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Key Takeaways If your meetings keep getting longer and your progress keeps getting slower, stop looking at the calendar and instead, take a look at your ownership.
The moment you make it clear who owns a decision and who owns the next step, your meetings shrink, and your team speeds up.
To create meetings that move work forward, start with a clear owner for every decision, name the next step in simple language and close each meeting with a shared record.
Last year, I worked with a global hybrid team that had grown fairly fast. They had people in the United States, Europe and Asia, and the team truly cared about the work. Everyone in the team showed up prepared.
But something odd kept happening.
Their meetings kept getting longer, and weekly “syncs” turned into 90-minute sessions. Not only that, their check-ins doubled, and their project calls began to stack on top of each other. People often joked that their real work started after hours, when they entered what they dubbed the “night shift.”
Leaders certainly felt the pressure because, despite being busy all day, the output kept slowing down. As a result, they kept adding meetings because, in their minds, the team needed more time to align. Instead, the pace of the work dropped yet again.
They were confused because they believed more talk would solve the problem, but instead, it kept getting worse. Much worse.
When I joined them, my first job was to watch how they worked. So, I sat through their calls, listened to how they made choices and paid close attention to the moments where energy dropped. After two days, the source of the slowdown became clear.
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