If your regular leadership meeting isn’t a highlight of your week, month or quarter, then you need a reset. These are the exact meetings worth looking forward to — not for the information shared but for the connection that happens.
Most leadership calls don’t fail because folks aren’t smart or prepared or even thoughtful. They fail because the meetings are designed to move information, not to do leadership work.
At the American Press Institute, our monthly directors’ call was one such meeting. It failed on multiple counts: from too many cancellations to rushed updates and low energy. But it was the only consistent space for our senior leaders to think together. So in September, I began listening to my directors with the intention of redesigning the space for meaning-making.
After the first couple of redesigned meetings, two directors surprised me with separate pings: I think we need more time. This year, we’ve extended the meeting from 60 to 75 minutes — not because there’s more to cover, but because our directors want and deserve more space to think together.
What follows is a practical playbook you can adapt to reset your leadership meetings, whether they are virtual like ours, hybrid or in person.
What the meeting is (and is not)
To redesign a meeting, focus on clarity and boundaries. Then listen and loop your team for understanding so your reset is also responsive to their wants and needs.
For example, knowing it was my job to protect my leadership team’s balcony time, I knew I had to design away from status updates, performative presentations and weekly-level problem solving.
This meant the meeting had to be designed for:
- Reflection before reaction
- Foresight instead of hindsight
- Shared sensemaking
- Strategic alignment
The five moves of a leadership meeting
Over the past five months, a repeatable structure emerged: a set of facilitation moves and learning design principles that helped us slow down, think together and leave with shared clarity and connection.
Let’s think of this as the five moves of a leadership meeting that turn it from an update forum into a space for leadership work and connection.
Move 1: Ground
This new leadership meeting will always interrupt the busyness of the day, and that interruption is critical to our work, mission and well-being. We each must arrive with closed tabs and muted notifications because presence, not introspection alone, makes the time well-spent.
Grounding is about creating the conditions for your team to reflect on the past, think in drafts and lead with intention.
Facilitation prompts that have worked for us:
- Where did our mission come alive for you in the past month?
- What’s been constant for you — and what’s evolving?
- What reminded you of who API is as a team?
Move 2: Orient
After we’ve left the noise of the day behind, we orient ourselves with transparency and context-setting — not reporting out. This typically takes the form of a short executive and organizational update.
It doesn’t cover everything, and fighting the urge to overshare is real. For us, this looks like giving our leaders enough context and information to think well, together.
Facilitation prompts that orient our executive update:
- One thing unchanged
- One thing in motion
- One thing to keep in mind
From there, take a few questions and keep the agenda moving because the meat-and-potatoes of the leadership meeting are ahead and everyone is hungry.
Move 3: Surface
This part of our leadership agenda is about bringing the unseen into the room. We aim to surface early signals, acknowledge tensions and complexities, and emerge opportunities.
This move to surface insights from each leader’s perspective is more about having time than having answers, which is why we time-box first for independent thinking and discovery and second for airtime.
And our agenda reflects this:
What I’m seeing → Why it matters → One question I’m holding
Move 4: Focus
Strategy requires restraint. If leaders are going to hold 75 minutes once a month to connect and think alongside one another, then focusing our attention is critical.
This meeting reset intentionally advances from reflection and ideation to focus and prioritization. What is surfaced in the previous section of the agenda becomes the focus for the rest of the meeting. Choosing the idea to go deeper on is an act of leadership.
Facilitation prompts that focus our meeting:
- What themes or throughlines are we seeing?
- Which opportunity or pattern do we most want to explore together?
- What might this mean for API’s three months, six months, a year down the line?
- What would it look like to act on this opportunity?
- What’s one meaningful and manageable shared focus for [month]?
Move 5: Make meaning
We close this new leadership meeting with an eye toward meaning-making to emphasize memory, narrative and motivation.
By articulating in a word, a phrase or even an emoji what the conversation meant to each of us, we’re enabling the meaning that shapes our memory. And that connection to an experience impacts our commitment.
Facilitation prompts that shape our sensemaking:
- What are you leaving with?
- What patterns, appreciations or shifts in perspective are resonating?
The quiet design choice that changed everything
This leadership meeting was designed around slides as shared memory. We use a Google deck, not as a presentation tool, but as the connective tissue.
These slides are set up as “worksheets” with text boxes throughout and the speaker notes used for notetaking. Both allow our leaders to remain present and attentive to the prompts at hand. And the slides have created a living record of how we’re thinking — not just what decisions were made.
As a result of these slides and the meeting design in general, I’ve seen (and felt) some noticeable shifts in our leadership culture:
- We’ve stopped outright canceling the meeting.
- Engagement has increased.
- Leaders asked for more time together.
- Strategic alignment is improving.
- Siloes are slowly coming down.
- Organic ways to collaborate are increasing.
- Specific praise has become a mainstay.
Ready for your template?
Here’s a distilled version of the agenda that we’ve been using.
- Opening reflection (5-7 minutes)
- Context + orientation (10-12 minutes)
- Foresight + tensions (15 minutes)
- Deep dive on one (15 minutes)
- Sensemaking close (5 minutes)
Meetings are one of the few places where leadership becomes visible in real time. There’s no byline for us to hide behind.
When we slow down our meetings, grounding them in collective purpose and focusing them on shared thinking, they stop being calendar obligations and start enabling leadership as a practice.
