As a senior leader, one of the most common complaints I hear is about the number of meetings people are expected to attend. Meeting fatigue is real, and when calendars become a solid block of meetings, it can be challenging to find time to complete essential tasks.

But the solution is simple: have better meetings, and you can have fewer of them.

Over my decades of experience leading teams, I’ve honed my approach to meetings until I found a style that works for me. Of course, everyone is different, but I believe this framework can help you get the most out of your meetings too.

Create an Agenda Agendas are essential for a few reasons. Why do you need to have this meeting? In creating an agenda, you answer that question. For recurring meetings with my engineering, product, and architecture managers, we keep an open document that they review and contribute to ahead of the meeting each week. Often, they’ll add their items, make a comment with a clarifying question, or remove a topic that’s being addressed in another forum. I find a collaborative agenda is the best way to ensure everyone understands the goals of that meeting, and everyone feels a sense of ownership for it.

Define Meeting Sections I break my agendas into three sections:

Share updates and information

Discuss ideas and shape strategies

Make decisions on lingering topics

By defining meeting sections, you provide essential clarity for those attending the meetings. They know where they’ll be asked to share ideas, where they’ll be asked to provide updates, and where you need to decide and move on.

Focus on Collaborative Discussion In the "Discuss" section of the meeting, we brainstorm and shape the strategies that the team will execute, and everyone is given a chance to contribute and provide feedback. This section tends to be the longest part of the meeting, and it's where you can leverage the collective knowledge of the team to find new and better solutions.

Make Decisions and Move Forward The "decide" section comes last, and it's where we make decisions on lingering topics that we haven’t yet come to a consensus on, but that need to get done. As great as collaboration is, sometimes you just need someone to make a decision, and the managers in the room can make that final call when necessary.

Update the Agenda as You Go During the meeting, we update the agenda as we discuss it to document our decisions and map out the next steps. It becomes a living document that allows us to review previous discussions, follow up on action items, and make sure none of the work we’ve done in the meeting gets lost.

In conclusion

By creating a framework for your meetings, you can make them more productive and valuable, which hopefully means you can have fewer of them. It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved.