When the same item returns to the leadership team’s agenda month after month, it hasn’t moved forward between meetings. Usually there’s nothing wrong with the plan. I’ll explain what gets things moving. Included is a meeting structure for your next leadership team meeting.
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Tuesday, 8:30 a.m. A leadership team meeting: six people, one screen, and a coffee pot. The fourth item on the agenda is the key account management model, the agreed way of handling the most important customers. The same item was on the agenda in September. And in August. In between, it hasn’t moved forward.
The material was sent out in advance, but no one had time to read it. Everyone says the same thing: things were busy. It gets read together in the meeting, deemed fine, and the group moves on.
Around the table, everyone agrees the matter is important. The sales director says the team has had a busy autumn. The head of customer service is waiting for a system update. The CFO brings up the budget. Every comment is true.
The item ends with a familiar line:
Let’s come back to this next month.
The scene is a composite, but I’ve sat in this meeting many times, first as a CEO, now as a coach. Everyone genuinely cares about the issue. The account management model just keeps getting pushed aside each month by something more urgent.
The meeting raises plenty of questions, but not this one: who is responsible for making sure this moves forward before the next meeting?
A leadership team makes plenty of good decisions. The hardest part only begins once the meeting ends and everyone returns to their own calendar.
After a study or a workshop, the work moves into the leadership team’s day-to-day reality. That’s exactly where many good initiatives slow down. A plan only becomes a result once someone starts acting on it, and makes sure it keeps being acted on.
One CEO summed it up for me in three questions:
Will that be done this month? If not, why not? What changes?
Simple questions, but you have to keep asking them every single month.
That’s why my first question to a leadership team isn’t whether the plan is good. I ask who’s responsible for carrying it out.
When something doesn’t move forward, the reason is usually found in everyday work. There are typically three causes.
1. The goal hasn’t been broken down into milestones. The initiative has an overall goal, but it hasn’t been split into stages: what needs to be finished first, what comes next, and what comes after that. When that’s missing, people track the end result instead of milestones, and it becomes hard to move the whole thing forward. Progress starts once everyone knows what the goal means for their own and their team’s work this week and this month, and once it’s agreed how you’ll know the week went well.
2. Execution lacks an owner. In a small company, the founders can agree things verbally and take it week by week. Once more people join, that’s no longer enough. When the owner and the timeline are left undefined, it’s hard to recall exactly what was agreed two weeks later. Or an owner has been named, but no time has been set aside for them, and nothing has been agreed about what else can wait.
3. Progress is reviewed too rarely. A new way of working lasts a week or two. Then everyone slips back into the old one. Usually there’s nothing wrong with the new approach, people simply stop checking on its progress. Tracking is also often too complicated and scattered across too many systems. Or the matter gets discussed in the meeting but never written down. A simple spreadsheet is enough to get started. Meeting notes and task lists are now easy to generate with AI, but tracking the bigger picture still often falls short.
Leadership teams also spend a lot of time looking backward. Figures are often only reviewed a month later. I once told a customer that in March, you can no longer influence what happened in February. Tracking only helps when there’s still time to change course. Predictability is hard to achieve without a process built for it, which is often the case especially in sales. That’s why a leadership team is best off reviewing progress weekly, in its own meeting.
Another CEO asked me directly at our first meeting: if nothing has changed before, why would it change now? It’s a fair question, and my answer is always the same: you need an agreed, recurring moment each week to check what’s actually been done against what was agreed.
The work does get done. It’s just that the weeks fill up with whatever feels urgent.
Coaching means an experienced outsider helps someone else think, decide, and carry an agreed plan through to the end. In working life, it’s a regular conversation in which the coach challenges your thinking and shares their own experience. In leadership coaching, the focus is on business decisions, sales, customer accounts, strategy, and development initiatives.
Coaching can involve the whole leadership team or just the CEO. The coach’s role also varies: sometimes an outside sounding board, sometimes the person driving the initiative. In this article, I’m focusing on the leadership team.
Related terms are easy to mix up:
| Focus | Typical question | |
|---|---|---|
| Leadership coaching | Business decisions and their execution | What are we deciding, and who will carry it through? |
| Training | A leader’s own skills and goals | How do I grow as a leader? |
| Work supervision | Workload and interaction | How am I coping, and how do I act within my team? |
| Mentoring | Passing on more experienced insight | What would you do in my position? |
When a leadership team knows what to do but things still don’t move forward, the know-how is usually there. What’s missing is a named owner and a weekly review of progress.
