A playbook for meetings at startups
At some point in every company’s trajectory, a leader looks at her weekly calendar in horror and wonders how her company too has fallen victim to excessive meeting culture. Often this is paired with a simultaneous realization that execution has slowed down. Speed of execution may matter less when you’ve already ‘made it’ – but it’s everything when you’re trying to scale quickly, quite likely burning cash, & trying establish yourself as a legitimate business.
Yet meetings are critical to a company’s success. I don’t buy that companies can succeed without having lots of meetings.
So it’s a paradox.
This post is a playbook for how to set up meeting infrastructure at growth companies.
Why have meetings at all?
Ah yes. The building a business without having meetings idea.
This sentiment is a symptom of ‘bad’ meetings - not that all meetings are inherently bad. If you like the people you work with* and set the right structure, meetings can be mostly enjoyable.
Additionally, the meetings and less formal interaction implied by your organizational structure (e.g. who reports to who) form the backbone of the way people within an organization work and communicate with one another. Meetings are the primary mechanism to shape strategy and allocation of time and resources. In other words: the difference between success and failure.
Speed
As a rule of thumb, meetings should be speeding things up, not slowing things down. As such as a guideline, meetings should happen because they are the most efficient vehicle to do one or all of the following goals:
Make decisions
Figure out hard problems (e.g. because a diverse group is looking problems or data collaboratively)
Assign out work for follow up
Keep colleagues updated
Support a direct report
A ‘bad’ meeting - e.g. one that feels like a waste of time - may be a sign that the meeting that shouldn’t be happening. But it may also be a sign that the agenda for the meeting is wrong, a direct report is coasting or underperforming, or the manager or participating stakeholders aren’t adequately prepping for the meeting. A bad one-on-one is a sign of a deeper underlying symptom - one-on-ones should definitely be happening.
Standing meetings, mission meetings & one-off meetings
‘Standing meetings’ form the backbone of our communication architecture at Context. They happen with recurrence and don’t go away.
'Mission meetings’ (borrowed from Andy Grove) have a specific business goal (e.g. a mission) in mind, and happen for a finite amount of time. The meetings that support our OKR cycle are a good example of mission meetings, yet non-OKR examples crop up regularly too whenever cross functional teams get together to tackle a specific strategic challenge.
‘One-off meetings’ happen once for a specific reason and not again.
For the purposes of this post, I will be outlining our standing meetings, as these are not company-specific. However, I’ll note that key contributors to meeting bloat in my experience are:
Confusing a mission meeting - which is really to produce a specific decision or action on a specific initiative - for a standing meeting
Creating a standing meeting for what should be a one-off meeting
Having a standing meeting to make decisions when one of two things should really happen: a topic is more urgent, and shouldn’t wait for a recurring meeting, OR a topic is not that important, and shouldn’t be reserved for a meeting at all but rather a Slack or email discussion.
I would also note that in order to cut down meeting bloat and to make more decisions over email, an accountable party should try to propose a solution upfront rather than wait to do this for the live interaction, unless the purpose of the meeting itself is to brainstorm something.
Context’s current meeting architecture
Here’s a list of the standing meetings we’re currently running at Context Travel:
Steering committee - in lieu of a staff meeting (e.g. where the CEO and her direct reports meet weekly), we’ve carved out two meetings. One is our business performance meeting (see below), where we review trailing week business performance with a slightly larger group. The other is a ‘steering committee’ - we run it at the end of the week – a very small group that sits between the board and the company to make certain decisions, in particular around resource allocation.
Business performance meeting – the business performance meeting is our key trading meeting. The goal of the meeting is to improve business performance: keep key stakeholders on the same page regarding business performance, and generate a list of follow-up tasks. Rinse and repeat. This meeting forms the beginning of the ‘trading week’ and as such is the beginning of a communication cascade to the functional staff meetings & one-on-ones.
Functional staff meetings & team standups - staff meetings are meetings where a team manager meets with their direct reports, and maybe one or two individual contributors. The goal of this meeting is to cascade key messages, review functional performance, and remove blockers.
We’re agnostic on whether these are better as a standup or a scheduled weekly meeting. However they do need to be happening, and probably no less frequently than weekly in situations where a lot is changing quickly.
They should include cascaded messages from the business performance meeting & one on ones, as well as a review of relevant departmental KPIs.
Relevant senior team members outside of the function can and should be regularly invited to attend these meetings with some regularity and depending on the agenda, or for special topics.
Sales standups – whether this is appropriate at your startup depends on your business model. At Context, we have a reasonably complicated lead-to-confirmed booking sales process, with a lot of opportunity to enhance the value of the lead throughout the sales process, as well as opportunity to create a ton of delivery complexity for our operations team downstream. As such, sales is an activity that necessitates daily senior attention. The goal is to improve sales conversion and maximize booking values. These meetings can be very short (e.g. 10-30 minutes). Here’s a flavor of sales stand-ups:
Daily sales standup - sales leader runs meeting with sales team. Everyone’s top leads and strategies to close are discussed
Sales & operations standup - sales leader pulls the key top leads for discussion with operations leader
End of week sign off - before taking off for the weekend, have all possible open orders and leads been closed out?
One-on-ones - a lot has been written about one-on-ones. It’s the primary way junior team members are directly supported by their manager. The goal is to best support the work and development of a direct report, as well as to provide less senior reaches of the organization a way to contribute ideas that can make it straight to the top. A manager’s role in a one on one is to help tease this out.
I don’t have any strong views as to how best run a one-on-one, but I believe they need to happen weekly with direct reports. I will offer up one thought - the one-on-one should be 50/50 manager/direct report talking. Ben Horowitz actually suggests one on ones should be 90% listening.
I can't improve on Ben's post here, also featured in The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
Other types of one-on-ones: skip levels & laterals.
A skip level meeting is where a manager reaches one or two levels down in her reporting line. I use skip levels when there are new roles that I want to stay close to, or a disproportionately important area of the business that’s a step removed from my regular work. I find them to be very useful but also use sparingly.
Laterals are meetings where two people from different functions meet. Organizations need this to happen - however I would note caution around making these standing vs mission specific. In my observation recurring laterals are a key contributor to meeting bloat.
Standing cross-functional meetings (e.g. operations & tech meet every two weeks) – I’m personally not a fan of these. I would caution using as standing meetings vs one-off or mission specific. It’s another key contributor to meeting bloat, and worse still can really unnecessarily slow the organization down. Don’t wait for a meeting in the future - if something is critical talk about it now, if something is less critical perhaps a decision over email / Slack can suffice.
All hands - the goal of all hands is twofold - to provide transparency on company performance and key initiatives, & to make your team feel included & good about working here.
Conclusion
It’s often said that meetings are expensive, and it's true. Andy Grove highlights this point in ‘High Output Management’. Our weekly business performance meeting costs well over $1k in staff time. Even more routine meetings in smaller forums rarely cost less than $100. Just as I wouldn’t flippantly expense a $100 business lunch, we should be very aware of the hidden costs of meetings.
What can often get lost: meetings are cheap compared to everyone not being on the same strategic page. The cost of an unproductive team member, or a team member focused on the wrong thing, is far in excess of their salary – it’s their salary plus the strategic impact that a productive team member could be having.
So embrace it: proactively plan out your communication architecture to use meetings to supercharge your organization.
* If not, start there