5 Meetings Every Manager Should Schedule, Immediately

Meetings, in my opinion, are one of the tools in your management and leadership toolbelt that are often overlooked and under-appreciated.

Meetings should feel like productive work sessions or opportunities for growth within your team. If they are neither, you may want to consider tweaking the meeting format and/or nixing some of your meetings altogether.

Today, I’m going to share with you five meetings that you should have on your calendar to drive performance and progress, build better relationships with your team, and create a strong, thriving company culture.

The five types of meetings I’m going to share with you today have all been tried and tested at Fellow and have been perfected over time:

1. Leadership meetings
2. Daily standup meetings
3. One-on-one meetings
4. All-hands meetings
5. Weekly summary (asynchronous meeting)

1 Leadership meetings

At Fellow, we host a leadership meeting every Monday for about 1.5 hours. We use a modified Level 10 meeting agenda format, which allows us to focus on the most important things (aka the big rocks) as well as get customer and employee highlights, share good news, review metrics and keep the company on-track.

👉 Learn more about the importance of leadership meetings.

2 Daily standup meetings

The second meeting that almost everyone at Fellow engages in is the departmental daily standup meeting. For example, my marketing team and I have a daily standup every morning at 9:30 am for about 20-30 minutes where we go over the priorities and focus for the day as well as any roadblocks that may be impeding progress on any given tasks.

3 One-on-one meetings

The third meeting, and arguably one of the most important, is the one-on-one meeting. The one-on-one should be something you do with each of your direct reports, individually, on a weekly or bi-weekly cadence.

This is NOT a status check-in meeting or a project-focused meeting but rather an opportunity for you and your direct report to give and get feedback, build a strong relationship, and think about career progression.

Interested in learning more? We wrote the definitive guide to one-on-one meetings.

4 All-hands meetings

Typically held once a month, this meeting is important for overall company alignment, energizing and inspiring the company, and showing off the work that different departments are focused on.

For us at Fellow, we host these all-hands meetings monthly and we typically do a message from the CEO, metrics review, talk through any important or big news items and then we do a show and tell period where a team or two will present something they’re working on and we wrap up with a team-building activity.

5 Weekly summary (asynchronous meetings)

Tthe fifth meeting is something we’ve put in place at Fellow that is unique and something I hadn’t seen before joining the company. It’s held in our calendars as a “meeting” but it’s actually something we record in a recurring meeting agenda in Fellow and all do asynchronously.

The meeting is called the Weekly Summary and in it, each department outlines key metrics, projects that were accomplished that week, things of note for the rest of the company, etc. We schedule it for Fridays at 4pm and our CEO uses that to inform his Sunday email, which he sends out to the entire company.

Again, this isn’t a typical meeting that people have to show up to physically but rather a summary in a meeting agenda that we track, week to week, in Fellow.

👉 Learn more about asynchronous meetings and asynchronous communication.

You may have more than just these five types of meetings on your plate and you may be hearing of some unique meetings that you hadn’t done before now. Either way, the key is to find a cadence that works for you and your team and iterate on it often.

Pro Tip

Collecting feedback right after your meeting, with a tool like Fellow, can help you understand what’s working and what isn’t.

Learn about Fellow’s feedback feature

Meetings are at the heart of the way we work. We hope that these five meetings help you and your team stay productive and motivated.

What would be on the top of YOUR must-have meetings list?