Managed by meetings

One of the first questions I ask when beginning a consulting engagement is deceptively simple: “Describe a typical week in your organisation.” The answers are remarkably consistent. Monday begins with an executive management meeting. Tuesday is occupied by departmental reviews. Wednesday is reserved for project meetings. Thursday brings steering committee sessions, while Friday closes with performance reviews and planning meetings. Somewhere between all these meetings, employees are expected to find time to do the work the meetings were meant to support.

This recurring pattern has led me to an uncomfortable conclusion. Many organisations are no longer managed by strategy, systems, or performance. They are managed by meetings.

Meetings are indispensable. Organisations need spaces where people exchange ideas, solve problems, make decisions, coordinate activities, and build relationships. Few significant organisational achievements occur without people coming together. Yet meetings are also among the most expensive activities any organisation undertakes. Every hour spent in a meeting represents productive time taken away from focused work. When multiplied across an organisation, the hidden cost is enormous. The real problem, therefore, is not that organisations have meetings. It is that too many organisations have allowed meetings to become a substitute for management.

Steven Rogelberg, one of the world’s leading researchers on workplace meetings and author of The Surprising Science of Meetings, has shown that poorly managed meetings reduce employee engagement, productivity, job satisfaction, and psychological well-being. Employees consistently identify unnecessary meetings as one of the greatest barriers to getting meaningful work done.

Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow reached similar conclusions, demonstrating that excessive meetings fragment attention, interrupt concentration, and diminish opportunities for innovation and high-quality thinking.

Technology has amplified the problem. Video conferencing, collaboration platforms, and hybrid work have made meetings easier to schedule than ever before. Unfortunately, easier scheduling has often produced more meetings rather than better ones. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index reports that knowledge workers now spend increasing portions of their day in meetings and managing digital communications, leaving far less uninterrupted time for what productivity expert Cal Newport calls “deep work” – the sustained concentration required to solve complex problems and produce high-quality results.

Ironically, many meetings exist because organisations have weaknesses elsewhere. When objectives are unclear, another meeting is called. When responsibilities overlap, another meeting is scheduled. When information is unavailable, another meeting is organised. When accountability is weak, another meeting is convened. Instead of fixing the underlying systems, organisations simply increase the number of conversations.

This creates two dangerous misconceptions. The first is that more meetings improve communication. Excessive meetings often create more noise than clarity. Participants leave with pages of notes but little certainty about decisions, priorities, or next steps. Conversation is mistaken for communication, and communication is mistaken for execution.

“Technology has amplified the problem. Video conferencing, collaboration platforms, and hybrid work have made meetings easier to schedule than ever before. Unfortunately, easier scheduling has often produced more meetings rather than better ones.”

The second misconception is that meetings create accountability. They do not. Accountability comes from having the “right people on the bus”, assigning clear ownership, defining measurable outcomes, establishing deadlines, and consistently following up on commitments. Meetings can support accountability, but they cannot replace it. So the question is: How then should organisations rethink their meeting culture?

First, every meeting should have a clearly defined purpose. If the objective can be achieved through a dashboard, concise report, or well-written email, the meeting probably isn’t necessary.

Meetings should be reserved for discussion, decision-making, problem-solving, and collaboration – not simply sharing information.

Second, organisations should distinguish between different kinds of meetings. Patrick Lencioni argues that daily operational check-ins, weekly tactical meetings, monthly strategic reviews, and periodic planning sessions each serve different purposes. When every meeting attempts to accomplish everything, most accomplish very little.

Third, meetings should revolve around decisions rather than presentations. Reading slides to people who could have reviewed them beforehand wastes valuable time. The meeting itself should focus on interpreting information, challenging assumptions, resolving issues, and making decisions. Every meeting should end by answering four questions: What has been decided? Who owns each action? When will it be completed? How will progress be monitored?

Finally, organisations should evaluate meetings the same way they evaluate every other investment. Were the right people present? Were meaningful decisions made? Were agreed actions completed? Did the meeting improve execution? If the answer is consistently no, the meeting itself requires redesign.

Ultimately, organisations should never aspire to build a meeting culture. They should aspire to build a performance culture. High-performing organisations rely on clear strategy, effective systems, transparent information, capable leaders, and disciplined execution. Meetings support these capabilities; they should never replace them. Their purpose is to remove obstacles, accelerate decisions, strengthen alignment, and enable execution.

Every meeting carries a hidden price tag. It consumes salaries, interrupts focused work, delays decisions, and competes for one of an organisation’s scarcest resources – attention. The return on that investment should therefore be measured not by attendance, agenda length, or the number of slides presented, but by what happens afterwards. Were better decisions made? Were barriers removed? Did execution improve?

In the end, organisations are not transformed inside meeting rooms. They are transformed by the quality of the decisions made there and, more importantly, by the discipline with which those decisions are executed afterwards.

Meetings should never become the engine of management. They should be the catalyst that turns strategy into action and conversations into results. That is the difference between organisations that merely meet and organisations that consistently perform.

Omagbitse Barrow is the chief executive of Efiko Management Consulting, and he supports organisations and leaders to translate their strategy into results.