Solve "Too Many Meetings" To Increase Team Effectiveness and Morale

Help your teams run more effectively through solving for the root cause of meeting proliferation in your organization. Level up your influence and credibility through leveling up your team.

(Beach For Days; Teddy The Corgi, California, USA)

“We have too many meetings!” is a common complaint leaders hear from their teams. Too many meetings can drain team morale and prevent “real work” from being done.

It is often unclear what to do about it. Some leaders try adopting a “no meetings” day. This approach usually leads to more meetings on other days. Over time, meetings will slowly accumulate again on those days. Others declare “Meeting Bankruptcy” where they cancel all the meetings and start over. Again, works for a little while, but over the next 3 months the teams’ calendar inevitably fills up again.

To truly decrease the meeting load of an organization, it is critical to find and address the root cause. Often, the proliferation of meetings hides inefficiencies in how the team operates. The first step in solving for “too many meetings” is to understand what causes so many meetings to be created.

Root Cause Meeting Proliferation

Too Many Meetings is a common theme in every team I've led. It is also an issue that many of my coaching clients struggle with. I've found that across B2B and B2C, startups and tech giants, there are common root causes that lead to meeting proliferation.

1. Unclear decision-making forums

One of the most common causes of many meetings is a lack of a clear decision-making process. The sniff test I use with my teams and clients is to go to the most junior person on the team and ask: “How does your team make decisions?” and “How well do those decisions stick?”

When it is unclear how to get a decision made, the person who needs a decision will try to chart their own. This often leads to many more meetings than necessary. Most people will start with a series of individual or small group meetings. Then, as conversations are had, small changes or debates happen. This leads the person to go back to the first set of people to re-align, creating more meetings. Sometimes, these meetings also happen “out of order” or miss critical stakeholders. Then, the alignment and realignment conversations need to be had again, and again. Too many meetings, and not a lot of progress.

2. Non-scalable communication processes

Does your team often get meetings tossed on their calendar for “updates”? Meetings get formed because one team needs an update from another team to progress with their work. In the absence of a scalable, timely process to communicate updates and decisions, ad hoc meetings get set up instead. The more interdependent the teams, the more meetings will get set up. I once had a PM on my team who spent 10+ hours a week giving updates each week. The most ironic part? Her time was so boggled down with update meetings that she didn't have time to make progress on the project itself.

3. Lack of ownership or authority

“Let’s find a time to talk about it some more as a group”. Does your team get stuck in rounds of meetings where people weigh in and revisit prior concerns? When a project or decision lacks a clear driver to own the next steps, meetings proliferate. At Meta and Instagram, I’ve seen this tactic used to slow down progress on projects that were not favored. A leader will say “We should do this” but not assign an owner, making it very difficult to truly make progress.

4. Information FOMO

One of my personal pet peeves is when people go to meetings because they worry “Just in case something comes up”. Sometimes, there is a culture of showing up to meetings only to be supportive, even if you have little to add. Sometimes, the decision-making process is unclear. People feel they need to show up to every meeting “Just in case” something is decided that affects their work. In my early days at Fuzzy, my attempt to cut back meetings received strong push-back because of this fear. I had first to solve the decision-making problem before people felt comfortable not attending a meeting (because who wants to book “catch-me-up” meetings?).

Uncovering Root Causes

Your team may be shy or hesitant to tell the truth about too many meetings. They might not fully understand the dynamics themselves. One effective way to get perspectives on what might be causing meeting overflow is to send a written survey (anonymous is best!) to your organization or team and ask them 3 simple questions:

• What current meetings do find useful?

• What meetings do you have that you find less useful or could be better run?

• What is preventing you from making those meetings more effective?

You can then build upon aggregate findings through your regular 1:1s and team meeting times. Once you have a good sense of the root cause of meeting proliferation, it’s time to invest in systems that truly eliminate meeting load.

Design Your Systems

Once you have a grasp on the root causes for your team, it’s time to try new ways of working to become a more effective and efficient team. As you can see above, many of the root causes are related to decision-making and communication. Here are some of my go-to tactics to improve those:

• Group Review Meetings: Consider creating or revamping your large group decision-making forums. This can be a product review or leadership review process. These meetings are anointed as decision-making forums and attended by senior decision-makers. They have clear guidelines for attendees, preparation, topics, and post-meeting shareout. Finally, to help teams understand when to bring a topic to the forum, outline the types of reviews: Information, Brainstorming, Discussion, Decision-Making, and Conflict Resolution.

• Written Updates: Kill those update meetings with well-written weekly update emails. Summarize progress in 1-2 sentences up front. Divide the main content by goals, theme, or intended team of the audience, not your team. Include evergreen links to design documents, product specifications, and launch plans. Encourage people to reply with questions. It can help to maintain an easily shareable version too (e.g. in Google Docs, Confluence, etc). When you receive questions during the week, you can easily direct the person to the weekly update.

• Assign a DRI or Captain: Create the concept of a Primary Driver (DRI) or Captain in your teams. This person is responsible and accountable for driving a project forward and ensuring decisions are made. A DRI can be assigned regardless of the person's official title or job. Often, projects can fall between team lines or functional responsibility. Designating a Captain is a fast way to imbue authority and move forward. This is a common practice at Meta, Amazon, and Netflix, particularly for large cross-team projects.

Remember, at the core of Too Many Meetings are ineffective processes and fear. Simply eliminating meetings may feel better in the short term. But in the longer run, it’s important to address process and culture to truly have more efficient teams.

That’s all folks!

See you next week at 3:14 pm.

Yue