Business Meeting Schedule: Frequency Matters

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Traction" by Gino Wickman. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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What is an optimal business meeting schedule? Should you meet weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly?

According to Gino Wickman, the author of Traction, your business meeting schedule should consist of two types of meetings: quarterly and weekly. Your quarterly meeting should be a full-day event. Your weekly meeting should take place on the same day each week and follow the same agenda.

Here is how to set an optimal business meeting schedule, according to Gino Wickman.

What Is an Optimal Business Meeting Schedule?

It’s a myth that meetings are a waste of time—meetings are where you practice accountability and get traction. But they need to be productive. By following a structured business meeting schedule with purposeful agendas, you’ll find that everyone will get more done and continuously advance the company’s vision. You should have two types of leadership meetings: quarterly and weekly.

The Quarterly Meeting

When you have annual, three-year, and 10-year goals, it’s human nature for people to start wandering off track in about 90 days. To counter this, you need to focus on interim goals every 90 days—or you’ll lose sight of your vision.

Your quarterly leadership meeting should be a full-day, off-site event with the following agenda:

Opening: Each team member should share the following: good news from the last 90 days, what’s working/not working, and expectations for the day.
Review the previous quarter: Review the financials, then review the company and leadership team priorities to confirm which ones were achieved (you won’t complete 100% every quarter; strive for 80% or better). If you missed hitting a priority, you can advance it to the next quarter, reassign it, or, if it’s close to completion, just put it on a to-do list and finish it.
Review the vision to ensure everyone has clarity so you can set the right 90-day goals. As part of this, update the issues list.
Set the next quarter’s priorities: Follow the steps for setting priorities described earlier in this chapter. List what must be done in the quarter and narrow the list to three to seven items.
Tackle key issues: Determine your top three issues and go through the IDS (Identify, Discuss, Solve) process for each of the top three. Then begin moving down the list, solving as many issues as you can in the time available. Save the rest for your weekly leadership meeting.
Next steps: Clarify who is doing what, and whether there’s anything to communicate to the employees—for instance, any decisions made to solve problems.
Conclude: Each team member should share: feedback on the meeting, whether their expectations were met, their rating of the meeting from one to 10. (A successful meeting should get at least an eight.)

Repeat this meeting every quarter—don’t skip any quarters. Your quarterly meetings will become increasingly productive. At the end of the year add a second day to your quarterly meeting for annual planning, following this agenda.

Annual Planning Agenda — Day One

Opening: Team members should share: the company’s three greatest accomplishments, the individual’s greatest personal accomplishments, and expectations for the meeting.
Review the previous year: Review the financials, the previous year’s goals, and the last quarter’s priorities (just note whether each was done or not done).
Team building exercise: “The One Thing”: Have the team give each member feedback on her greatest strength and weakness. Then have each team member choose one thing to do differently.

Business Meeting Schedule: Frequency Matters