Let’s return to Tuesday morning and picture the same meeting three months later. The first item on the agenda is the account management model. It has an owner. In two minutes, they explain where things stand and what the next step is. New ideas only come up after that.
Often the most natural owner is the sales director themselves, since they know the key accounts best. At the same time, the leadership team agrees what can be expected from their desk, and who they can turn to for help.
The coach helps by making sure every meeting starts with previous decisions, and by asking, for any unfinished item, what’s holding it back and who can move it forward.
Experience is also needed. A good coach understands the big picture and knows how to prioritize which initiatives will have the greatest impact on the business. They encourage and offer perspective on why something is worth doing. That only comes with experience. They’ve seen the same situation play out in many companies and can spot a fading initiative before it shows up in the numbers. Voitto’s founders have over 200 projects behind them over their careers.
The solution doesn’t always come from the coach. In one leadership team, the burden of weekly reporting came up repeatedly over about a year. We trimmed the format together, but it still stayed too heavy. The turning point came when the CEO took ownership of it himself. He went through the weekly report point by point with the leadership team and asked the same questions at every item:
What do we actually need this for? What do we get out of it? How much work time does it take to get this data in here?
The unnecessary items were cut. The weekly meeting now covers the urgent matters and the figures that are actually needed. I told him the final version only takes shape once leadership uses the model themselves and notices what’s actually useful.
An outside eye helps even the skilled. In 2011, surgeon Atul Gawande wrote in The New Yorker about asking a retired surgeon colleague to observe his operations. Gawande had been doing the work for years, and doing it well. Even so, his colleague noticed things he could no longer see himself.
You can adopt this meeting structure without us, and many do. An outsider helps when you want someone who notices what you can no longer see from the inside, helps you prioritize, and brings experience from other companies.
In the first meeting, we listen to what’s on leadership’s mind right now: goals, the current situation, and what’s holding back growth. After that, we put together a shared list of decisions and initiatives. Each one has an owner and a timeline. We keep the list short, so the most important items don’t get lost.
Here’s how Suomen Biovoima’s development director described the start:
Our needs and wishes were listened to carefully, and they were able to distill them into clear goals and actions.
Tapani Korhonen, Development Director, Suomen Biovoima Oy
In following meetings, we review what’s moved forward and what’s stuck. The status review happens quickly, so there’s time left for decisions. Every meeting ends by agreeing who does what next.
The leadership team handles the weekly follow-up itself. The coach meets with leadership on an agreed schedule, often once a month.
Strategy is often discussed in its own separate meeting, with other matters handled in the weekly meeting. Because of that, it’s easy for strategy to end up outside the leadership team’s weekly work. A good strategy shows up in weekly work, and the initiatives on the list connect to it. Directly or indirectly, they also connect to the customer: how to create more value for them, or how to strengthen their commitment. I cover the strategy side in another article: Strategy shows up in everyday work when it fits on a single page.
The scope ranges from a single meeting to ongoing coaching. Leadership’s time commitment typically starts from around an hour a month. You can start with just one meeting.
I tell leadership teams directly: you sit in a meeting to make decisions and move forward. When coaching works, everyday practice changes like this:
Don’t wait for the perfect decision. In my view, a decision that’s 70% right is already good. The rest gets corrected along the way.
A four-part meeting structure
A self-check for your leadership team
If any answer gave you pause, that’s a good place to start.
I would start the next leadership team meeting with fifteen minutes and one question: which item has been on the agenda more than twice?
The answers get written on a board. One is chosen. Right then, you agree on the first milestone, the owner, and when progress will next be reviewed.
The following meeting starts from there.
A new plan usually isn’t needed for that. It’s enough to carry out what’s agreed, one step at a time. That’s where the coach helps.
Get in touch
A Voitto founder meets with your leadership team on an agreed schedule and starts every meeting with previous decisions. More about leadership coaching
A couple of sentences in your own words is enough. We’ll respond within one business day and tell you plainly whether we can help, and where we’d start. If it’s something you can handle without us, we’ll tell you that too.
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A few sentences in your own words is enough. We will respond within one business day and tell you directly if we can help and where we would start.
