Leadership meetings: seven rules to make them actually decide

Since 2025, I have organised and run the committees of a TotalEnergies department and its units. Before that, I ran the steering and executive committees of an ERP and WMS programme for The Walt Disney Company, and the unit heads’ committee of an IT domain for GRDF. The size and the stakes change. The rules that make a committee decide stay the same.

A committee that doesn’t decide is easy to spot. Round-table updates where everyone recounts their month. Heavy slide packs discovered in the room. Topics that come back week after week. And a leader who decides after the meeting, in the corridor, with whoever stayed behind.

1. An agenda built around decisions

Every agenda item should say what is expected of the committee. “HR update” says nothing. “Approve or not the hire of a sales manager before the summer” says it all: the subject, the decision expected, the deadline. An item with no decision expected is usually information, and information doesn’t need a meeting.

2. Papers go out the day before, with the conclusion on page one

A committee that discovers the figures in the room spends the meeting understanding them. Papers go out the day before at the latest, and each starts with its conclusion: what is proposed, why, what it costs, what is at risk. The detail follows for those who need it.

A decision paper often fits on one page, in five lines: the proposal, the reason, the cost, the risk, the decision asked of the committee. If the author can’t write it that way, the subject isn’t ready for a decision yet, and that is useful information in itself.

3. Top-down information has no place

News from each department, monthly figures with no notable variance, announcements: an email will do. The committee’s time is kept for what needs a collective decision, or for what departs from the plan.

4. The decision is written down in the room

What, who, when. The decision is stated aloud, recorded and read back before moving to the next item. If nobody can state it in one sentence, it hasn’t been taken. Better to find out in the room than the following week.

5. The decision log opens the meeting

Every committee starts with the previous meeting’s decisions. Each has one of three statuses: done; late, with a new date; or dropped, in which case we say why. Five minutes is enough. They are the five minutes that make the rest useful.

6. A named owner, never “the team”

An action given to “the team” belongs to nobody. Every decision carries a name, that of someone present or explicitly informed. The name isn’t a sanction: it’s the person who will be asked, next time, where the action stands.

7. Minutes go out the same day

Short: decisions, actions, owners, dates. No verbatim. Sent the same day, they fix what was decided before everyone keeps their own version. Sent a week later, they serve little purpose.

One more rule: bad news arrives early

A delay, an overrun, a lost customer: the worst way to hear it is in the room, by surprise, or after the event. The rule fits in one sentence: bad news is shared as soon as it is known, and always with a proposal. A committee where someone can raise a problem without being put on trial is a committee that sees problems in time.

The leader’s place in the room

The leader sets the frame, but doesn’t have to speak first. On a contested item, speaking last leaves others free to say what they think. The leader also avoids settling in the corridor what should have been settled in the room: every decision taken outside the committee weakens the next one. And they accept that an honest answer is sometimes “we don’t know yet; we’ll know by this date”.

In an SME, the same committee takes forty-five minutes

These rules aren’t reserved for large groups. In a company of a few dozen people, the leadership committee is often a Monday meeting between the managing director and three to five managers, sometimes with no official name. The rules apply in a lighter form: no slides, one page shared the day before, the decision log in a simple spreadsheet, and five lines of minutes sent before noon.

The effect shows quickly. Topics stop coming back, everyone knows what they must do before the following Monday, and the leader no longer has to chase every action personally. It is often the first time they win back.