9 Types of Meetings Every Manager Needs (And How to Run Them Effectively)
Jan 19, 2026
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12
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AI Summary by Fellow
Every manager runs meetings. But the best managers know that different objectives require different meeting types, and that the real value of any meeting lies in what happens afterward: the decisions captured, the action items tracked, and the context preserved for future reference.
The challenge? Most managers lose critical information the moment a meeting ends. Decisions live in someone's memory. Action items scatter across notebooks. Context disappears when team members leave.
An AI meeting assistant solves this by automatically capturing every conversation across Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and even in-person meetings, then making that intelligence searchable across your entire organization. Instead of asking "What did we decide about the Q3 roadmap?", you simply query your meeting library and get the answer.
This guide covers the nine essential meeting types every manager needs, with practical tips for running each effectively and ensuring no critical information slips through the cracks.
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What are the nine essential meeting types for managers?
The nine meeting types every manager needs are:
Onboarding meetings
Weekly team meetings
One-on-one meetings
Decision-making meetings
Problem-solving meetings
Brainstorming meetings
Project kickoff meetings
Feedback and retrospective meetings
Team-building meetings.
Each serves a distinct purpose in driving team performance, alignment, and accountability.
Understanding when to use each meeting type (and how to capture their outcomes) separates effective managers from those who waste their team's time.
How do you run effective onboarding meetings?
An onboarding meeting introduces new hires to company culture, team dynamics, policies, and role expectations. These meetings set the foundation for employee success and directly impact retention and time-to-productivity.
Best practices for onboarding meetings:
Prepare a structured agenda covering company values, team introductions, role expectations, and immediate priorities
Provide access to essential resources, documentation, and tools before the meeting
Assign a mentor or buddy who can answer questions in the weeks ahead
Encourage two-way conversation rather than one-directional information dumps
Use an AI meeting assistant to capture everything discussed so the new hire can reference it later
The most effective onboarding meetings create a searchable record the new employee can revisit. When questions arise in week three about something covered on day one, they should be able to find the answer instantly rather than asking colleagues to repeat themselves.
What makes weekly team meetings productive?
Weekly team meetings bring team members together to share progress updates, align on priorities, surface blockers, and coordinate for the week ahead. These recurring touchpoints maintain momentum and prevent misalignment from compounding over time.
How to run a productive weekly team meeting:
Set a consistent day and time that works for the entire team
Distribute a clear agenda in advance with allocated time for each section
Focus on blockers and decisions rather than status updates everyone could read asynchronously
Capture action items with clear owners and deadlines
Keep the meeting to 30 minutes maximum to maintain energy and focus
The secret to great weekly meetings is making previous meetings searchable. When someone asks "Didn't we discuss this three weeks ago?", you should be able to pull up that conversation instantly using a feature like Ask Fellow rather than relying on faulty memory.
Why are one-on-one meetings critical for managers?
One-on-one meetings are private conversations between a manager and an individual team member focused on feedback, career development, goal-setting, and addressing specific challenges. These meetings build trust, identify issues early, and drive individual performance.
Effective one-on-ones require:
A consistent cadence (weekly or biweekly works best for most teams)
An agenda co-created by both manager and direct report
Focus on the employee's priorities and concerns, not just manager-driven topics
Follow-through on commitments made in previous sessions
Documentation of key discussion points, decisions, and next steps
The most common one-on-one failure? Forgetting what you discussed last time. This creates a frustrating cycle where employees feel unheard because the same topics resurface repeatedly. AI meeting notes eliminate this problem by automatically capturing every conversation, making it easy to track progress across sessions.
Struggling to remember what you discussed in your last one-on-one? Fellow automatically captures every conversation and tracks commitments across meetings.
How do you structure a decision-making meeting?
A decision-making meeting convenes when a specific agreement, choice, or commitment needs to be made. These meetings require clear framing, relevant stakeholders, sufficient information, and explicit documentation of what was decided and why.
Running an effective decision-making meeting:
Define the specific decision to be made before the meeting starts
Share relevant context, data, and options in advance so attendees can prepare
Ensure all necessary decision-makers are present (no decisions without the right people)
Allocate time for discussion, but set a clear endpoint for reaching agreement
Document the decision, the reasoning behind it, and who owns implementation
Decision-making meetings fail when decisions aren't captured with enough context. Six months later, when someone asks "Why did we choose vendor A over vendor B?", the answer should be searchable in your recording library, not lost in someone's memory.
When should you hold a problem-solving meeting?
