The Campbell Academy Blog (89)

Cadence of meetings

One of the attributes that experts and people who write about these things would suggest is essential for success, and leadership is the ability to set the cadence of your meetings and live by them.

What I mean by this is deciding how often you will meet with different groups of people to achieve different things, making sure this is as effective, as clear, and as instructive as possible without wasting any time or effort.

Setting the cadence, the number of meetings, how long they take, and how often you repeat them at the start of your project or mission allows you to live by that, has a structure to work to, and has accountability to report to.

The trick is never to meet too much but never to meet too little.

The trick is to know exactly why you're meeting when you're meeting, and what is expected of everyone in the meeting.

What should you have read, what should you bring, what are you taking away, and what will you do before the next time?

This is how shit gets done amongst people; it's how the most amount of shit gets done in the most effective way.

Treating everyone like an adult, trusting them to do what they said they would do but to tell you if they were not able and then going through being honest in the meetings and coming out of it with clarity and other things to do or how you move from here to there and there to there.

It's how strategy works; it's how it gets implemented.

Deciding on your big, hairy, audacious goal three years away and then dividing it into cadence steps, tick, tick, tick, having the ability to adapt as the unexpected happens, but always keeping on track.

It does not come naturally to me, not at all, but it's as important as counting the money and so it has to be done and the effort has to be made to make it as good as possible.