that she heard "pause through Q3", and her forecast assumes that. The VP Engineering confirms October 1, and you correct the log before anyone acts.

On Wednesday of week two, the list shows recruiting hasn't been told. You ask the VP Engineering one to one and learn he was waiting for the CEO to call a candidate with a final interview booked, a dependency nobody wrote down. You add a line for the CEO, dated Thursday, and both actions close by Friday. In week three the item never reaches the late list.

When an action is late, find out why first

A late action usually means one of three things. Ask the owner one question: "What would done look like, and when can you get there?"

If they answer quickly with a new date, it's capacity. Re-date it once, and if it slips again, take it to the CEO to reassign or drop something else. If they hesitate or argue about the action itself, they never agreed with the decision; put it back on the agenda as a decision, with their objection in the pre-read. If they can't describe done, the action was badly written, so rewrite it with them as a verb, an outcome and a date.

I'd watch hardest for treating disagreement like capacity. Chasing someone who disagrees produces a late action every week and a worse relationship with you, while the disagreement never gets discussed.

Once a month, close or re-date anything older than six weeks, because old lines teach people the list isn't real. In a larger company, tag the actions each leader needs to cascade so their teams hear decisions from their own leader first; our post on strategic communication covers writing those messages.

How do you turn a meeting transcript into decisions and actions?

Use an AI tool your company has approved for meeting content to draft the decisions and actions, then check the draft against your own notes before anything is sent. The tool is fast at finding who said they'd do what and unreliable at telling a decision from a suggestion, so the prompt makes it say when it isn't sure. Use it only on meetings where everyone agreed to the transcript.

You are helping a Chief of Staff write up a leadership team meeting.

Below is the transcript of the meeting and my own notes. Produce:

1. Decisions: only items the group clearly agreed. For each: the decision in one sentence, the owner, the date, and the transcript line that shows agreement. If agreement is unclear, list it under "Needs confirming" instead.
2. Actions: verb + outcome, owner, due date. If no owner or date was said, write "owner not stated" or "date not stated". Don't guess.
3. Still open: topics raised with no decision, and any next step mentioned.
4. Messages for the company: anything the group said should be communicated, and who said they'd send it.

Rules: don't attribute opinions or quotes to people. Skip any section marked as notes-off. Keep it under 300 words. Use plain sentences.

My notes: [paste]
Transcript: [paste]

Read the "Needs confirming" list first. Those are the places where the room thought it agreed and didn't, and each is worth a quick message to the owner before the follow-up goes out.

The second prompt drafts next week's agenda from what's already in your system. Take the draft into your 1:1 with your principal and agree it there, so the agenda goes out with both your names behind it.

Draft next week's leadership team meeting agenda (75 minutes) using the format below.

Inputs:
- Decision queue (item, owner, date needed, pre-read ready?): [paste]
- Late or blocked actions: [paste]
- Agenda requests received: [paste]
- Metrics that are red or moved more than [x]%: [paste]

Rules:
- Include at most 3 decisions, chosen by date needed, then by impact. Only schedule items with a pre-read ready; list the rest under "Not ready" with what's missing.
- Inform-only requests go under "Move to written update".
- Allocate minutes. Leave 5 minutes for the read-back and 5 for what we tell the company.
- Output: the run-of-show table, then "Not ready", then "Move to written update".

How do you fix a leadership meeting that isn't working?

Find out what's broken before you change anything. Ask each leader one to one what the meeting is for, what they'd cut and what they'd keep, then compare their answers with what last month's agendas actually spent time on. The gap between the two lists shows you which fix to make.

The fix that works best is usually the smallest one the team will accept. Changing everything at once, like Ryan Kelly's first attempt, puts every leader's habits on the line together. Change one thing, run it for four weeks, then ask the group whether it helped.

When leaders agree in the room and object afterward

This symptom does the most damage, because the meeting looks like it worked. With the CEO present, objecting in public costs a leader more than nodding, so the objection moves somewhere cheaper: a private word with the CEO, a complaint to their team, or slow execution.

Alyssa Palomba, who was Chief of Staff at SportsRecruits when we spoke, said on our podcast that she first felt she had to react all the time, because decisions were finalized in the meeting. She built a written culture around it: pre-reads first, then the conversation, then a wrap-up, so introverted and extroverted leaders could debate on equal footing. Dara Chen, who was Chief of Staff at Rad AI when we spoke, described on our podcast watching how engaged leaders are, then calling them afterward to say she sensed they disagreed and ask why. A change to planning or recruiting only works, she said, if the people running it buy in.

To tell which situation you're in, ask the leader who objected one question: "Did you get a chance to say this before the decision?"

• If they weren't consulted, the fix is upstream. Before any contested item, talk to each affected leader one to one and put their objection in the pre-read, in their words.
• If they were heard and overruled, the gap is commitment. Add one line to the read-back: "Is anyone not able to commit to this?" Asked out loud, it gives a leader a last chance to object, and it makes the objection later much harder to justify.
• If they say the decision wasn't what they thought, the decision was vague. Tighten the read-back until each decision is one sentence with an owner and a date.

Pre-wiring has a cost. If every outcome is settled in your one-to-ones, leaders learn the meeting is theater and start lobbying you, so use those conversations to surface objections and leave the outcome to the room. Remote teams can add a written round in the meeting chat: "one line each: commit, or what's stopping you?"

If you need to cut attendance, ask the CEO to tell each person dropped one to one before the invite changes, and say which items they'll still join for. Timing helps too: when Kroll reorganized, Alexis Summit used the change to move the CEO's reviews from monthly to quarterly, because a reorganization, a new CEO or a new quarter lets you reset a meeting without it reading as criticism. In your first 90 days, listen in month one and bring your first fix in month two.

[SCOTT: one line on fixing the executive meeting at Spring, if you have one?]

Track three numbers for a month before and after the change: minutes on decisions versus updates, decisions made per meeting, and actions closed on time. Show your principal the before and after, and keep the numbers for when you discuss your own role and level.

This week, book 20 minutes with each member of the leadership team and ask: "If you could change one thing about our leadership meeting, what would it be?" By Friday you'll know which fix to try first.