The hidden meeting mistake wasting your time and draining productivity
Having spent the past seven years running a company all about productivity, I’ve found that meetings are generally the most inefficient activity across companies. So I started to cancel meetings.
That is, until I found the meetings that truly needed to be added back. I learned through this trial-and-error process of canceled meetings that the most inefficient and unproductive are one-on-ones, especially between executives.
One-on-ones for individual contributors are necessary for morale, connection, and coaching. But for executives, they are costly, ineffective, and inefficient. I used to have standing one-on-ones with every member of the executive team, and they had one-on-ones with each other. Think about the cost of these meetings: the highest-paid people meeting with each other individually, every week. But more importantly, what comes out of these meetings? And what happens when you cancel meetings?
I found it was the single source of enabling politically charged decision-making. Many executives use one-on-ones to privately align on their preferred decision or outcome for an upcoming topic. While they don’t necessarily have bad intent, it creates a culture of closed-door decisions made without transparency. Plus, the discreet and informal nature of one-on-ones created a slippery slope to complaining about others.
Topics discussed in a one-on-one are rarely only relevant to the two people in the room. In the vast majority of times that executives disagree vehemently and can’t come to a quick resolution, it's simply because both parties don’t have the full context.
The solution? I canceled meetings within the executive team and replaced them with daily group meetings. Companies have become far too siloed, and fragmented meetings are largely what causes it. The way to solve it is by canceling one-on-one meetings at the top.
