The Weekly is a sixty-minute leadership meeting, same day and time every week, that opens with the numbers, spends half its time working the top three issues to a decision, and ends with the scribe reading back every owner and date. The owner is in the room. The owner does not chair it. Here is the agenda, the roles, the rules, and how it differs from the meeting most owners have already tried. The agenda and worksheets are free: download The Weekly (PDF).
The agenda
| Minutes | Segment | What happens | Who |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | Open | One win from the week, one sentence each. Starts on time, gets every voice in the room early. | Chair |
| 10 | The numbers | The scoreboard, filled in before the meeting. Each owner reads their number and says on track or off track. No explaining. Off track goes on the list. | Scoreboard owner, then each metric owner |
| 5 | Priorities | The quarter’s three to five priorities. On or off track, one word each. Off track goes on the list. | Each priority owner |
| 5 | Build the list | Everything off track, plus anything anyone brings. One line each. Pick the top three by impact, not by who is loudest. | Chair |
| 30 | The Solve | Work the top three, one at a time: name the real issue, agree on the cause, decide what happens, who does it, by when. Retire it. Next. | Chair runs it, scribe writes it |
| 5 | Owners and next steps | The scribe reads back every decision with its owner and date. Anything undecided goes to next week’s list by name. | Scribe |
Sixty minutes. If the room finishes The Solve early, the meeting ends early. It never runs long; the fourth issue waits a week, and if it cannot wait a week it was not an issue, it was a fire, and fires get a phone call, not an agenda slot.
The three roles
The chair holds the clock and the list. The scoreboard owner arrives with the numbers already filled in. The scribe writes every decision, owner, and date, and sends them within the hour. None of the three has to be the owner. Two of them should not be. The chair rotates off the owner within ninety days; if the owner cannot miss the meeting, it is not a rhythm yet, it is an owner with an audience.
The rules that keep it worth the hour
- Same day, same time, every week. It does not move for a busy week. The busy week is the one where a ten-minute conversation would have caught the problem.
- Starts on time with whoever is in the room. Ends on time.
- The scoreboard is filled in before the meeting, never during it. A number that is not ready is off track by definition.
- Reporting is one word. The discussion happens in The Solve, where there is time for it.
- Issues leave the room retired, with a name and a date, or they come back next week by name. Nothing is “still being looked at.”
Three choices made on purpose
If you have sat in a good leadership meeting, the shape will feel familiar, and it should: numbers first, most of the time on issues, decisions with owners at the end. Three details are different.
Sixty minutes, not ninety. A leadership team of three to five in a business under $5M rarely has ninety minutes of real issues, and a meeting expands to fill its slot. Sixty forces the room to pick the three that matter.
The owner does not chair it. The point of a rhythm is that the business runs without one person holding it. A meeting the owner must run is a meeting that stops when the owner is out. The chair rotates, and the scribe and scoreboard owner are other people from day one.
The list is built in the room, by impact. Rather than a standing issues list that grows all quarter, the list is rebuilt each week from what is off track plus what people bring, and the top three are chosen by cost to the business. Standing lists become graveyards; a fresh list is short and honest.
If your team already runs a weekly meeting well, you do not need to replace it. Add the rotation and the sixty-minute cap and you have most of this.
The Solve
Most issues are raised as symptoms. “We missed the delivery date” is what was said; the real issue might be that nobody owns the handoff between sales and delivery. The Solve is three steps: name the real issue (rarely the first words said), discuss until the room agrees on the cause, then decide what happens, who does it, and by when. The worksheet in the PDF has a column for “as raised” and a column for “the real issue.” If they match, keep going.
The meeting map
The second worksheet lists every recurring meeting on the calendar with its cadence, who attends, its purpose in one line, and a keep-or-retire box. A leadership team that starts The Weekly usually retires two or three other meetings within a month, because the standing check-ins were compensating for the absence of a rhythm. Alongside The Weekly, the map usually keeps a biweekly 1:1 for each owner and a short daily standup for delivery teams, and not much else (how the rhythm fits the rest of the business).
Download The Weekly agenda, The Solve worksheet, and the meeting map (PDF). Free, no form. If you want to know whether the weekly meeting is where your business is narrowest, the Origin Score will show you: twenty-seven questions, about five minutes, and if it is not the meeting, it will show you what is.
