Meetings are not overhead
Take a moment to look at your calendar for this week. How many meetings do you have scheduled?
Now ask yourself: how many of those meetings would actually make a difference if they didn’t happen? How many feel necessary versus how many feel like you’re just going through the motions?
For most senior leaders, meetings dominate the calendar. Back-to-back sessions, running from one to the next, landing in each meeting still mentally processing the one before. No transition time and no space to think.
And if you’re honest, many of these meetings feel like necessary evils rather than valuable use of time.
A CTO I work with recently and candidly shared his experience of his company’s leadership team meetings. His frustration was evident: “Three hours where we talk about everything and decide nothing.”
The themes he shared were not new: Issues get raised but not resolved. Conversations stay surface-level. The same few voices dominate while others check out. Decisions get deferred. Accountability goes unchecked.
But the team knows they need to meet, so they meet.
This is the paradox. Most of the time, leaders know meetings are important. They show up. They run them. But all too often, in their experience, meetings aren’t where the real work gets done. The real work happens afterward – in the emails, the side conversations and follow up.
But here’s what I see proven repeatedly with the most effective leaders: meetings aren’t a distraction from the work of leadership. They recognise that meetings ARE the work.
For leadership teams specifically, meetings are where collective decisions get made, where alignment happens, where hard truths surface, where accountability gets established. If you’re not doing that work in the room together, you’re not actually functioning as a leadership team – you’re just a group of individuals who occasionally update each other.
And so, if meetings are where the work happens, then the quality of your meetings directly determines the quality of your results.
Which means if you want exceptional results, you need to be exceptional at meetings.
Not just competent. Exceptional.
The problem is, most meetings aren’t exceptional. They’re not even good. Many of them are tolerably mediocre at best, and actively harmful at worst. Leaders sit through them, half-engaged, wondering why nothing seems to stick, why the same issues keep surfacing, why execution feels so difficult.
The cost of bad meetings isn’t just wasted time. It’s deferred decisions, avoided conversations, misalignment, lack of accountability, and teams that don’t actually function as teams. It’s leaders who feel disconnected from the collective work and retreat into their silos because at least there they can get something done.
But transforming meetings – and in turn your team performance – requires first being honest about what’s actually happening in them; both in the leadership team you’re part of and in the team you lead.
Because meetings are where collective leadership happens. But only if you treat them that way. And only if you’re willing to do the work to be exceptional at them.
Because exceptional results don’t come from tolerating mediocre meetings.
They come from recognising that the meeting IS the work.
Reflect: How you engage with meetings – which ones you prepare for, which ones energise you, where you check out – reveals what you genuinely believe about where value gets created.
Think back to a meeting where you felt genuinely energised afterward – what made it different?
Which meetings do you arrive at fully prepared versus the ones you land into – what does that reveal?
What small change to how you show up could make the biggest difference?
Focus: If your leadership team meetings aren’t where the real decisions happen and the hard conversations surface, then you’re not functioning as a team – you’re just a collection of individuals who update each other.
If 10 is exceptional, where does your leadership team meeting currently score on a scale of 1-10? What would your peers say?
How much do you personally invest in making them a success?
What are the real issues your leadership team keeps circling but never names?
Your Team: The meeting culture you create – whether meetings are energising or draining, whether all voices are heard or just a few dominate – tells your team more about your leadership than almost anything else you do.
Which patterns keep showing up in your team meetings that you’d like to disrupt?
Whose voice in your team have you stopped listening for – and when did that happen?
If you addressed the thing you’ve been avoiding, what might become possible?
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