213: How to Hold an Effective Team Meeting as a Big Thinker

Welcome to the She Thinks Big! Podcast. Get ready to level up your thinking and expand your horizons. I’m your host, Andrea Liebross, your guide on this journey of big ideas and bold moves. I am the best-selling author of She Thinks Big: The Entrepreneurial Woman's Guide to Moving Past the Messy Middle and Into the Extraordinary.

I support women like you with the insights and mindset you need to think bigger and the strategies and systems you need to turn that thinking into action and make it all a reality. Are you ready to stop thinking small and start thinking big? Let’s dive in.

Hello out there. I am back recording podcasts. This is the first podcast that I am recording in 2025. Now, I hope it is not the first podcast that you're listening to in 2025, but my team and I did a pretty good job of getting ahead of the game, batching podcast recordings. So I am back at it. I am back in my little podcast room here in the basement of my house that is soundproof, doesn't have the best lighting so that is something I'm going to work on in 2025, the lighting in here.

I'm curious where you are. I have heard, and I was discussing this with Stacey, my podcast producer, that probably I am with you either in your car with you. Hello, where are we going? I am on a walk. Maybe we have a pet with us. I am emptying the dishwasher with you. I'm folding laundry with you. You're probably doing something else while you are listening to this, but you've got a friend, I'm here with you.

When I think about what I want to share with you each and every week, I do think about specific people that I work with and I think about what they need to hear about and hopefully, that's the same thing that you need to hear about. Because really what I want to do is be of service to you.

I love to hear from you too. This is an open invitation for this year to message me. Connect with me somehow. There are so many ways. You can go to Instagram and just direct message me, you can go to my website and send me, fill up a contact form, you can go and send me an email at support@andrealiebross.com, whatever it is, connect with me and tell me more about what you want to hear about because I love it, I love hearing from you.

If you are on a walk or emptying the dishwasher or folding laundry or driving, snap a photo. Shoot it over. I want to be with you. I want to see where you're at because I my friends listen to many of podcasts in the car. I would say my top three listening spots are in the car, that’s probably number one, number two would be on a walk. We used to have really big dogs. We don't have any anymore, but I take walks now by myself, and then the third time that I probably listen to podcasts the most often is when I am making dinner.

So where are you? Let’s do this. Today, we are going to dive into a topic that I think is a game-changer for you as a business owner, as a female entrepreneur, as a CEO, I want you to really start embracing the fact that you are the CEO of your business. If you are the CEO of your business, and even if you're CEO of your household, we have a lot of meetings, official and unofficial.

Sometimes I know, based on my own experience, that meetings are too long, they're too frequent, and they leave you feeling like nothing got accomplished. If you are someone, and I know you are, I know you've had meetings that are too long, that happen too often, the meetings that you feel like that was a waste of time, nothing was accomplished, this episode is for you.

By the end of our time together today, I want you to have clear strategies for how to shorten the meetings, while still making them meaningful and impactful and getting bleep-dee-bleep done. In our next 20 or so minutes together, I'm going to share with you how you can get access to some simple yet really powerful meeting formats that I have created to help you run efficient, effective meetings. Are you ready? Let's go.

All right, number one here. Let's chat about why you, as a big thinker, struggle with meetings in general. There's a lot of coaching time I spend around meetings. Here is what I think. Here's the thing about you as a big thinker. You love ideas. You thrive on thinking about all the possibilities, connecting the dots, dreaming up solutions. Probably visioning for you isn't as hard as it is for some because you're a big thinker, but these incredible strengths that you have can also derail your meetings.

Too often, I see my clients turning their meetings into status reports, kind of a rundown of everything that's happening in the business, updates on what's about to happen. You go around, you let every team member talk, but that's not what a meeting should be. Team meetings should focus on what impacts the entire team and requires group discussion or decision making, that we need everybody's input on.

If your meetings are feeling bloated—my daughter uses that word a lot—if they feel bloated or unfocused, stick with me, keep listening because I've got some solutions that I think you're going to love. All right, so let's start with the essentials, I will call it, of meeting cadence, how frequently they should happen, and the format, the basics.

