Running meetings that don’t suck

Quick math problem for you:  Eight (highly-paid) engineers are sitting in a conference room, blankly staring at a screen.   The meeting is two hours long.   How much does that meeting cost?  Fully loaded, those seats cost about two grand.   Motivational cost of slowly killing parts of your developers’ souls?  Priceless – and not in a good way.  Oh, total output of that hour? Zero decisions. Zero action items. Just the collective death of initiative in your company.

Many teams treat bad meetings like bad weather.  You can see it coming, but you can’t do much to change it – you just have to endure.  That’s bullshit.  Bad meetings are a choice. They are the result of lazy scheduling, a lack of respect for other people’s time, or self-indulgence on the part of the scheduler.   If you want a high-performance culture that scales, you must run good meetings that don’t suck.

Item One – Ensure It’s Absolutely Needed

The most productive meeting is the one that never happened. Before you even look at a calendar, ask yourself whether the current meeting set can handle the issue. 80% of the exceptional meetings I get can be handled within pre-existing meetings that are part of our already-defined Rhythm of the Business meetings.  If we’re smart in designing information flow, we can often avoid additional meetings.  Second, a meeting is needed to accomplish a thing.   We don’t meet to “connect”, “chat”, or “talk”, but to accomplish specific things.  We also don’t meet to “inform” people.   If you just need to inform people, write a memo or record a video – let them review it as their time permits.

Item Two – Right Type of Meeting

Not all meetings are created equal. If you don’t define the type of meeting, the participants won’t know how to behave. In a scaling, we typically see four legitimate types of internal meetings:

Meeting Type	Purpose	The Rule
Broadcast	One-way info sharing.	Essentially, these are lectures.   As noted above,  we generally recommend sending notes or recording videos to simply “inform” people.    Meetings are only needed here if there is a requirement for live Q&A or logical team building objectives (such as with an all-hands meeting)
Decision	To pick a path.	A specific person or process is defined in advance to make a decision.  The meeting has a structured agenda to review data or options, make a decision, and document the path indicated by that decision.
Working Session	Cross-functional problem solving.	Define an agenda that’s clear about time spent on problem exploration, solution exploration, solution definition (agreeing and aligning on the approach), and solution refinement and elaboration.    A working session doesn’t mean “no agenda, let’s just talk,” it means a structured approach to problem-solving.
Alignment	Ensuring everyone is on the same page.	Pulling stakeholders together to confirm a shared approach.  Typically, this focuses on discussing and resolving specific subpoints of a larger strategy, where different people are doing different things.

Item Three – Nail The Invite

If I see a calendar invite that just says “Quick Sync” with no body text, I view it as a personal, professional, and existential insult.   WTF?   My time’s not valuable enough for you to tell me what we’re meeting about?  My time is valuable.   Your invite is telling me what you want to use it for.   Good invites must include:

• Objective: The “Why” of the meeting (e.g., “We need to finalize the Q3 pricing structure.”)
• Desired Outcomes: The “What.” (e.g., “By the end of this call, we will have a signed-off pricing sheet for the Sales team.”)
• Bulleted Agenda: A realistic timeline of how we will spend the time
• Background & Pre-reads: Links to the data or documents. If you spend the first 15 minutes of a meeting “presenting” a deck that the attendees could have read in five, you are wasting time and not expecting enough from your co-workers.
• Logistics: Who is facilitating? Who is taking notes? What preparation is required from the attendees?

The “25/50” Rule

The default 30 and 60-minute blocks are a trap. They lead to back-to-back days where no one has time to grab water, let alone process what was just discussed. We operate on 25 and 50-minute defaults. Give your team the five or ten minutes back to reset. It’s a small change that drastically reduces burnout.

Item Four – Run Your Meetings

The meeting starts at the scheduled time, and you, the organizer, are expected to facilitate and run it.   As the facilitator, your job is to manage the meeting and people in it to the objective.  As you go, we recommend three tools to that end:

• Keep the Outcome in Mind:  If you are drifting from the topic, restate the outcome: “We are here to decide on X. By the end of this, we need Y.  What we’re talking about now isn’t linked to that.”
• The Best Idea Wins, Not the Loudest.  Don’t let the loudest 10% of the room dominate 90% of the conversation. If a smart, thoughtful person is quiet, call on them.
• Have a Parking Lot: When a tangent is useful, identify it and put it in the “parking lot” for separate follow-up, then bring the group back to the agenda.

Item Five – Follow-up (The Artifact)

If a meeting happens and no one takes notes, did it actually happen?  As soon after the meeting as possible, ideally immediately, worst case within 24 hours, the organizer or designate must send a recap.   A recap isn’t a word-for-word transcript.  It’s the as-short-as-possible summary of decisions and action items.  Store these notes in the correct system of record (Google Drive, your CRM, etc.) This method creates a searchable history of the company’s logic, which is invaluable for onboarding new hires as you scale.

Item Six – Audit Quarterly(Recurring Meeting Hygiene)

Recurring meetings are the silent killers of productivity. They start with purpose and quality, but by month six, they are boring and stale.   The purpose is gone, and we’re all just showing up because we have to.  Three tools I use to fight this:

Recurring Meetings Must Expire.   Every recurring meeting should have an “End Date,” and a “forever” series of meetings isn’t allowed.   Ideally, they expire after a quarter; six months out is to good a balance.   What this does is force inspection and requires a person to renew a meeting series consciously.   

Audit Quarterly: Once a quarter, rebuild the corporate calendar from the ground up.  Check each meeting and ask, “If we removed this, would the company break?” If the answer is “probably not,” delete it for two weeks and see what happens.

Remove Optional: In general, “optional” should mean “no” for stakeholders to recurring meetings.  If they aren’t required, send them a recap, not an hour-long obligation.

The Path to Operating Leverage

Meetings are not a distraction from the work; for a leader, they are the work. But they must be treated with the same analytical rigor as your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) or your churn rate.  When you clean up your meeting culture, you save time and clarity.   You move from a state of constant, reactive “syncing” to a state of proactive execution. You move from “busy” to “effective.”

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