The Four Meetings Every ELT Needs

Byline: Alastair Steward

We’ve all seen or been on a version of this executive leadership team.

The weekly meeting is packed with updates. Important decisions get discussed, but not quite made. Strategy gets a lot of attention during annual planning season, then quickly loses ground as day-to-day noise builds back up. New priorities appear without old ones being removed. Difficult or politically sensitive issues are informally escalated or just buried.

Meanwhile, everyone is very, very busy.

It’s tempting to treat these as separate problems. Maybe meetings need better agendas. Maybe leaders need clearer roles. Those things might help, but often they’re symptoms of something more fundamental: The ELT doesn’t have an operating rhythm for doing its work.

My colleagues Rodney Evans and Sam Rothkopf talked about this in a recent At Work with The Ready episode. Their framing of the ELT’s job is simple: investigate, decide, and move together.

An ELT needs to understand what’s happening inside and outside the business, make choices about what the organization will do in response, and steer execution without doing all the executing itself.

That requires more than a weekly meeting.

"Wait, more meetings?"

Luckily, no. Here are two clarifications:

First, an operating rhythm isn’t a weekly staff meeting plus the occasional MBR. It’s the set of routines that ensure a team’s most important work happens at the right frequency with the right people.

Second, installing an operating rhythm doesn’t mean adding new meetings to an already crowded calendar. Instead, it means (a) repurposing and redesigning existing meetings to be more effective, (b) removing meetings you don't need anymore, and (c) only then adding meetings that serve an important purpose not being handled elsewhere.

Your operating rhythm starter pack.

 For most ELTs, I’d start with four meeting structures:

1. A strategy meeting. The team needs a recurring opportunity to ask: What’s changed in our environment and market? What have we learned? Does our strategy still make sense? What needs to shift as a result? For many organizations, quarterly is a useful starting point. Once a year definitely isn’t enough.

 2. A prioritization and resource allocation meeting. Strategy isn’t a list of important things. It requires choices. Somewhere in the rhythm, the ELT needs to look across the whole portfolio and decide what gets more time, money, and people—and crucially, what gets less. This meeting should happen more frequently, so the portfolio can adapt as circumstances change. Try starting with once per month.

 3. A regular action or steering meeting. This is where the team looks at a small set of business metrics, checks movement against its most important priorities, and triages whatever requires collective attention. It's not 90 minutes of status updates. The point is to notice, decide, and unblock. Try starting with twice per month.

 4. Space for complex decisions. Some decisions need more investigation and dialogue than a weekly meeting allows. Rather than squeezing them between updates or letting them ricochet around Slack for weeks, create an explicit way to surface, decide, and take action against those decisions. To start, try protecting a discrete portion of time in your action meeting for them.

The configuration that works best for you should change over time. If your current strategy is about rebuilding your go-to-market engine, maybe the CEO, CFO, and CRO need deeper conversation more regularly around pipeline and commercial performance. Six months later, product might need that attention instead.

In a complex environment, installing a permanent set of meetings and assuming it will remain appropriate forever makes as much sense as setting your strategy once and refusing to revisit it.

"The chance to make actual trade-offs."

I worked with a fast-growing leadership team that had more than two dozen strategic initiatives underway at once in addition to "business as usual" work. The problem wasn’t that the initiatives were bad. Most made perfect sense individually.

The problem was that nobody could see just how much everyone was overloaded. As a result, progress was constantly falling short of expectations, and the team felt like they were failing.

So we changed the rhythm. Instead of reviewing initiatives one at a time, the team put the entire portfolio in one place and looked at it together. That made something previously impossible possible: the chance to make actual trade-offs.

The team compared work against work, clarified what mattered most, and made choices about constrained resources. We paired that with a weekly action meeting focused on business metrics, movement on priority work, and the issues that most needed executive attention.

No one meeting was revolutionary. What mattered was strategy, prioritization, execution, and escalation now had clear places to happen.

Look at your own operating rhythm.

Start with these questions:

• What is our ELT accountable for together?

• What decisions can only this team make?

• How often do we need to revisit strategy given how quickly our context changes?

• Where do we explicitly make trade-offs between competing priorities and resources?

• What needs the whole ELT, and what would be better handled by a subset?

If your answers are fuzzy, don’t add another meeting that looks just like the one you already have every Tuesday. Start by getting clearer about the work the team exists to do. Design the rhythm around that, and keep changing it as the work changes.