A lot of businesses get caught up in meetings. And you know, the whole concept of even raising the issue or having a meeting can often bring a glaze over people's eyes.

So what are the actual meeting structures that we really need to think about?

Huddles

The first one is what we call huddles. These are very quick stand up style meetings which run for five or 10 minutes at a time and often run at a team level. A typical agenda in a huddle are:

• What am I working on now?
• What are the things I need to complete today/this week?
• What do I need help with?

Huddles are very operational, completed on the run and are often stand up style meetings.

Leadership Meetings

The second level of business meetings that we need to run is what we call leadership meetings. Every business really needs to have a leadership team. If we're going to run effectively, we want to be complementing each other by having a leadership team that actually helps run the business effectively and efficiently.

In the leadership team meeting, we're going to talk more about the types of things that are actually going ON in the business e.g.

• How well are we tracking towards our strategic initiatives?
• What actions we've been committing to?
• How well we have been tracking on those?

The interval on the leadership team meeting would often be on a weekly cycle.

Governance Level

The third level of the meeting would tend to be more of a management or what I call a governance level. Here what we're talking about the business strategically. This is about the strategic direction that we're wanting to take our business and how well we're tracking towards that.

The frequency of these tends to be more dependent on the business itself. It can often run around monthly or quarterly, but they are generally less frequent. But really what they are looking at, is trying to give direction to the leadership team and our business, particularly who in turn will give direction to our operational team.

So that's the three different levels of business meetings if you want to run an effective structure in your meetings.