How To Run an Effective Executive Staff

After 20 years, Peter Drucker's principles of management are as powerful as ever

I previously wrote about a cadence of meetings that you can use to drive forward momentum in a company. This post goes into a more detail on how to run an effective executive staff meeting.

In the early days of a startup, thing may seem so chaotic that you can’t really plan. You’re turning your prototype into a real product, closing deals, raising money and hiring people. Who has time for meetings, right?

But at some point you realize that the whirlwind of activity that got you to this point isn’t going to get you to the next stage. Maybe there’s a bit too much chaos. The more there is to be done, the more you dive in until you’re stretched so thin you become the bottleneck to execution.

You might become frustrated that you’re having the same conversations with different people about what’s important and where to focus. Decisions need to be made quickly, but when things aren’t discussed or communicated across the group, that can easily lead to siloed, suboptimal situations. Sometimes the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing. 

Once you’ve got a couple of senior people in the team to run engineering, marketing or sales, it’s time to level up your execution. Running a productive executive staff meeting can be a good way to do that.

The primary purpose of the executive staff meeting is to ensure that major initiatives are moving forward and there’s sufficient coordination so that everyone is contributing to the best of their ability. 

The exec staff meeting is not a pulpit for founders or executives to pontificate on their philosophies of management, but rather a forum to collaborate and solve difficult problems as a group. 

Typically, the exec staff meeting should be scheduled early in the week. I find Tuesday works well, because that enables people to conduct their own team meetings on Monday. The meeting should be around 60 minutes, but as the team grows, it sometimes ends up running to 90 minutes. I have been in companies where the exec staff meeting runs for hours on end, but I’m not sure that’s the best use of time.  

When I joined Gatsby as CEO, the weekly agenda was made up of topics that I wanted to discuss or get alignment on. But that quickly became a bit too much like “the Zack show” and I encouraged others on the team to add topics to the agenda. That made for better discussions as it enabled people to surface items that were important to them and their teams.

Focus On Customers

Two perennial topics that I have found to be helpful in shaping the executive team agenda are Hot Prospects and Hot Customers. The idea is to facilitate a regular discussion concerning customer situations led by the head of sales and head of customer support, respectively. By regularly prioritizing customers you are signaling to the executive team (and hopefully the broader organization) their importance to your business.  

For example, the head of sales might raise an issue that a prospect wants to see a longer term product roadmap, needs a custom integration or operates at a scale you’ve never seen before. The idea is to surface edge cases that require additional discussion or resource commitments. You can brainstorm the problem in the executive staff meeting, come up with action items and next steps quickly because you’ve got all the necessary stakeholders in the room. 

Similarly, the head of customer service might raise a situation that is preventing a customer moving into production, or a customer who’s upset and may become a churn risk. 

You can use the executive team meeting as an early warning system on these and other vital issues so that the organization is moving faster and in unison. If the pipeline is looking light, brainstorm some campaigns and get them out by end of week. Is a new feature slipping? Figure out which deals are at risk and determine some alternatives for impacted customers. 

Ideally the exec team becomes a productive and supportive group for sharing any problems that require attention. As we used to say at MySQL, “Bad news is good news” since once you know something isn’t working, you can take action to fix it.  

I have often used the exec team meeting to review departmental metrics, such as marketing pipeline, engineering roadmap, customer churn and similar. Reviewing these in rotation once 4 to 6 weeks can be a good way to spot problems early while increasing accountability. It provides everyone visibility into (and hopefully empathy!) around other areas of the business, which can foster trust and collaboration. 

More complex discussions, such as annual planning, product strategy, fundraising may be better dealt with in a separate discussion or part of an offsite meeting.  

What Makes An Effective Executive?

When you join an executive leadership team, you are no longer just a functional or departmental leader. You must now operate at a broader level to determine what is best for the company. As such, you are expected to contribute beyond your functional area of responsibility. 

This can be a tough moment for people who have typically been experts in a specialized domain. Sometimes they are not used to having their ideas or plans questioned. Or they are not used to thinking about the broader implication of their functional area. 

Peter Drucker put forward a set of operating principles in his HBR essay “What Makes an Effective Executive?” These provide an excellent starting point. As an executive you should ask: 

• What needs to be done?

• What is right for the enterprise?

Following from this, a good measure of the effectiveness of the executive team meeting is the extent you are making decisions and developing action plans. A good meeting is more than just discussion. These too, are part of Drucker’s principals. 

I had long been familiar with Drucker’s principles, but I really saw them put to use at MySQL under CEO Marten Mickos. Drucker’s work has had a profound impact on my leadership style and my career. I often think how much more effective most managers would be if they simply focused on making decisions, developing action plans and communicating. 

Drucker’s Principles

Drucker concluded that great managers may be charismatic or dull, generous or tightfisted, visionary or numbers oriented. But every effective executive follows eight simple practices:

• They ask “What needs to be done?”

• They ask “What is right for the enterprise?”

• They develop action plans 

• They are accountable for decisions

• They take responsibility for communications

• They focus on opportunities rather than problems

• They run productive meetings 

• They think and say “we” rather than “I”

I encourage you to reflect on these principles and consider how to incorporate them into your own management style. They can provide focus to any executive meeting and often have the knock-on effect of improving decision making throughout the organization.