Hey, it’s Aaron. I’m sitting in my study on a warm Idaho morning. The day started off crisp but we’re in the dog days of summer and it’ll be a hot day. It’s a dry heat though, so we’ll take it! I love that we get all four seasons here.

For those of you who missed June’s email — yes, Contagious Leadership relaunched as Between Meetings. It felt like this could be a little less generic and a little more focused on the things I’m working on every day to turn conversation into action.

Contio is on a roll right now — rolling out the Daily Brief feature that has gotten so popular, launching integration after integration, and releasing the key capabilities that step into our vision of flowing your conversations right into the work. Next up, we’re building a bunch of things on top of those platform capabilities to automate a lot of this for companies in specific verticals. We’re excited.

Thank you again for all your support for Contio, and welcome again to all the new folks! I love hearing from you, so send back questions, thoughts, ideas, or just a hello any time by hitting reply.

Remember, most of the value gets created between meetings. Thanks for being here.

The Five Minute Test

In 2024, a CEO asked me to coach him, and invited me to sit in on his leadership team meetings for a few months — a couple in person, a couple via video call.

This was a high-functioning team, and I watched them have one of those meetings that felt productive in all the visible ways.

The problem was real. The conversation was sharp. Two people disagreed in a healthy way, the room worked through the tradeoffs, and by the end, everyone seemed to know what needed to happen next.

People closed their laptops. A few side conversations started. Someone made a joke. Someone else said, "Good discussion."

And then everyone left.

No one named the actual decision. No one confirmed the owner. No one sent the two-sentence follow-up that would make the commitment real. The meeting had produced alignment, but in the five minutes after the meeting, that alignment evaporated into vibes.

Three weeks later, I joined the video call, and noticed the same topic was back on the agenda. And the first question was: "I thought we decided this, but I can't quite remember who had the ball."

Sound familiar?

I've come to believe those five minutes after a meeting reveal something important about a leader, a team, and a culture.

The meeting tells you whether people can talk. The five minutes after the meeting tell you whether they can close.

Closers and Noters

There are two kinds of people after a meeting: closers and noters.

Closers turn conversation into commitment while the room is still warm. They know that the moment right after a meeting has a kind of fragile power. Everyone remembers what was said. The tradeoffs are still fresh. The emotional energy is still available.

So they use it.

Noters do something that looks responsible but often isn't. They preserve the conversation. They capture the discussion. They write down the themes, file the notes, and tell themselves they'll come back to it later.

Sometimes that is useful. Notes matter. Good memory matters. I mean, I'm literally running a company that is building compounding workspace intelligence for high-functioning teams!

But notes are not the same thing as commitments.

The danger is that noting can become a very professional-looking form of procrastination. It feels like progress because the meeting has been documented. But nothing has been converted into motion.

And down the road, a lot of people are scratching their heads wondering why that initiative never landed.

Here’s the test

At the end of any important meeting, look at what happens in the last five minutes.

Not the next day. Not after someone cleans up the notes. Not when the recap finally gets sent. The first five minutes after discussion ends.

Do people leave with sharper commitments than they entered with? Or do they leave with a more elegant record of the conversation?

Closers tend to do three things almost immediately.

• They name the decision. Not the discussion. Not the theme. The decision. "We are moving forward with the new onboarding sequence." "We are not hiring for this role this quarter." "We are going to price the proposal this way."

• They assign the owner. A decision without an owner is a polite suggestion. Closers make sure a human being has the ball, and everyone knows who it is.

• They ship the next signal. Sometimes that's a customer email. Sometimes it's a Slack note to the team. Sometimes it's a two-line recap: "Here's what we decided, here's who owns it, here's when we'll know if it worked." It doesn't have to be beautiful. It has to exist.

Noters tend to do something different.

• They capture everything and commit nothing. The notes are thorough, but you can't tell what changed because of the meeting. "The team discussed the issue, and consensus formed around the new onboarding sequence."

• They use soft verbs. "Explore." "Consider." "Circle back." "Socialize." These words are not always bad, but they are often where accountability goes to hide.

• They defer the conversion. "I'll clean this up later." "Let's get a recap out." "We'll follow up next week." Again, sometimes reasonable. But often this is the moment where the work slips out of the present tense.

The difference is subtle in the moment and enormous over time.

A closer's meeting creates forward motion. A noter's meeting creates another meeting.

Why the Room Is Still Warm

The phrase "while the room is still warm" matters.

Every meeting's energy has a half-life. Five minutes after it ends, the signal is still strong; an hour later, the edges are already softer.

A day later, people remember their version of the meeting, not the meeting itself.