Problem-solving meetings address specific challenges, threats, or obstacles blocking team progress. These meetings focus on diagnosis, solution generation, and action planning for a defined problem.
Problem-solving meeting structure:
Clearly identify and articulate the problem before the meeting begins
Gather relevant information and data that participants will need
Define constraints and requirements for acceptable solutions
Brainstorm potential solutions without premature judgment
Evaluate options and select a path forward with clear next steps
Some problem-solving meetings are planned. Others emerge from emergencies requiring rapid response. In either case, capturing the discussion and decisions matters even more than usual because problems have a way of recurring. When a similar issue surfaces next quarter, having a searchable record of how you solved it previously saves hours of redundant work.
What's the best way to run brainstorming meetings?
Brainstorming meetings (also called innovation meetings) encourage creative thinking and idea generation around a specific challenge, opportunity, or strategic question. The goal is divergent thinking: generating as many ideas as possible before evaluating them.
Keys to effective brainstorming:
Define the focus clearly: what problem are you solving or opportunity are you exploring?
Create psychological safety so participants feel comfortable sharing unconventional ideas
Separate idea generation from idea evaluation (no criticism during brainstorming)
Build on others' ideas rather than competing with them
Capture every idea, even ones that seem impractical in the moment
The worst thing you can do after a brainstorming session is lose the ideas. AI meeting assistants automatically capture everything discussed, creating a searchable record of creative thinking you can revisit months later when circumstances change.
How do you kick off a new project effectively?
Project kickoff meetings mark the initiation of a new project, bringing together key stakeholders to establish objectives, deliverables, timelines, roles, and success criteria. These meetings align the team and build momentum from day one.
Project kickoff meeting essentials:
Define project objectives and success metrics clearly
Clarify roles, responsibilities, and decision-making authority
Establish the timeline with key milestones and deadlines
Identify risks, dependencies, and assumptions
Set communication cadence and norms for the project duration
Project kickoffs create the reference point for everything that follows. When scope creep threatens or stakeholders disagree about priorities, you need to revisit what was originally agreed. Having a searchable, AI-captured record of the kickoff meeting prevents the "that's not what we discussed" conversations that derail projects.
Why are retrospective meetings essential for team growth?
Retrospective meetings (also called feedback meetings or post-mortems) occur after a project milestone or completion to assess what worked, what didn't, and what should change for future efforts. These meetings drive continuous improvement and organizational learning.
Retrospective meeting framework:
Review the project timeline and major events
Discuss learnings: what did each team member discover?
Acknowledge successes: what worked well and should continue?
Identify opportunities: where can improvements be made?
Define specific actions for implementing changes going forward
The value of retrospectives compounds over time, but only if you capture and act on the insights. Too often, teams have the same retrospective conversation repeatedly because previous insights weren't documented accessibly. An AI meeting assistant creates a searchable library of retrospective learnings across projects.
How do team-building meetings strengthen organizational culture?
Team-building meetings strengthen relationships between team members, building trust and connection beyond transactional work interactions. These gatherings range from structured exercises to casual social events.
Team-building meeting approaches:
Mix formal and informal formats based on team preferences
Include cross-functional participants to build broader organizational connections
Create space for personal connection, not just work discussion
Recognize individual and team accomplishments
Vary activities to engage different personality types
Team-building extends beyond your immediate team. All-hands meetings, cross-departmental events, and company-wide gatherings all build the connective tissue that makes organizations function smoothly.
What are the best practices for making meetings more effective?
The most effective managers follow consistent practices that maximize meeting value while respecting everyone's time. These habits apply across all nine meeting types.
Set clear goals before every meeting
Every meeting needs a defined purpose and desired outcome. Use a meeting agenda template tailored to the meeting type, distribute it in advance, and stick to it during the session. If you can't articulate why a meeting needs to happen, it probably doesn't.
Build and share agendas in advance
Agendas keep discussions focused, ensure adequate preparation, and help attendees determine if they actually need to attend. Send agendas at least 24 hours before the meeting so participants can prepare thoughtfully.
Send invites with enough lead time
Respect everyone's calendar by sending invites well in advance. For recurring meetings, establish consistent time slots. Avoid canceling meetings unless absolutely necessary; frequent cancellations signal the meeting isn't important.
Leave space for questions and discussion
Reserve time before or after meetings for questions, concerns, and suggestions. Creating space for open dialogue builds trust and surfaces issues that might not emerge in structured discussion.