Now, number one thing to remember when we talk about the basic foundational pieces of your meetings, predictability is key. It's key. We all like to know what's going to happen. You like to know when you turn on this podcast player and you hear me, you'd like to know what the format usually is of my podcasts. Just like that, every meeting, whether it's a one-on-one meeting or a team meeting, it should have a very predictable expected purpose, it should have a predictable format, it should have a predictable duration, and it should have an intended outcome.

The simplest way to summarize all that is time agenda outcome. Hey, team, we're going to be here for 20 minutes. Does everybody have their calendar? 20 minutes? We got 20 minutes. Great, there's time. Agenda. We are going to talk about one, two, and three. An outcome. By the end of our time together, I want you to know blah, blah, blah, or have us to have made a decision on X, Y, and Z. Predictability, that's number one, that's the key.

Number two, one-on-one meetings, I think you should hold these about every one to two weeks and they should be 20 to 30 minutes. They are ideal. A one-on-one meeting is ideal for checking in on progress, talking about challenges, obstacles, you giving feedback and maybe a little coaching, and then making sure you and that person are aligned on priorities.

I do these one-on-one meetings, probably every two weeks or so, with my team members. This is exactly what we do. This is the time for the progress report. This is the time for her to bring to the table things that are hard or challenges she's facing where she needs my input. Me too, vice versa. This is for me to provide some feedback for her and then make sure that for the next two weeks, we're aligned on the priorities.

Now afterward, I make sure that we document everything that was discussed. So I use now the Fathom Notetaker in my meetings. Because my meetings are on Zoom. There are options if they're in person for you out there, so go look for those. But I use, with my team members, Fathom Notetaker and it does this whole follow-up email for me. In fact, there is literally a button that says “Send follow-up email to participant,” “Share notes”. So we have no confusion about next steps. We have no confusion about the decisions we made. I will put a link to Fathom Notetaker in the show notes.

Now, if it is an all-team meeting, they should probably happen every two to four weeks, like once a month, and they should be no longer than 45 minutes. The focus of team meetings should really be big-picture updates on things that affect the entire team. We should focus on the big-picture updates that affect everybody. We should focus on collaborating for problem-solving, only bring things to the table that need everybody's opinion on. Then they should also serve as a place where we can align on where we're moving. What are our goals and what are our strategies?

Pro tip out there. Avoid turning these meetings into status reports. I just had a call about this with the client. Too often, they turn into status reports, and status reports on things that everybody doesn't need to know. They become boring, they become feeling like they're a waste of time.

Use a project management tool like I use ClickUp or email if that's where you’re at for this kind of individual updates and save that time together, save your meeting time for real discussions that you want everybody's input on. You want to make some decisions and you want to know what other people think.

There is what a one-on-one meeting should look like, how often it should happen, what a team meeting should look like, what you should be talking about, and how often that should happen. I have created what I will call them simple, but powerful formats for these different types of meetings.

If you want a copy, send me an email. Send an email to support@andrealiebross.com with the subject line “Request for a meeting format,” and I would be happy to share them with you. Now, let's talk strategies to round this discussion out, let's just talk about some strategies for shorter and smarter meetings. This is where the work smarter, not harder thing comes in.

I'm going to go down pretty quickly. I'm going to give you 10 strategies for shorter and smarter meetings. Now, we already talked about the first couple. Number one, define the clear objectives. What is the purpose of the meeting? What is the outcome we're aiming for?

Number two, limit the agenda. One to three key topics. Save the rest for later or for follow-up. Number three is the time limits. Stick to max of 30 minutes for one-on-ones and I would say max of 45 to 60 minutes for team meetings. There's our time agenda outcome.

Number four, for a smarter, not harder meeting, prepare in advance. I don't buy it. I don't buy the thought that I've heard recently from one client that I shouldn't have to prepare for this meeting. I should just have to show up. I think that is a bunch of BS. I think you should come prepared for every meeting. Now that can look different for different meetings, but you at least need to know what we're talking about. You have to have done a little bit of forethought.

If there's anything you want to share, you've got to bring any documents or have easy access to things while you're there. So number four is to prepare in advance. Number five is the format. Which is different than the agenda, the agenda is like, “These are three topics we want to talk about.”

The format, I say you should start with wins or celebrations. Number two, you should talk about those agenda issues: What are the key challenges? What are our topics? Then number three, you have to decide on the next steps and who owns it and when it needs to be accomplished by. Did you hear those two little things? Who owns it and when it needs to be accomplished by? People forget that.

