Too Many Meetings for an Executive Shows Up as a Queue

The question gets asked as though it had a threshold. Some put the line at half the working week, others at a number of meetings a day, and executive calendars are audited against whichever figure the team heard most recently. The audit usually finds the calendar over the line, the executive agrees it is too full, and little changes, because nobody can say what the extra hours are costing.

Why the rules of thumb do not hold

A threshold in hours assumes the cost of a meeting falls on the person sitting in it. For most people that is close enough to true. For an executive it is the smaller part of the cost. An executive's calendar is not only their own time. It is the capacity the organisation has for everything that needs them, and the price of a full executive calendar is paid by the people waiting to get into it.

Where the cost showed up

A payments company we worked with makes the point. Its chief operating officer ran a calendar booked solid weeks ahead, and by every internal account ran it well: meetings started on time, closed with decisions and rarely overran. Nobody on the executive team thought the COO had a meeting problem. The problem surfaced two layers down, where a change to merchant pricing on a checkout product had been ready for sign-off for nearly three weeks. It needed twenty minutes of the COO's time. When the team asked, the first free twenty minutes had been sixteen working days away.

A calendar is a queue

Every item that requires a particular executive joins a line for their time: a sign-off, a judgment between two functions, a conversation with a client that only they can hold. When the calendar has room, the line is short and the wait is a day or two. As the calendar fills, the wait does not grow in proportion. It grows faster, because a calendar with no unbooked time has nowhere to put anything new except the back. This is how any queue behaves when it runs close to full, and it is why a calendar that moves from busy to fully booked feels like a small change to the executive and a large one to everyone else.

So the useful definition is a comparison rather than a count. An executive has too many meetings when the work that needs them waits longer for their time than it takes to do once it gets there. Twenty minutes of work behind sixteen days of waiting is the condition. The same calendar would be acceptable for an executive whose decisions can sit for a month without anything stalling, and too full for one whose signature gates a weekly release.

What the layer below does while it waits

Waiting is rarely passive. At the payments company, the teams queuing for the COO had settled into three habits, each sensible locally and each expensive:

• waiting, so that finished work sat still and its owners moved on, losing the thread they would need when the slot finally arrived
• routing around, catching the COO in a corridor or a chat thread, where decisions were taken without the people who should have been consulted
• deciding alone and hoping, so that some changes shipped without the sign-off and several were reversed when the COO saw them

The third habit does the most damage. Each reversal teaches the layer below that deciding without the executive is unsafe, which sends more items into the queue, which lengthens it. A full calendar does not stay the same size; it recruits.

A full calendar does not stay the same size; it recruits.

Reading the wait

A calendar audit counts what the executive attends. The measure that matters sits in the work that did not get in. We take a few weeks of items that needed one named executive and record three dates for each: when it was ready for them, when it got their time, and when it was resolved. The gap between the first two is the wait. The gap between the second and third is usually short, and the contrast between the two gaps is the finding.

At the payments company the sample took a fortnight to collect. The typical wait for the COO was a little over two weeks. The typical time from getting into the room to a decision was under a day. The items that waited longest were not the hardest ones but the smallest, because a small item loses every contest for a slot against a large one. A pricing tweak cannot outbid a quarterly review, so it waits behind every quarterly review until someone escalates it.

The second reading is unbooked time

The other measure is simpler: how much of the executive's week is still unbooked on Monday morning. It predicts the wait better than the meeting count does, because it is the room the queue has to move in. An executive with twenty meetings and a day of open time is in better shape than one with twelve meetings and none. The count describes how the executive spends the week. The unbooked time describes whether anyone else can reach them during it.

Decision slots

The first change at the payments company did not remove a single meeting. The COO's office converted two hours on three days of the week into decision slots: twenty-minute blocks that could not be booked more than two working days ahead, and could only be booked for an item with a written recommendation attached. Because they could not be booked far in advance, they stayed open for whatever had become ready that week. Because they required a recommendation, what arrived in them was ready to decide.

Within a month the typical wait had fallen from a little over two weeks to two or three days. The COO's total meeting hours were roughly where they had been. The calendar had not become emptier. It had acquired slack in the one place the queue needed it.

Shortening the route

The slots treat the symptom well and the cause only in part. The longer fix is to reduce how much work has to queue for an executive at all, which means asking, for each kind of item in the sample, why it needed this person. Many of the answers trace back to the gaps set out in the note on executive teams with too many meetings: approval rights held too high, numbers nobody trusts without a live explanation, seams between functions with no owner. Moving those is slower work, and it is what keeps the queue short once the slots start to fill.

An executive can attend a great many meetings without having too many, provided the work that needs them is not left standing in line.

Our work on executive meeting load starts with the wait rather than the calendar. A fortnight's sample of items that needed a named executive, each with the date it was ready and the date it got their time, usually shows on one page whether the calendar is too full and who has been paying for it.

From there our consulting engagements in the operating cadence pillar set up the decision slots and work through the items that should never have queued, often starting from who holds which right, as in decision rights in a scaling company need an expiry date. Our training programmes cover the other side of the slot: writing a recommendation an executive can decide on in twenty minutes. How many meetings are too many for an executive is answered by the people waiting outside the calendar, not by the hours inside it.