Capture meeting outcomes automatically
The most important meeting practice is ensuring decisions, action items, and context don't disappear when the meeting ends. Rather than assigning someone to take meeting minutes manually, use an AI meeting notetaker to capture everything automatically. This allows everyone to stay fully engaged in the conversation.
Define action items with owners and deadlines
Every meeting should produce clear next steps. Define who owns each action item, when it's due, and how completion will be tracked. Without this discipline, meetings generate discussion but not progress.
Ask for and give feedback continuously
Create a culture of continuous improvement by soliciting feedback on meetings themselves. What worked? What didn't? What should change? Teams at Shopify, HubSpot, Vidyard, and Motive use Fellow to capture meeting feedback alongside meeting content, creating a continuous improvement loop.
How do you turn meeting decisions into organizational knowledge?
The real value of meetings isn't the conversation itself. It's the decisions made, the context established, and the commitments captured. Without a system for preserving this information, meetings become expensive exercises in repetition.
Modern teams solve this with AI meeting assistants that automatically record, transcribe, and organize meetings into a searchable library. Instead of asking colleagues "What did we decide about the pricing strategy?", you query your meeting intelligence and get the answer with full context.
Fellow captures conversations across Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, in-person meetings, and Slack huddles, with or without visible recording bots. Ask Fellow questions like "Where are projects getting blocked?" or "What commitments are at risk?" and get answers from your actual meetings.
With SOC 2 Type II certification, HIPAA compliance, and a commitment to never training on customer data, Fellow provides enterprise-grade privacy controls that let you deploy meeting intelligence across your entire organization without compromising security.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most important type of meeting for managers?
One-on-one meetings are arguably the most important meeting type for managers because they directly impact employee engagement, retention, and performance. These private conversations build trust, surface issues early, provide coaching opportunities, and demonstrate that you value each team member as an individual. Managers who skip or deprioritize one-on-ones consistently struggle with turnover and team performance.
How do I reduce the number of meetings my team has?
Reduce meeting volume by establishing clear criteria for when meetings are necessary versus when asynchronous communication suffices. Status updates, FYI announcements, and simple questions rarely require meetings. For meetings that do occur, use an AI meeting assistant to capture everything so attendees who miss the meeting can catch up asynchronously, reducing the need for follow-up conversations.
What should I do if meetings never produce clear outcomes?
Meetings without clear outcomes typically lack defined purpose, inadequate agendas, or missing follow-through systems. Fix this by requiring every meeting to have a stated objective, distributing agendas in advance, and using AI to automatically capture decisions and action items. When every meeting produces a searchable record of what was decided and who owns next steps, accountability improves dramatically.
How do I make remote meetings as effective as in-person ones?
Remote meetings require extra attention to engagement and documentation. Use video to maintain human connection, establish clear speaking norms to prevent talking over each other, and leverage AI meeting assistants that work across Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, and other platforms. The advantage of remote meetings is that AI capture is seamless, creating perfect documentation that in-person meetings historically lacked.
Can AI meeting assistants work for confidential or sensitive meetings?
Yes, but choose an AI meeting assistant with enterprise-grade security. Look for SOC 2 Type II certification, HIPAA compliance, GDPR compliance, and explicit commitments not to train AI models on your data. Fellow, for example, offers permission-based access aligned to organizational roles, ensuring sensitive meeting content is only accessible to authorized team members.
How do I get my team to actually follow meeting best practices?
Start by modeling the behavior yourself: always have an agenda, capture action items, and reference previous meeting decisions. Then make good practices easy by using tools that automate the hard parts. When AI automatically captures notes, extracts action items, and makes meetings searchable, teams adopt good habits because they require no extra effort.
Start capturing every critical conversation
Effective meetings aren't complicated. They require clear purpose, thoughtful structure, and systems for preserving decisions and accountability. The nine meeting types covered here give you a framework for every management scenario.
The difference between good managers and great managers often comes down to what happens after the meeting ends. Do decisions disappear? Do action items scatter? Does context evaporate when team members leave?
With Fellow, every meeting becomes shared, searchable intelligence. Capture conversations across all your platforms with botless recording options. Query your meetings with Ask Fellow to surface decisions, commitments, and context instantly. Connect meeting intelligence to your workflows through 50+ native integrations and 8,000+ apps via Zapier and n8n through the Fellow API and MCP Server.
Your meetings already contain the answers your team needs. Fellow helps you find them.
Record, transcribe and summarize every meeting with the only AI meeting assistant built from the ground up with privacy and security in mind.
