The weekly meeting is where a leadership team either runs the business or just talks about it. When it works, problems get solved in the room, numbers get looked at while they can still change, and everyone leaves knowing what they owe by next week. When it doesn’t, it becomes a status round where each person reads out their update and nothing gets decided.
The difference is rarely the people. It’s structure: the same agenda every week, the same day and time, someone running it, and a written record of what was decided. A sync in Clarion gives you that structure. Running it well is still your job.
Set it up once
Create one sync per team that meets: Leadership, then each department that has its own weekly rhythm. Give it a cadence, a day, a time and a duration, and attach it to the team it belongs to. The team matters. It decides which metrics, milestones and challenges appear in the meeting, and where the recap is posted afterwards. The step-by-step is in schedule a sync.
Every new sync starts with a six-step agenda:
- Scorecard (10 min): review the numbers.
- Wins & Notables (5 min): good news and anything the team should hear.
- Milestone Updates (10 min): each owner gives the status.
- Action Items (5 min): done or not done.
- Challenge Discussion (15 min): the real work.
- Summary (5 min): wrap up and rate the meeting.
That’s fifty minutes, and it’s a good default. You can rename, reorder, retime or add steps for one sync, and Owners and Admins can change the company-wide default under Settings → Sync Agenda. Any step can also carry briefing content: a paragraph of context, an image or a checklist. See customize the sync agenda.
Don’t rush to change the agenda. Run the default for a month before you tune it.
Run it live
When the meeting starts, open the sync and press Start Sync. Whoever starts it is the facilitator. Everyone else presses Join Sync and follows along on their own screen: when the facilitator moves to the next step, everyone moves. The header shows elapsed time and who’s in the room, and each step shows its planned minutes, so it’s obvious when you’re running long.
A few habits make the difference:
- Start on time, even if someone is late. Waiting teaches people that the start time is a suggestion.
- Scorecard: report, don’t discuss. Each owner says on or off target. Anything off target that needs a conversation becomes a challenge, not a ten-minute tangent. Values can be typed straight into the scorecard step.
- Milestones: status only. On track or off track. If it’s off track and needs help, add it to the challenge list.
- Action items: done or not done. No stories. Anything that keeps slipping is a challenge.
- Challenges: spend the time here. Take the top-voted challenge first, find the real cause, decide what happens next, and capture the action items. Then move to the next one. How to do this well is covered in solving challenges before they escalate.
The Add button in the live header opens quick add, so anyone can capture a challenge or action item without leaving the meeting.
Close it properly
The Summary step shows what the session produced: how many metrics were reported and how many hit target, plus action items created and closed, challenges raised and resolved, and milestones completed. Each attendee rates the meeting from 1 to 10. Ask anyone who rates it below 8 what would make it better, and act on the answer.
On the last step, press End Sync & Save. Use that button, not End Sync on an earlier step: ending before the last step cancels the session, and nothing from the summary is saved. For a sync attached to a team, Clarion posts the recap to that team’s Hub: the Wins & Notables, notes from any custom steps, a “What happened” list, and a “What’s owed” list naming every action item created in the meeting, with its owner and due date. That post is the meeting’s minutes. Nobody has to write them.
A weekly checklist for the facilitator
- The day before: check the scorecard is filled in and nudge owners who haven’t entered numbers.
- Five minutes before: open the sync so you’re ready to start on the minute.
- During: keep each step to its time and push discussion into the challenge step.
- After: read the recap in the Hub and make sure every action item has an owner and a due date.
- Monthly: look at the average meeting rating. If it’s drifting down, change something.
Common mistakes
Solving problems during the scorecard. It feels productive, but it eats the time meant for challenges, and the most important problem often never gets airtime.
No facilitator. If nobody owns the clock, the loudest topic wins. Pick one person and keep it the same person.
Cancelling when busy. The week you’re busiest is the week you most need to decide what not to do. Keep the meeting, keep it short.
Leaving without owners. “We should look into that” is not an action item. Every decision gets a name and a date before the meeting moves on.
Unprepared attendees. If people are updating their numbers during the meeting, the meeting is too slow. Share how to prepare for your sync with the team, and keep the scorecard short enough to fill in quickly.
For the clicks, see run a live sync.