S2E12: TRACTION | Running World-Class Meetings

Today we’re digging into the EOS® Meeting Pulse and the power of living in a 90-Day World®. If you’ve ever seen your team lose interest or momentum after a few months, this tool is for you. In the realm of EOS, we embrace the power of a 90-Day World, driven by the steady rhythm of The Meeting Pulse®.

Like a well-choreographed dance that keeps you in sync and propels you forward, the 90-Day World provides the perfect balance between short-term action and long-term vision. It’s a sweet spot where progress thrives and results blossom. With a clear time frame, we can set ambitious – yet attainable – goals and keep laser focused on our efforts.

That 90-Day World allows us to accomplish something of significance, but it’s also short enough to keep our eyes and our attention on it. The Meeting Pulse ensures we stay on track, and it also holds us accountable. Regular check-ins, like clockwork, keep us aligned. They foster collaboration, and they drive momentum.

We can celebrate wins, address challenges, and recalibrate as needed, all within that 90-day container. 

The secret sauce to The Meeting Pulse is the psychology behind it. Human nature craves milestones and deadlines. The Meeting Pulse taps into our innate desire for progress and achievement. It creates a sense of urgency, igniting our motivation, and unleashing our full potential.

The EOS Meeting Pulse consists of several key components that establish a consistent meeting rhythm, facilitate open communication, promote accountability, and drive progress. By adhering to The Meeting Pulse, organizations ensure that important discussions take place, priorities are reviewed, and everyone is aligned and engaged in moving your business forward.

Here are the core elements of The Meeting Pulse. First, you have your Level 10 Meeting™. That’s a weekly, 90-minute meeting where your leadership team comes together to address issues, review Scorecards and metrics, discuss Rock progress, and identify priorities for the upcoming week. It follows a structured agenda to maintain focus and maximize efficiency. It’s all about removing friction on the leaders, the leadership teams, and the business itself. 

Then you have quarterly planning. That’s a full-day session held every 90 days and dedicated to strategic planning and setting priorities for the upcoming quarter. It involves reviewing the last quarter’s results, reassessing goals, and defining new Rocks and priorities – with a heavy dose of issue-solving to boot!

Next, your annual planning is a comprehensive multi-day session held once a year to establish the organization’s long-term vision, set goals for the upcoming year, assess your team’s health, and align every team member around a common purpose. 

Remember that your leadership team Level 10 Meeting is the most expensive meeting you have in time, energy, and money. Please take it seriously and prepare. Preparation, or lack thereof, is the single greatest problem I see in sessions. When you don’t prepare, you get top-of-mind, urgency-based thinking.

When you take time – 12 to 24 hours – prior to the meeting to really zoom out and consider what’s happening, what pain people are in, where there is friction, what the root cause really truly might be, and what you need to get out of that meeting, you come in and you do a better job. 

You have to treat your company as your #1 client. Everything flows from there. Attendance from everyone is mandatory, with the exception of vacation (yours) or death (also yours). I really do mean it because when you have that kind of popcorn performance where people are in and out, your meetings will suffer. Your Level 10 Meeting Agenda is a standard structure for productive meetings and it’s an efficient way to get a weekly handle on your business in its entirety.

I’ve found that my EOS clients get more done in that 90 minutes a week than in dozens of one-off meetings. And in fact, when they get really good at it, they get three or four times the length of time of that meeting back every single week because they’re running so much more efficiently…

You need to hold your Level 10 Meeting on the same day and at the same time with the same agenda. You also need to have it start on time and end on time every week.

That kind of discipline drives results. Here’s the agenda…

You have a segue for five minutes. You’re going to start the meeting with every team member sharing good news – both personally and professionally – from the previous week. That helps remind the team they work with real, live human beings, and it also moves them from being in the business to on the business and has a humbling effect to realize what the outside passions and responsibilities can be. Please don’t skip this. Many teams can speed-bump this part and it’s the happiest news of the meeting. So savor it while you’ve got it for all five minutes. 

Your Scorecard review is five minutes as well. Reviewing your Scorecard provides objective proof of whether the team is hitting its goals, doing the right weekly activities, and helping identify issues early. Here every person reports whether their Measurable is on or off track without going into explanations. If a Measurable is off track, you have to drop it down and add it to your Issues List. 

The Rock review is also five minutes. To keep the discussion to a minimum, this section again uses “on track” or “off track” from each Rock owner. Any questions, explanations, or further discussions belong in the issues section, and you should drop down any Rock that’s off track because we identified these as key priorities for the business for the next 90 days. 

Headlines are five minutes long as well. Anyone attending the meeting should be sharing employee or customer news, good or bad. This allows your team to celebrate some good things happening and also potentially drop down any bad news to the Issues List if you need more discussion. Otherwise, it’s just a headline.

Your to-do review is five minutes. While Rocks represent 90-day priorities, your to-do list captures action items to complete within seven days. This is another critical place where it can get sloppy. You can’t keep assigning or kicking the can down the road with your To-Dos. You must complete them every seven days; remember, your To-Dos came from solving last week’s issues.

The expectation is that 90% of them will be complete seven days later. Ten percent of the time, they can extend another seven days or go a total of 14 days. If To-Dosare languishing more than seven and sometimes 14 days, accountability is your issue and you need to attack that with some determination.

Every attendee reports on their To-Dos from last week by saying “done” or “not done” with no explanations. Any unfinished, not done To-Dos get dropped down to your Issues List, and you can put that person’s name next to them if it’s been 14 or more days. 

That leaves you with 60 high-quality minutes for IDS®-ing. This is the section where you, your team, identifies, discusses, and solves issues…

You start by prioritizing the top three time-sensitive and mission-critical issues. Once you’ve done so, the person raising the issue will clearly identify it. Then the team discusses the issue until they get to the root cause. After every detail has been laid out, the team will determine the best way to solve the issue forever.

Add any To-Dos from the solving session onto your To-Do List for the following week. Once you’ve solved your first three issues, you prioritize your top three again and repeat the IDS process until your 60 minutes are complete. On average, as teams get good, you’ll solve five to 10 issues every single week. The last five minutes is for your conclusion…

You’ll conclude your meeting by recapping all the new items on the To-Do List, so that everyone not only said them, but they heard them, and any resolutions that require additional communication outside the meeting become a cascading message. You ask everyone attending the meeting to then rate the meeting on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the best, and ensure you end on time.

Introducing your EOS Meeting Pulse into your organization will allow you to maximize your team and your results. With the Level 10 Meeting, you’ll keep a weekly pulse on your business, your quarterly meetings will help you set new priorities and focus on every quarter, and your annual meeting ensures you’re planning ahead for the next year and staying healthy as a team.

When you put that all together, your business is constantly in sync with both short- and long-term goals.