Leveraging Leadership
Are you ready to up your leadership game? Tune in to Leveraging Leadership, where Chiefs of Staff, executives, and business professionals find the tools, strategies, and insights they need to excel. Hosted by Emily Sander, a C-suite executive turned leadership coach, this podcast delivers practical and tactical takeaways every week.
Whether you're tackling tough conversations, fine-tuning your KPIs, or mastering delegation, this show offers new perspectives and actionable advice to help you feel confident and thrive in your role.
Each Monday, enjoy interviews with leaders from diverse fields—primarily business, but also from military, politics, and higher education. Every Wednesday, catch a solo episode where Emily shares concise, actionable insights on a specific topic you can apply immediately.
If you appreciate relatable, informal conversations that pack a punch with no fluff, you’re in the right place. While especially valuable for Chiefs of Staff and their Principals, the insights are useful for any leader aiming to grow.
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Leveraging Leadership
How Chiefs of Staff Can Revive Leadership Team Meetings
This episode shares two practical tips for Chiefs of Staff looking to revamp their executive team's meeting routine: delete the old meeting series and start a new one as the organizer, then give the meeting a fresh name to set a new tone. Examples include replacing a dull weekly meeting where team members air grievances or read KPIs with a more energized and purposeful leadership session. These simple moves help signal change and boost engagement.
Links Mentioned:
Free Resources:
- Strategic Planning Checklist
- Chief of Staff Skills Assessment Checklist
- A Day in the Life of a Chief of Staff
- Chief of Staff Toolkit
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Who Am I?
If we haven’t yet before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want.
Time Stamps:
01:05 Identifying Issues in Current Meetings
02:00 Implementing New Meeting Strategies
03:25 Final Tips and Conclusion
Quick tip for chiefs of staff who are trying to establish a new rhythm of business across their executive team. So rhythm of business is a large, broad and important topic for chiefs of staff. It typically involves things like weekly leadership team meetings. I. Or monthly manager meetings or maybe quarterly, all hands meetings, or certainly the quarterly board meeting is a typical cadence. Things like this, the structure, the mechanics, the framework of the team. So let's just talk about one little sliver of this process, and let's say that you're a chief of staff and you're trying to establish a new cadence and a kind of a new tone and new life to the leadership meeting. And right now. There is technically something that is supposed to be a leadership meeting, and it technically happens once a week, but you get in there and it's like, oh my gosh, it's low energy. It's like the weekly chance for Kathy and Jaron to hash out their latest grievances across their teams, and they just go at it and everyone else kind of steps back and watches and wait for it to be over. It might be okay, everyone pulls up their like OKRs or KPIs and reads out verbatim like. 14% of the pipeline, blah, blah, blah. We had 121 new tickets. Okay? Then everyone else falls asleep and then they wake up and then they go through their week and they do it all again the next week, and you're like, okay, I don't want anything to do with that. I don't want anyone to think that that's what a weekly leadership meeting should be. I wanna overhaul this thing and clean slate this thing. How do I establish this new rhythm of business? Here are two quick tips that I found to be successful over and over and over again. First thing, delete the old meeting series, so find the organizer. Have some discussions or just get in there and delete the old meeting series, and then start a new meeting series where you are the organizer. So right away that establishes, oh, something old has gone away and something new is happening. Oh, and the chief of staff is the organizer for this leadership meeting. The chief of staff organizes the leadership team. Got it. That's a good conscious or subliminal message to send. And then of course when you get in there, you are the one saying, okay, new energy, new agenda items, new way of discussing things, new topics, all this stuff. It's run in a different way. So that's the first thing. Second thing, which is a fast follow and goes along with the first thing is you change the title of the meeting. You change what the meeting is called and this could just be anything, anything different. It might be like it was an exec huddle before and now it's weekly leadership team meeting, whatever it is. Just something different. Which one reinforces it's new, but two makes people refer to the new meeting series as something else. So it used to be this, we used to do this, and now we do that. And when people say, Hey, like are you going to the weekly leadership team meeting? They have to say the new name. And so it just reinforces like, oh, this is a new thing. So those are just two relatively simple things you can do as chief of staff and they go a long way. So these are like a lot of bang for your buck type actions. These are leverage points in your role as chief of staff. So I would use those if you can. And I've seen these work over and over and over again very effectively in lots of different permutations. So I just wanted to share that with you in case it's helpful and I'll catch you next week on leveraging leadership.