The Monday Meeting: One Hour to Run Your Company

I gave this same talk four times in one day.

Four CEOs, four different companies, four different stages, same conversation. Somewhere in the middle of the fourth one I said out loud, "I'm going to write a blog post about it because this is the fourth time today that I'm doing this."

So here it is.

I've written before about why your company needs an operating system. This is the piece of it people ask about most: what actually happens in the Monday meeting.

First, credit where it belongs

I did not invent this. The bones are Patrick Lencioni's and The Table Group's. The weekly tactical meeting, the lightning round, building the agenda in the room, cascading communication, the first team. If you haven't read Death by Meeting, go read that before you read me. It's great.1

What follows is their framework run through three turns as a CEO and a lot of years installing it with founders.

Your answer is meetings. My answer is leadership.

Every one of these conversations started the same way. Underwater. Reactive. No real hands around the business. And the question is always some version of which meeting do I add, which one do I move, which one do I blow up.

That is the wrong question.

I want you managing leaders and leading managers. Not managing meetings.

But you still need a system, because without one you are the system. You sit there on a Sunday night going, what's happening with this, what did I forget, who do I need to chase. You set reminders on Slack threads to check on things because you know they won't come back to you otherwise.

That is not a calendar problem. That is the operating system not feeding you.

The system starts on Monday.

Clarity, Focus, and Urgency

Everything below is in service of three words, and I say them in every meeting I am in. At this point I'm legally required to.

Clarity. Everybody knows what success looks like. Not roughly. Exactly.

Focus. We are doing the things that matter most, we are not doing the other things, and we are backing the people on our team to get them done.

Urgency. We are moving now, because speed is an advantage and most companies give it away.

Clarity, Focus, and Urgency are the job. The Monday meeting is where you install them, one week at a time.

The point of the meeting is to win the week

That's it. That is the whole thing.

We have annual goals. Annual goals divide into quarters, into months, into weeks, and if you want, into days. That is not a philosophy. That is just math, and it is true.

So the goal of this meeting is to drive total Clarity, Focus, and Urgency for the week, so we know exactly what we are on target for.

It is not a brainstorm. It is an execution, alignment, and accountability meeting.

When that meeting ends, the leaders of your company are pixel-perfect aligned on what makes a great week. Not roughly aligned. Not mostly. Pixel-perfect. If two of your leaders would answer "what does a great week look like" differently on Monday at noon, the meeting did not work.

Who is in the room

No more than six or seven people. And every part of the business has to be covered.

If you cannot cover the business with seven people, you have an org design problem, not a meeting problem. Wipe the whole thing and design it again with seats, not butts.

One more thing about the room. What you are building is what Lencioni calls a first team. If you asked anyone in that meeting what team they are on, the answer should be the leadership team of the company. My peers are the people in this room, not the vertical I represent.

The agenda, in five parts

Sixty minutes is the target. I've had them run ninety and that was fine. The agenda never changes. That is the point. Nobody builds an agenda every week and nobody gets bird-dogged for their topics.

1. Lightning round. Ten minutes.

Everybody gets a minute or less. Top priorities for the week. Not goals. Actions. The things they have to get done.2

I've got the big client meeting Wednesday. I'm traveling to the event Tuesday. I have to get that job description into the field. Those are my big things this week.

It is not a discussion. It is not an opportunity to challenge anyone. It is quite literally a lightning round. Somebody writes it all down.

And anyone in the room, including the person talking, can flag any item and say, let's talk about that today. It goes on a list.

Because the agenda for the meeting gets built on the fly.

2. KPI review. Ten minutes.

Five to seven numbers. Not fifty. Company-level, resultant numbers.

Every number has a person's name next to it. That person is responsible for updating it before the meeting, and I want them to do it by hand. I don't want it automated.3 I want them to feel it, because entering the number triggers a color.

Green means we are on target.

Yellow means we are not on target and I have a plan.

Red means we are not on target and I don't have a plan.

Anything yellow or red automatically becomes a discussion item.

So they know before they walk in. You don't have to remember to ask. You don't have to remember to check in. Accountability starts first thing Monday morning, every week, in front of their peers.

