Supermanagers TLDR – Staff Meetings

Making healthy debate a norm in leadership teams.

Author

Manuela Barcenas
August 08, 2024

One of my all-time favorite leadership resources is Claire Hughes Johnson’s 26-minute talk about staff meetings (also known as leadership team meetings).

If this is the first time you hear that name, Claire has held significant positions at Google and Stripe, where she contributed to both companies' growth and operational excellence. She is also the author of the book “Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building.”

What is so interesting about this talk?

Claire mentions that insufficient conflict in staff meetings can lead to a lack of effective decision-making. 

But how can CEOs, COOs, and other executives create an environment where the leadership team feels comfortable engaging in healthy debate?

According to Claire, you can start with the following 3 things:

  1. Build an understanding of the executive team’s personalities through off-site retreats and strengths assessments.

  2. Define a purpose for each staff meeting.

  3. At the start of the meeting, check in on everyone’s expectations. Then, at the end, run a check-out where everyone aligns on the decisions and expresses any remaining thoughts or concerns. 

“Meetings are actually a really important team-building tool, yet they are never treated as such and therefore become complete energy sucks,” says Claire. “People should know what good behavior looks like. They should know if they are supposed to challenge each other. They should know that if they disagree, they ultimately have to commit. They should know they have to listen.”

Claire Hughes Johnson

Check out Claire’s staff meeting agenda template in Fellow here.

Supermanagers Podcast – Jessica Zwaan, COO at Talentful

Jessica Zwaan is the COO at Talentful. She is also the author of “Built for People: Transform Your Employee Experience Using Product Management Principles.”

Over the years, she has applied product management principles to leadership team meetings, significantly improving their structure and outcomes.

For executive meetings, Jessica introduced a Weekly Business Review (WBR) modeled after Amazon’s practices. 

Each week, different team members chair the meeting, ensuring an understanding of key metrics across the leadership team. According to Jessica, this rotating chair system not only promotes accountability, but also deepens everyone's grasp of the business.

Jessica’s WBR meetings begin with team members reviewing top-line metrics and immediate concerns, followed by discussions on any notable changes or trends. 

To learn more about Jessica’s approach, listen to the conversation here.

Fellow tip of the week 

This week’s tip comes from: David Kramer, Chief of Staff at Fellow

“It’s hard to stay on top of all my on-going projects, without having to be personally involved in all the meetings and decision points. 

Once up and running, most projects do not require my day-to-day involvement or input. But I need a quick and objective method to understand if things are on track, that doesn’t require asking people for updates.

AI meeting recaps in Fellow facilitate this, enabling me to manage more projects at scale, and drive more value for the business.

My tip of the week: Use Fellow’s AI Meeting Copilot to generate meeting recaps that you can asynchronously consume to gather context about the business.

You can even write prompts such as:

- Is this project on track?

- Are there any blockers?

This has been of great help to me, as a Chief of Staff.”

David Kramer

If you haven’t tried Fellow to manage your meetings, it’s free to get started here.

And that’s it for this new issue of the Supermanagers TLDR Newsletter. We hope that the content we curated inspires you to continue growing as a leader.

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Thanks for being part of our community,

Manuela and the Fellow team