You’ve been lied to. You should have more meetings.
Meetings aren’t what prevents your team from succeeding. What prevents them is a lack of progress, a lack of alignment, and unsolved problems. It’s having the wrong meetings. And bad meetings.
I’ve built three businesses and worked with more than 70 clients on their operations and strategy execution. In this post, I’m sharing the one meeting that doubles your team’s productivity, helps you reach your goals, and — if done well — lets you work less.
What most businesses get wrong
When businesses try to become more efficient, they cut meetings. They switch to async communication in Slack or Teams. They focus on producing deliverables.
But what actually happens? Initiatives stall. Focus shifts. Goals don’t get reached.
I’ve seen this in dozens of companies. The successful ones don’t cut meetings. They run one specific meeting consistently: a weekly strategy execution meeting.
Why strategy execution needs a meeting
Strategy is actually pretty simple:
- Define what you want to accomplish.
- Define what needs to be done to get there.
- Execute. Again and again until you get there.
Now, if you do this once and let your team run with it, what happens? One or more of these things:
Focus drifts. Someone — maybe you — decides something else is more important. Goals shift elsewhere.
Decisions don’t get made. Reality turns out different than you expected. New decisions are needed on how to proceed. Nobody makes them. Initiatives stall.
Roadblocks don’t get removed. The team needs support, doesn’t get it, and stops.
Strategy execution is a process that needs constant attention. The simplest format to provide that attention is a weekly strategy execution meeting.
Finding the right frequency
You need to find the middle ground between meeting often enough to push progress and allowing enough time for your team to make progress between meetings.
Anything between twice a week and once a month can work. For most companies, once a week is the right starting point.
How to run the meeting
Set up a Kanban board
You need a place to track all initiatives. Don’t overthink this. A simple Kanban board with three columns — Open, In Progress, Done — is a perfectly viable starting point. You can add more granular stages over time.
The board should capture broken-down work packages from your strategy. If your strategic goal is to launch a service in a new client segment, tasks on the board could be: define ICP, find communication partners, select marketing channels, set up channels, and so on.
The meeting itself
In every meeting, review the items that are in progress. For each one, discuss:
- What’s the actual progress?
- Are there any roadblocks or decisions that need to be made?
- What’s the targeted completion date?
Go through each team member’s open topics. Keep it focused and time-boxed.
What this meeting gives you
When done well, this meeting delivers five things:
- Alignment on strategic priorities. Everyone stays pointed in the same direction.
- Sustained importance. The team understands that the things discussed remain important — not just this week, but next week and the week after.
- Momentum. The next meeting is already in the calendar. Progress becomes the default.
- Surfaced dependencies and bottlenecks. Problems come to light before they stall progress for weeks.
- Continuous improvement. You find operational inefficiencies and work on eliminating them, every single week.
The secret: discipline
The format is simple. So why do so many businesses struggle with strategy execution?
Discipline.
The key to making this work is doing it every week. Over a year. Over two years. Focused. Without letting it slip.
If you do that, you will inevitably make progress toward your goals. Don’t cancel the meeting because something else comes up. Don’t let the cadence break.
The strategy execution meeting is the tool. But it’s up to you to use it.