If you have an annual target, make sure it is divisible by twelve to get a month and divisible by four to get a week. Then you can say: it is the 17th, we are sixty percent through the month and we are at forty-eight percent to target. Not pacing. Yellow. But here's why it's going to be fine.4

This is the dashboard I hand every client I install this with: mbj.im/dashboard. Take it, gut it, put your own numbers in it.

3. Discussion topics. Thirty minutes.

Now you have a list. Some from the lightning round, some kicked out by the colors. There will almost always be more than you have time for.

The CEO picks the order. You are the one who is responsible and accountable for all of it, so you get to say, let's start with this one, then this one.

You will not get to them all. That's fine. The ones you don't get to either get scheduled somewhere else or they weren't a priority.

4. Decisions. Five minutes.

Write down every decision made in the room. Names and dates. And specificity.

That is accountability.

5. Cascading messages. Five minutes.

For every decision the teams need to hear, we write the actual words.

Not each leader's priorities. The company's message. So that nobody walks out of a team meeting thinking we're going after upsells this week when we're going after adoption.

Everyone leaves that room and goes to their own team meetings and one-on-ones singing from the same prayer book. Scripted. Truly scripted.

This is how pixel-perfect gets one layer down. Your leaders leave aligned, and five minutes of scripting is what carries that alignment to everybody who works for them.

Do not run your own meeting

The CEO does not run this meeting. Chief of staff, head of ops, whoever owns operating rhythm. If you don't have that person yet, rotate it through the team. Anyone but you.5

I want you to be a participant. Not a taskmaster.

Somebody has to keep the lightning round to a minute, tell people to keep moving, push the big stuff to the discussion list, and take the rest offline. You want someone nobody is going to push around, who can tell people to keep moving and actually run the process.

And it is not the CEO's administrative task. You are not the one taking the notes, chasing the numbers, or building the agenda. The second it becomes your admin job, you've stopped participating and gone back to being the system.

When I ran these, I always went last in the lightning round.

Run it before everything else

The Monday meeting has to happen before one-on-ones and team meetings, not after. The message cascades down from that first conversation. If people are already in their one-on-ones before the exec team has aligned, you get eighteen different versions of the week.

Do the leadership meeting first thing. Then stack your one-on-ones, timebox them, and keep them close. By eleven or noon on Monday you know where people need help and how to spend your time.

Friday is the other half

Monday opens the week. The Friday update closes it. Same system, and for me the Friday update is non-negotiable.

On Friday you look back at what you said Monday morning and answer one question: did we win the week?

It should include numbers. Not necessarily all seven. Some of what you look at on Monday is not for broad distribution, and that's fine. Pick the subset the company should see, keep the same colors and the same owners, and say what moved, what didn't, and why.

The Friday update is not just a recap. It sets the strategic priority for the coming week. That is your balcony time at the end of the day Friday, and it means you roll into Monday already knowing what matters. Sunday is fine too. What matters is that it exists and that it is yours.

Monday you ask, what does a great week look like. Friday you ask, did we get it. Without the Friday half, Monday is a status meeting.

Everything else has a home

That is the weekly loop, and it is the one to install first.

There is a monthly piece, a quarterly piece, and a daily piece too. They matter, but they are the rest of the operating system, not this meeting. I wrote about all of it in why your company needs an operating system.

The week drives the month. The month drives the quarter. The quarter drives the year.

Why this works

If you run the system, everything has a home.

You don't have to remember what's going on with pipeline, because every Monday morning the person who owns pipeline is telling you, with their name next to the number and a color next to their name.

You are creating an environment where accountability is unavoidable, and it is not on you to remember to ask people how it's going.

Work the system and the system bubbles up the things that need to get done.

Sixty minutes. Six or seven people. Five numbers. One question: are we pixel-perfect on what a great week looks like.

Clarity. Focus. Urgency.

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1. It's a business fable, which means there are characters and a plot and a guy named Rich. ↩
2. Somebody in your room is going to take four minutes. You know who it is. You knew before you finished reading this sentence. ↩
3. I know. You have a tool that could pull this automatically. Every founder tells me about the tool. The tool is not the point. The person typing the number and watching it turn yellow is the point. ↩
4. If reading that sentence made you slightly uncomfortable, that is the system working. ↩
5. If your honest answer is "nobody on my team could run this meeting," that is also not a scheduling problem. ↩