Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has an 8-hour meeting with his leadership team every month

By Shana Lebowitz

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been known to tell employees to skip pointless meetings that waste their time.

But that doesn't mean he spares his top execs from long meetings.

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Nadella said they convene one Friday a month for a whopping eight hours. The other three weeks, they meet for four hours.

"The senior leadership team of any company [has] got to stay on the same page," he told The Journal. "Any organization can easily devolve into a bunch of silos."

What are they doing for all that time? A Bloomberg Business story from earlier this year noted that Nadella keeps a dashboard that measures the performance of all his executives. It includes "real-time graphs and data on financial performance to product usage," and "executives bring out the dashboards each Friday at senior leadership meetings to help coordinate efforts across business units."

In a video interview with The Journal, Nadella said his strategy for running meetings is to "listen more, talk less, and be decisive when the time comes."

Outside of meetings with senior leaders, Nadella also drops in on "grass-roots employees" from time to time, to find out what they're working on and note any potential problems.

"Anyone should be able to tell me anything," he told The Journal. "That's the culture we strive for."