By: Will Jones
From wasted time to real impact: a new approach to leading effective meetings
Meetings are essential to every growing business, yet so many business leaders fail to understand the value and true purpose they can provide. Often, meetings are viewed as little more than an opportunity to gather everyone together and reiterate some of the same mantras and information as always, just in a larger group setting. These types of meetings can lead to the most infamous of responses from employees: “This meeting could have been an email.”
This can be an entirely deflating experience for business leaders and employees alike. Research has shown time and again that when meetings are bad, the whole company suffers, with morale dropping, decisions stalling, trust eroding, and your best people starting to check out. However, when business leaders take full advantage of what a meeting can truly be, turning them into vital conversations in which everyone feels like an active participant rather than a bored school student listening to a lecture, everything can change. When meetings work, the rest of the business gains room to function more effectively. Fortunately, Kris Snyder specializes in helping business leaders differentiate between good and bad meetings with his book, Meetings Kinda Suck. Snyder’s book, which is part of the EOS Impact Library, gives readers the framework and the motivation to fix their meetings this week, not next quarter.
Who Is Kris Snyder?
Kris Snyder is an entrepreneur, author, and Professional EOS Implementer who serves on the board of Ninety and is the founder of Impact Architects. To this end, he has many years of multifaceted experience as both an employee and a leader, the two sides of the coin when it comes to business meetings. Meetings Kinda Suck was published as part of the EOS (the Entrepreneurial Operating System) Impact collection and has become a key part of both his own brand as well as that of Ninety.
In total, Snyder has now spent nearly three decades building, leading, scaling, and selling entrepreneurial companies. Back in 2006, he founded Vox Mobile, which he later grew to over 200 employees and raised significant growth capital from venture partners before a successful exit in 2018. Shortly thereafter, he launched Impact Architects, a growth advisory firm working with small and mid-sized business owners to implement business operating systems.
Coaching as His Passion
Since the start of Impact Architects, Snyder has personally facilitated over 400 EOS session days with more than 50 leadership teams across industries. As he details, “I coach several days a week, so I am constantly in the room with real companies solving real problems. That ongoing proximity to the work keeps every piece of advice grounded in what I see happening today, not what worked five years ago.”
He sees this as an opportunity to pass on his established knowledge and experience while helping others avoid the same problems he faced in his initial efforts. This is why each chapter ends with a “Meetings Suck Less Realization” that readers can apply immediately.
Overcoming Obstacles
Early in his career, Snyder found himself caught in the “Doom Loop,” where, as a business leader, he would call emergency strategy sessions every time the team missed a number, get everyone fired up, make new commitments, and then nothing would change. This was due to the lack of actual structure in his business to support the follow-through. He thought he was being responsive, but he was actually only feeding greater chaos. This kind of reactionary leadership leads to teams getting whiplash from the constant direction changes.
The shift came for Snyder when he learned about business operating systems, which allowed him to commit to structure, rhythm, and discipline in a whole new way. Today, he helps business leaders make the leaps from transactional leadership (telling people what to do) to coaching leadership (giving context and building people up) to transformational leadership (developing other leaders so the organization scales).
Building a Better Way
Across his past and current roles, Kris Snyder has actively crusaded to help business leaders better understand the value of structure, discipline, and the optimization of meetings as a truly communal space. Meetings Kinda Suck offers business leaders a roadmap to implement these techniques, EOS provides the framework (Level 10 Meetings, IDS, Rocks, Scorecards), and Ninety provides the software to execute it at scale.
To further illustrate how integrated all of these efforts are, the book includes a guest chapter on the psychology of meetings by Audra Stanton, M.D., Head of Product at Ninety, as well as a foreword by Kelly Knight, Integrator and President of EOS Worldwide. Snyder sees the week as a unit of work, saying, “You win the week, or you don’t.” This philosophy drives the entire book and his work as a whole, as he positions himself as a painkiller rather than a vitamin. To this end, his book solves an urgent problem for business leaders everywhere, building on his work as a Professional EOS Implementer.
