As a young boy in the 1970s, I was excited to receive my first set of “Grow Monsters.” Cheap toys made from a super-absorbent polymer, these small, shapeless specks would expand by up to 500% of their original size when placed in water. Fullgrown, they were supposed to resemble dinosaurs and other fearsome creatures, with the process designed to delight and amaze naïve young lads like me.

Guarded, careful tiptoeing, avoiding the pain. If this sounds like your company's leadership team, you're normal. I've lost count of the number of teams that act this way – there are so many.

I’ve also seen teams like this who experienced such a tremendous transformation that they are now seeing great business results and healthy team dynamics with much less effort. They have become abnormally great.

What did they do to experience this transformation? It was a simple shift in their mindsets.

A part of the journey for leadership teams to become their best is learning to run highly effective weekly meetings using the Level 10 Meeting Agenda.

During these meetings, I’m often a “fly on the wall,” just observing. Recently, I observed a tooling company that has become incredibly productive during their weekly meetings. After the meeting, I gave them some feedback to improve their meeting effectiveness even more. In fact, I’ve found that most businesses can benefit from similar themes of feedback.

These are 11 techniques that highly successful entrepreneurs use to run their business meetings. Try them out and see how they impact your own meetings.

A client of mine in the manufacturing industry recently experienced an a-ha moment about how often their team should meet. They had tried everything under the sun to find the right meeting pulse—daily meetings, weekly one-on-ones, weekly meetings, bi-weekly meetings, monthly meetings, cross functional meetings...you name it. Nothing seemed to be working effectively, and they were getting frustrated. And no matter what they did, they were wasting too much time in meetings, and not getting stuff done.

The a-ha wasn’t just how often their meetings occurred—it was what they were doing (and not doing) in the meetings that was amiss.

It’s no secret that most people cringe when they hear the words, “let's have a meeting.” Most meetings are awful.

When I first took the helm of our third-generation family business, I ran some pretty awful meetings. I knew I had to get the team on the same page with everything that was happening on a day-to-day basis, so I scheduled the leadership team to meet for 2-3 hours every other week.