Then they feel like these meetings are a waste of time because no one walks away knowing what to do. The number five strategy is to have that structured format. Then number six, which we mentioned before, document what was discussed. You can use Fathom for that or maybe you can type it in an email. Let's be efficient, and use some AI, people.

Which brings me to seven, using technology wisely. This means also that things that don't come to the meeting, things that don't need to be discussed in the meeting but do need to be shared, use your technology to share. Use Slack, Fox, or ClickUp, use whatever tools you're using to share those things. That's another way to use technology wisely.

Number eight for smarter, not harder is set the expectations. I must have said this like 10 ways from ways if you haven't noticed. Stick to the agenda, time, agenda, and outcome. Then here are numbers nine and ten. Number nine is to reserve some time in the meeting for big thinking.

Are you scheduling separate brainstorming sessions? You probably should if you find your meetings getting derailed by big, huge, big-thinking discussions. I think it's always good to have separate sessions for this big thinking. The big thinking honestly shouldn't really go on in a team meeting or a one-on-one meeting that's not the agenda of that meeting. Then number ten is to reflect on the efficacy of the meeting. After the meeting's over, reflect on the efficacy. Did you accomplish what you wanted to accomplish?

If you're on a walk right now, at the end of your walk, will you feel refreshed and exercised? Did the dog poop if you're on a walk? Did we accomplish what we wanted to accomplish? Here's just one real-life result that I heard this week. My client implemented some of these strategies. We did talk about it ahead of time.

She saw immediate results. She cut her weekly team meetings, which were 90 minutes, to bi-weekly 45-minute meetings, and she noticed that her team was way more engaged and way more energized. Another client, here's a change she made just in the past 17 days of January that has already occurred, she started sharing the notes for the meeting that occurred, like the documentation of the meeting, and then she saw fewer follow-ups and miscommunications. There are not tons of questions being asked. After a meeting, everybody has to have a meeting about the meeting. That's been eliminated.

What do you think? How are you going to change your meetings? Here is your challenge for the week. I see you out there. I already know that you can have better meetings. The challenge is to audit your current meetings. Are they predictable? Are they focused? Are they productive?

That's number one. That's your number one challenge. Number two, I want you to choose two strategies from that list of 10 strategies to try to put them into play. Are you limiting the agenda? Are you documenting everything? Apply them to your next meeting. Tell me what happened.

Then number three, if you want some guidance, don't forget to email us at support@andrealiebross.com and put “Request meeting format” in the subject line. Remember, the goal just isn't shorter meetings, it's smarter meetings. That really drives action and empowers all the people so we don't have disgruntled people.

Where are you on your journey? Where are we going? Have we made it to Target yet? Tell me. Listen, I know that your 20-minute drive time to Target is valuable, and I know that your team's time is valuable. Everybody's team time is valuable. Why don't you make every meeting and every drive count?

Be focused, and have an agenda for all these little parts of your life in your business. If you have found today's episode super helpful, will you do me a favor? Will you share it with a fellow business owner? Will you share it with your team? Sharing, my friends, is a way of creating connection.

Remember, connection creates conversation, creates conversion. This is a way to make friends, influence people, that kind of thing. By sharing podcasts, that's a way to do that. Remember, I'm always here for a conversation. If you want to take any of this to the next level, if you want help with it, head over to andreaslinks.com and book a discovery call, a consult call, or schedule a call. Let's chat.

Keep showing up, keep thinking big, and keep making extraordinary things happen. This is your time to level up. See you soon.

Thanks for tuning into the She Thinks Big! Podcast. If you're ready to learn the secret to unleashing your full potential, don't forget to grab a copy of my book, She Thinks Big: The Entrepreneurial Woman's Guide to Moving Past the Messy Middle and Into the Extraordinary. It's available on Amazon and at your favorite bookstore.

And while you're there, grab a copy for a friend. Inside, you'll both find actionable strategies and empowering insights to help you navigate the complexities of entrepreneurship and life, and step confidently into your extraordinary future.

If you found value in today's episode, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast platform. And if you're ready to take this learning a step further and apply it to your own business and life, head to andreaslinks.com and click the button to schedule a discovery call. Until next time, keep thinking big.