This is why the five minutes after the meeting are so valuable. You aren't trying to do all the work then — you're trying to lock in the work that was already done.

That might mean getting the recap out before you stand up. It might mean asking, "Before we leave, what did we decide?" It might mean turning to one person and saying, "You own this now. Can you deliver this first step by Friday?"

None of this requires a grand system. It requires a bias toward converting conversation into action before it evaporates.

The Discipline

If you want to get better at this, don't start with a complicated process. Start with three questions at the end of every important meeting:

• What changed because we had this conversation?

• Who owns the next move?

• What signal leaves the room today?

That's it.

If nothing changed, you may have had a useful conversation, but you probably didn't have a decision meeting.

If no one owns the next move, the group owns it, which means no one owns it.

If no signal leaves the room today, you are betting that memory and goodwill will carry the work forward. Sometimes they will. Often they won't.

To be clear, this is not an argument for rushing every decision. Some meetings are for discovery. Some are for debate. Some are for listening. Not every conversation should end with a forced action item.

But if a meeting is supposed to produce alignment, a decision, a next step, a project commitment, or a leadership consequence, then the five-minute test applies.

And if your team keeps failing that test, you don't have a meeting problem. You have a closing problem.

The Leadership Implication

This is where I think leaders should pay attention.

Cultures learn from what happens after meetings. If the five minutes after every meeting are vague, the organization learns that discussion = work. If the five minutes after every meeting are crisp, the organization learns that discussion is the input.

That difference compounds over time.

In a relationship business, this is even more obvious. The client doesn't experience your internal alignment. They experience the follow-up. They experience whether the proposal lands while the conversation is still fresh. They experience whether you remembered the commitment you made before they had to remind you.

The same is true inside a company. Your entire team doesn't experience your brilliant leadership offsite. They experience whether that turned into a decision, a plan, and an owner before the calendar swallowed everyone again.

For a long time, this discipline depended almost entirely on personal force of will. The best practitioners were just better at carrying the post-meeting load. They had the habits, the templates, the assistant, the systems, or the sheer stamina to make sure the second half happened.

That is changing. We can now build more infrastructure around the work after the meeting. But infrastructure only helps if the leader has the discipline to know what needs to be captured in the first place.

The tool doesn't make you a closer. It makes closing easier if you already care about closing.

Bottom Line

Pull up your last ten important meetings.

Don't score them on how smart the conversation was. Don't score them on whether people seemed aligned. Don't score them on whether the notes were thorough.

Score the five minutes after.

• Was the decision named?

• Was the owner clear?

• Did a signal leave the room that turned the conversation into commitment?

If the answer is mostly no, the problem isn't that your meetings are unproductive — it's that your culture isn't converting meetings into the work.

The fix is simple, but not easy: stop letting meetings end when the calendar says they end. The meeting ends when the commitment is clear.

Noters leave with a record of what was said.

Closers leave with proof that something changed.

Great Reads / Listens of the Month

A few great articles or podcasts I’ve loaded into my context window this month…

• The Last 10% by Alfred Lin. This is the “other side of the trade” from the people who want to ship half-baked MVPs.

• From System of Record to System of Intelligence. An interesting perspective on how systems of record change in the era of AI.

• The Roadmap Defense is Collapsing. Keep acting like an old-line software company, suffer the fate of an old-line software company.

• How to Start a Cult. The champion of communicators everywhere, Lulu Cheng Meservey, visits the Relentless podcast, and this was epic.

If you have a suggestion for a great read or listen of the month, hit reply and let me know — if I love it, I’ll give you credit in next month’s email!

Talent on the Prowl

Here’s a flip: I have a friend LOOKING for talent. Here’s the description:

This is a senior business development role for someone who can open trusted conversations with founders, CEOs, CTOs, CPOs, and product / engineering leaders. It is not a high-volume outreach role, not lead processing, and not a closing role. The focus is creating qualified opportunities through research, relevance, and executive-level relationship building.

If this sounds like you, hit reply or send me a DM and I’ll connect you.

If I can help, let me know.

That’s it for this month! As a reminder, I am coaching five CEOs or leadership teams. That’s all I have time for, but I’m having fun doing it, and it’s allowing me not to pay myself a lot from the new company while we are in the build phase. 😉 

I don’t think I could have been nearly as effective for my team without the help of a CEO coach. There’s just something about having someone who has walked that journey before as a “safe” sounding board who you can speak freely to.

At the moment, all of my coaching slots are full, but I always build a wait list because a few of my coaching engagements are for six to nine months at a time. If you want to discuss, click here to learn more about my approach, and hit reply if you’d like to talk about it.