Five Meeting Rules Every CFO Should Follow

Some finance leaders feel meetings are inefficient, preferring agile communication, and they dislike the structure and potential bureaucracy of meetings. However, a well-structured, intentional approach to meetings can address many of these concerns and demonstrate how meetings can be a powerful leadership tool.

As a CFO or senior finance leader, you spend a significant portion of your workday in meetings, whether it’s with the leadership team, small groups or individual team members. However, many leaders fail to structure meetings with the discipline required to ensure productivity, alignment and follow-up.

Every meeting is an opportunity to reinforce your leadership by driving alignment, solving problems and inspiring action. Even informal one-on-one conversations can and should have structure to maximise impact.

Why is this so important? Your time is the scarcest resource you have, so you must use it effectively. Given the time spent in meetings, you need to create a routine and approach to make them effective in moving the team and organisation towards the company’s vision.

Let’s explore FIVE strategies and best practices for making meetings an impactful tool in your leadership arsenal:

Format

The most common types of meetings for you as the leader are as follows:

Daily or weekly stand ups.

These meetings are a maximum of 30 minutes. You can use them for a quick update and immediate alignment with the team. Each person speaks for a maximum of five minutes and communicates their priorities for the week, and what help they may need from other members of the team to enable them to overcome hurdles.

One-on-one meetings.

This could be for coaching and mentoring your team, focusing on resolving a particular issue or bottleneck or alignment around the individual’s or their team’s performance against their KPIs and goals. These meetings should be a maximum of one hour – and an ideal target is 50 minutes, because it allows time between meetings to write up next steps or reset for the next meeting.

Leadership team meetings.

This is a meeting with your direct reports and should be held at least once a month, for anywhere between three and eight hours.

All-hands meetings.

These are for company-wide updates, culture building, and alignment and recognition. You must hold these meetings each month, normally for 30 to 60 minutes. Offering free food is the most powerful way to ensure maximum attendance.

Retreats and workshops.

Retreats are incredibly powerful events to build trust and create alignment around strategic plans. If your company has more than 100 employees, you should hold retreats at least once a year for two days. Workshops could resolve specific problems or progress opportunities, such as solutioning for a major client tender.

Timing

Regardless of the type of meeting, be strict about the time you invest in each of these meetings and hold firm to those timings. Start on time and finish on time!

Discipline in your meetings helps to create a culture of accountability.

Participants

Be deliberate in choosing the participants for the meeting and be considered in determining whether your presence is necessary.

It may be acceptable for you to start the meeting, set the context and objectives, and then say to the team, ‘Okay, over to you. I don’t need to be here, but I would like one participant to report back to me on the decisions made’.

Structure

Each type of meeting must have a clear and targeted outcome. It’s useful to build a standard and repeated agenda, ideally focused on three categories:

Inform. What do I want to share? What do I want to learn from my team? For example, some feedback you received from investors.

Approve. Are you approving something an individual or a team needs? For example, an investment.

Debate. Are you discussing an issue where you’re working towards a decision or is this the start of multiple discussions. For example, early discussions on the budget.

Minutes

Take minutes with clear follow-up actions and deadlines, sending them out within 24 hours.

These minutes are not meant to record every statement made. Instead, they’re about agreeing on the next steps and identifying the actions that need to be taken and assigning responsibility to complete.

I’ve done this for many years with my team: at the end of a meeting, I write something like, ‘Hi Abhijit, great discussion today! Just confirming these are the three things you’ll do, and these are the two things I’ll do’. Send it out quickly, then save the message for reference, or include in the calendar invitation for the next meeting.

Add deadlines to your calendar and invite the responsible people to those calendar events. This is powerful in creating accountability.

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Edited extract from Discipline Beats Vision: How to Be the Leader Your Company Needs – Starting Monday by Dane Hudson (Wiley, $36.95), available at all leading retailers, and Amazon.