5 Tactical Ways To Tackle Meeting Proliferation

Too many meetings comes from a lack of clarity and context or murky decision-making. Solving these issues will naturally decrease meeting load.

Every growth-stage company wakes up one day to an email or message from the founder or CEO saying, “We have too many meetings. Let’s cancel them.” The teams get excited. Some meetings get cancelled. And then, a month later, everyone’s calendar is full of meetings again.

Excessive meetings are a symptom of deeper scaling challenges in an organization. You can, at a surface level, temporarily reduce the number of meetings by asking people to do a calendar clean-up. But like bamboo shoots after the spring rain, they inevitably pop back up. To eliminate excessive meetings, leaders need to first work to address the root causes of meeting proliferation:

1. Lack of clarity on what to do

2. Lack of empowerment to make tough decisions

No one likes a calendar full of meetings, and no one puts meetings on the calendar for fun. Understanding the root cause of excessive meetings in your organization will allow you to effectively reduce meeting load for the long haul.

When you don’t know what to do, you do meetings.

One of the main reasons that meetings proliferate is when the team lacks direction. When a person doesn’t know what is important to work on or how to get a task done, they create meetings with other people to get the context and knowledge. It comes from a good place of agency and ownership. And there are two core reasons why people end up lost: being new to an organization and a lack of clarity from leadership.

Adding new people too quickly through organic growth or acquisitions is one of the basic yet often hidden reasons a team loses direction. As the organization adds more new people, there is less average context per person, more people doing new activities, and more coordination required to keep everyone moving in the same direction. Here’s a simplified view of what happens:

Imagine you have a team of 10 “Old Timers” who have been at the company since the early days. The company undergoes a scaling phase and hires 5 new people. Here’s what the meeting load of these 10 Old Timers looks like:

• To get to 5 new hires, the Older Timers must do 20 phone screens (30 min each), 10 virtual interviews, 8 on-site interviews, and 10 hours of interview debrief and interview notes writing time. This adds up to 10 hours per Old Timer per month.

• Each new hire decides to “figure it out” and onboards by having one-on-ones with the Old Timers who are doing work relevant to their jobs. For simplicity, let’s say that each new hire meets 3 Old Timers. Each Old Timer has 3 hours of intro meetings per month.

• As the new hires take on projects, they don’t know how things work, and there is no documentation, so they have more conversations with the Old Timers who know how things work. Each Old Timer adds another 3 hours of context-sharing meetings each month.

• Finally, the new hires take on new work. But their work is not entirely independent of the work of the Old Timers, so weekly meetings are started to keep everyone updated on progress and changes. Each Old Timer adds 4 hours of Weekly Syncs to their calendar.

In this overly simplified view, by adding 5 new people, we have added 20 hours of meeting time per person per month. There is thus far no actual new work being done, only onboarding, training, and context sharing. It is no longer efficient to simply tell a smart individual to “go figure it out” because “figuring it out” is expensive for the company’s most precious commodity: the bandwidth of those most productive and knowledgeable about your company.

The second root cause of why teams lack direction is a lack of clarity from leadership. Sometimes, this is because leadership itself lacks clarity. More often, it is due to a lack of scaled and reliable communication channels, or the leadership changing its mind too often.

When teams are small, it is possible to quickly talk to each other and stay coordinated. A quick Slack message or a simple 3-way conversation is sufficient. Smaller teams also pivot more quickly with less effort to stay on top of changes.

As teams get bigger, there are more layers of management, teams in different time zones, and specialized work. It takes real effort and time to communicate (changes in) vision, strategy, and direction. In a 50-person organization, it’s possible to communicate and try out a new strategy every month. In a 5000 person organization, it takes a month for a new strategy to actually reach every corner of the organization and change what people are working on. When an organization doesn’t invest in its communication infrastructure, people quickly get confused about which message to listen to, what is important, and what is changing that may affect them. To get clarity, they create more ad hoc, ineffective meetings!

When you don’t feel empowered to decide, you do meetings

Another root cause of excessive meetings is a lack of decision-making autonomy at the team level. In the early days, it’s easier to feel the ownership and autonomy to make decisions. Everyone has a clear area of responsibility, there are more problems than hours in the day, and there is a spirit of “just do it”.

First, as the company gets bigger, it becomes difficult to track who is responsible for what areas and who needs to be involved. Here’s another simplified example:

At the beginning, the company had 1 marketing person. That person hires 3 other people, one responsible for growth, another for lifecycle, and another for brand. Each of those people hires 3 more people, each with their own scope of work. On top, they hire a CMO and another VP of growth, who builds out her own 10-person organization. Throw in a few re-orgs as the team grows. Now, there are ~30 people doing what was once the scope of 1 person, and an org structure that changes every 6 months. As an engineer who needs to talk to “someone in marketing”, simply figuring out who to talk to has just become 30 times harder.

Second, it becomes less clear who is responsible for making the decision. As functions and teams get built out in a collaborative environment, it gets murky who calls the shots. Sometimes, individuals don’t want to be responsible for a wrong decision. More often, people are afraid to step on toes or offend others. When there isn’t a clear articulation of who, what, and where decisions are made, everyone spends more time in meetings discussing and aligning, rather than doing the work.

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Yue’s Coaching Corner

• I sat down with

  Bonnie Marcus
  at the Badass Woman podcast to discuss my transition from tech executive to executive coach and Playing To Win in Silicon Valley. Listen to the full episode here.

  • I also highly recommend her book, The Politics of Promotion: How High-achieving Women Get Ahead and Stay Ahead. It really changed how I viewed what was a priority to do in my own career.

• So often, we go about trying to build support for our projects and ideas the wrong way. Join me for a free talk on “AI-powered Stakeholder Management” on October 22. Sign up to attend live or get the recording emailed.

  • The content is a part of my live course, Master Executive Presence & Communication with AI. If you’ve been wanting to leverage AI to uplevel your written and verbal communication and influence critical stakeholders, this is the course!

  • Paid subscribers to this newsletter get 20% off! Pays itself back.

• 3 spots left for the January cohort of my Leadership Accelerator program for mid-career professionals who want to uplevel from “doer” to “leader”: learn more here.

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How To Tackle the Root Cause

To decrease meeting load for once and for all, it is important to shift the focus toward effective meetings and scalable channels of communication. The solution is not to discourage communication with a blanket “no meetings!”, but to nurture productive, effective channels of communication.

Here are 5 tactical ways to reduce meeting load:

1. Increase Meeting Effectiveness: Is this meeting still valuable or relevant as it is set up? Encourage each person to review the frequency, agenda, and attendees of their recurring meetings every month or quarter. Encourage teams to shift meeting structure as projects progress or finish.

2. Limit the Purpose: Clearly state and limit the purpose of meetings to decision-making, resolving disagreements, and trust-building. That’s it. Any meetings held to “inform others” or “share context” or “walk through a deck” should move to written and async first. Meetings are to resolve disagreements and misalignments or to finalize a decision.

3. Aggressively Move to Async: Reading and writing (now AI prototyping and Loom videos) are much more scalable than verbal communication. Encourage teams to write pre-reads, share AI prototypes, and record Loom videos of presentations.

4. Clarify Decision-Making: Who is the decision-maker on a project? How are decisions made? Who needs to be consulted or informed? Creating reliable forums for leadership reviews, defining roles and responsibilities, and creating playbooks (and AI agents) for repeatable work leads to more efficient workflows and fewer meetings.

5. Scale “inform” communications: Don’t waste meetings sharing context. Instead, practice sending out post-meeting summaries and action items, weekly or monthly updates, or daily Slack check-ins to keep stakeholders informed.