What Your Team Meetings Are Missing

If your team meetings look the same as they did last year, they need an upgrade.

How great are your team meetings?

For most founders, the answer is... not very.

As your company grows, meetings become the primary way your vision stays alive inside the business.

A bad team meeting isn't just wasted time; it's another week of misalignment.

Here are seven techniques my CEOs are using to improve their team meetings:

1. To improve quality, have AI review the reports before the meeting.

Your leaders might be using AI to draft their updates, but that's not enough to ensure clear thinking.

Ask your team to use AI to critique their own reports before they present them:

• Where could it be clearer?
• Where is the logic weak?
• What question is a founder likely to ask that this doesn't yet answer?

This is one of the easiest and most helpful AI rituals you can embed into your culture. The result is stronger reports and a higher quality of conversation in the meeting.

2. To improve mindset, start with wins and praise.

Most people enter team meetings with a list of "blockers". Blockers are places where they feel stuck. However, feeling "stuck" isn't the resourceful mindset you want to start with.

Start by asking everyone to share a personal win or recognise someone else's help. This generates a feeling of progress and puts people in a positive frame of mind.

Teams resist this at first. Finding genuine praise feels like effort. By making it a norm, it creates the social pressure needed to actually do it. And everyone appreciates it once it's done.

3. To improve alignment, read together in silence.

Reading reports requires concentration, and that's hard when you're on your own with notifications to distract you every 5 seconds. 

But for some reason, it's easier to concentrate on a report when the whole team does it at the same time. 

Amazon understood this when it introduced a concept called 'Study Time' into its meetings.

At the start of every meeting, all participants spend 20-30 minutes reading each other's memos. They add comments and questions in other people's sections, and keep an eye out for questions they can answer.

If you want everyone to be aware of what's happening in other people's areas, there is no better way to achieve this.

This gets the room onto the same page, literally.

4. To improve the format, end with a feedback survey.

People want to leave a long, boring, useless meeting as quickly as possible.

However, without a proper feedback loop, no meeting will ever improve.

Create a short feedback survey to complete it at the end of the meeting. I ask these questions:

• What was your number one takeaway from this meeting?
• How would you rate the meeting out of ten?
• What's one idea to improve it?

It takes less than 60 seconds, and the data tells whether your meetings are getting better or worse. It works for any meeting, even board meetings.

5. To improve dynamics, use AI to interrogate the transcript.

Many teams use AI to create transcripts of the meeting. However, after taking their own action items, they fail to extract the full insight the transcript captures.

Feed the meeting transcript into your favourite AI and ask:

• What's your critique of the meeting structure?
• What team dynamics are at play here?
• What are your recommendations on how each participant can improve?

If you have a support team, this is easy to delegate, and the insights are often good enough to substitute an expensive executive team coach.

6. To improve follow-up, build an accountability agent.

Actions that get agreed in one meeting are often forgotten by the next one. Some CEOs create spreadsheets to aid with follow-up. But smart teams take it one step further.

Build an agent that follows up automatically. I created a Cowork agent to:

• Take the transcript
• Captures to-do lists for every leader
• Follow up by email and provide support
• Share tips to improve their next presentation

Agents have transformed the way I run my team, and they're set to transform all our companies over the next few months.

7. To improve focus, set up a meeting Slack channel.

If you're like most founders, your mind is full of questions and ideas for your team. It can be a major distraction if your team feel like they have to respond immediately. 

The team meeting is often the ideal place to address questions and ideas. Realising this, one of my clients creates a channel for each recurring meeting where anyone can ask questions and share ideas.

Here's the catch is: There's no obligation to respond to questions and ideas until the meeting. 

The Slack channel provides a place for non-urgent questions and discussion topics—an open agenda—and reduces distraction between meetings. Pretty smart.

Here’s a recap:

1. Have AI review the reports before the meeting.

2. Start with wins and praise.

3. Read together in silence.

4. End with a feedback survey.

5. Use AI to interrogate the transcript.

6. Build an accountability agent.

7. Set up a meeting Slack channel.

Which of these techniques can you apply to improve your team meetings?

Take what's useful and give your meetings the upgrade they deserve.