An Executive Team's Extra Meetings Are Workarounds

The complaint is common enough to have its own remedies. An executive team looks at its calendars, finds most of each week committed before Monday starts, and decides to cut. Recurring meetings are cancelled wholesale, a no-meeting day is declared, and every invitation now needs an agenda attached. For a few weeks the calendars open up and the team feels lighter.

The purge and the regrowth

A digital bank we worked with ran this exact exercise. Its executive team of eight cancelled every recurring meeting that included one of them and asked the owners to re-request only the ones they could justify. Within a quarter the calendars were as full as before. Few of the old meetings had come back under their old names. A weekly product review had returned as a fortnightly alignment session with the same attendees. A risk sign-off forum had dissolved into a run of one-off calls, each booked by whoever needed an approval that week. The meetings had been cancelled, but the work each one was doing had not, and the work booked new meetings for itself.

This is what usually sits behind the familiar complaint that a team has too many meetings and nothing gets done. The count is treated as the problem, and the count is the one thing that recovers fastest. A calendar purge removes the container and leaves the demand where it was.

What a meeting covers for

Asked why a meeting exists, its owner names the topic. Asked what would have to be true for it to be unnecessary, the owner usually names something else, and the answers fall into a short set. In the teams we see, almost every recurring meeting with an executive in it is covering for one of four gaps:

• a decision right that sits too high, so the layer below brings each case to an executive for approval
• a number nobody trusts in writing, so its owner has to explain it live before anyone acts on it
• a decision that does not hold, so it is argued again in whichever forum comes next
• a seam between two functions with no owner, so every crossing needs both executives in the same room

Each of these is a reasonable thing for a meeting to absorb for a while. The trouble is that a meeting absorbs it silently. Nobody records that the weekly product review exists because product cannot ship a change above a certain risk level without a signature. It simply becomes the product review, and it keeps running long after anyone remembers why it started.

Most of the load sits below the executive table

The second finding is where the hours actually go. The executive team's own forums, its weekly, its monthly review and its quarterly session, are rarely the bulk of the load. Most of an executive's meeting hours are spent in meetings run by the layer below, attended to approve, to vouch for a number, or because the last decision taken without them was reversed. That is why cutting the team's own meetings barely moves the total, and why the question of how many meetings are too many for an executive cannot be answered from the leadership calendar alone.

The calendar trace

The method we use is plain. We list every recurring meeting that includes a member of the executive team, including the ones owned by people below them, and for each one we ask what would have to be true for it to stop being necessary. The answer places the meeting against one of the four gaps, or against none, in which case it is a habit and can go immediately.

At the bank, the trace sorted the regrown calendar within a fortnight. The largest group was approval-shaped: product and operational changes that needed an executive signature because no threshold had ever been written below which a director could sign alone. The next group was the alignment sessions between product and risk, which existed because nobody owned the boundary between the two. Habit accounted for less than the team expected. The meetings that are habit alone are the easy minority; the expensive ones are doing real work in the wrong place.

Reading the pattern

The distribution is itself a finding about the organisation. A calendar dominated by approvals says decision rights were never moved down as the company grew, the pattern set out in decision rights in a scaling company need an expiry date. One dominated by live explanations of numbers says the reporting is not trusted. One dominated by repeat discussions says decisions are closing without a record. None of these is fixed by a meeting policy, which is why the policy alone never holds.

Moving the job first

The order matters more than the cut. Each gap has a written substitute, and the substitute has to be working before the meeting is removed, or the meeting regrows the way the bank's did. An approval meeting gives way to a written threshold, below which the layer down decides and reports afterwards. A live explanation gives way to a pre-read carrying the owner's commentary on what moved and why. A reargued decision gives way to a register entry that states what evidence would reopen it. A seam meeting gives way to a named owner for the boundary, with the right to settle what crosses it.

Run in this order, removal stops being a negotiation. The meeting's owner is not asked to defend the meeting. They are asked whether the substitute has carried the job for a month. If it has, the meeting goes, and there is rarely an argument, because nobody is losing anything they still need. Cutting executive meeting load is a sequence of handovers, not a cull.

A calendar purge removes the container and leaves the demand where it was.

What the executive team keeps

What remains is smaller and more deliberate: the team's own weekly, a monthly review and a quarterly session, each holding only what no one below can settle, as set out in what belongs on a leadership team meeting agenda. At the bank the trace and the handovers took two quarters, and the calendars that came out of them stayed open, because the demand that had filled them had been moved rather than refused.

Our work on executive meeting load starts with the trace, not the calendar. A list of every recurring meeting with an executive in it, each one placed against the gap it covers, usually shows in a single session why the last purge grew back and which handovers would stop the next one from doing the same.

From there our consulting engagements inside the operating cadence pillar write the thresholds, owners and registers that let each meeting retire, and our training programmes build the habits those substitutes rely on, from writing a pre-read that answers its own questions to deciding below a threshold without checking first. An executive team with too many meetings fixes it by giving each meeting's job a better home, and only then cancelling the meeting.