The Meeting That Should Have Been a Decision
I once counted the number of hours my leadership team spent in meetings during a single week. Not the full organization — just the twelve directors and senior managers who reported to me. The total was north of 400 hours. That’s 400 hours of leadership capacity consumed by sitting in rooms — physical and virtual — talking about work instead of doing it.
The kicker: when I asked each of them which meetings were actually necessary, they could justify about a third. The rest existed because they’d always existed, because someone upstream wanted visibility, or because nobody had the authority — or the courage — to make a decision without convening a group first.
This isn’t a time management problem. It’s a leadership problem. And it’s one of the most corrosive dynamics I’ve seen in organizations of any size.
The consensus trap
The root cause of most unnecessary meetings is an organizational allergy to decision-making. Somewhere along the way, many companies developed the idea that good decisions are consensus decisions — that if you get everyone in a room and talk it through, you’ll arrive at the right answer together.
That sounds reasonable. It’s also incredibly slow, and it produces worse outcomes than you’d think.
Here’s what actually happens in consensus-driven organizations: a problem surfaces, a meeting is scheduled, eight people attend, the problem is discussed, concerns are raised, action items are assigned, a follow-up meeting is scheduled. At the follow-up, the action items are reviewed, new concerns are raised, the scope of the decision expands, more stakeholders are invited. Three meetings later, the decision is either made by exhaustion — whoever has the most stamina wins — or it’s made by the most senior person in the room, which is what should have happened in the first week.
I watched this cycle play out when we were trying to reduce our escalation resolution time. The problem was clear: escalated cases were taking an average of 22 days to resolve when our target was 10. The root causes were identifiable: unclear ownership between teams, no single person accountable for driving resolution, and a process that required too many handoffs.
The solution required a decision about who owned escalations end-to-end. That’s it. One decision. Instead, it became a cross-functional initiative with a steering committee, weekly syncs, a RACI matrix that took three meetings to agree on, and a pilot program that took two months to launch. By the time we actually made the change, we’d spent hundreds of hours in meetings about a problem that a single empowered decision-maker could have resolved in a week.
The cost nobody calculates
Organizations track every line item in their budget. They scrutinize headcount, travel expenses, software licenses, office space per square foot. But they almost never calculate the cost of their meeting culture.
Let me do some rough math. A one-hour meeting with eight people isn’t one hour of cost. It’s eight hours of cost, plus the context-switching cost for each person before and after, plus the opportunity cost of whatever they would have been doing instead. If the average fully loaded cost of those eight people is $100 an hour, that meeting costs $800 in direct time alone. Run that meeting weekly for a year and you’ve spent $40,000 — on a single recurring meeting.
Now multiply that by every recurring meeting in the organization. In one company I worked with, we identified over 300 recurring meetings across a department of 200 people. Conservatively, that was millions of dollars in annual meeting cost. And the department was simultaneously complaining about being under-resourced.
They didn’t need more people. They needed fewer meetings.
The ownership problem
The meetings that should have been decisions almost always share one characteristic: unclear ownership. When nobody owns a decision, the default response is to schedule a meeting. The meeting creates the illusion of progress without requiring anyone to stick their neck out.
I learned this the hard way. Early in my career, I was a prodigious meeting scheduler. Every problem that landed on my desk got a meeting invite. I thought I was being collaborative. What I was actually being was indecisive. I was distributing the risk of being wrong across a group, so that no single person — including me — would be accountable if the outcome was bad.
When I realized what I was doing, I started asking a different question before scheduling any meeting: “Who owns this decision?” If the answer was clear — if someone had the authority and the context to decide — the meeting was unnecessary. What that person needed was information, not a conference room.
I implemented a simple rule on my team: before you schedule a meeting, answer three questions. What decision needs to be made? Who has the authority to make it? What information do they need that they don’t currently have? If you can answer all three, you probably don’t need a meeting. You need a five-minute conversation or a well-written message.
Breaking the cycle
When I set out to fix the meeting culture in my organization, I didn’t start by canceling meetings. That’s the instinct, and it feels good for about a week until the meetings creep back because the underlying behavior hasn’t changed.
Instead, I started by auditing decision-making. For every recurring meeting on my team’s calendar, I asked: what decisions has this meeting produced in the last month? The answers were illuminating. Many meetings existed for “alignment” or “visibility” — which usually meant that people attended, listened, and then went back to doing what they were going to do anyway. No decisions were being made. The meetings were informational, and most of that information could have been an email or a dashboard.
We consolidated aggressively. Our weekly leadership meeting went from 90 minutes to 30 by changing its purpose from “discuss everything” to “make decisions on blocked items.” If a topic didn’t require a decision from the group, it didn’t make the agenda. Updates were shared asynchronously in a written format that people could read on their own time.
The escalation review meeting — the one I mentioned earlier that had spawned a steering committee — was replaced by a single owner who had the authority to drive escalated cases to resolution and reported progress asynchronously. Escalation resolution time dropped from 22 days to 5. Not because we had a better process — because we had a person who owned the outcome instead of a committee that discussed it.
The 75 percent improvement
The number I’m proudest of from that period isn’t a customer metric or a revenue figure. It’s the 75 percent improvement in escalation resolution time that we achieved primarily by clarifying ownership and eliminating the meetings that were masking the lack of it.
That improvement didn’t require new tools. It didn’t require additional headcount. It required one structural change: moving from “the escalation committee reviews cases weekly” to “this person owns escalations and has the authority to do what it takes to resolve them.” The committee had created the illusion of accountability — eight people discussing each case — while actually diffusing it. When everyone is responsible, nobody is responsible.
The same pattern showed up everywhere we looked. Decisions about resourcing? A meeting. Decisions about process changes? A meeting. Decisions about customer exceptions? A meeting. In every case, the meeting existed because the decision rights were unclear, and clarifying those rights made the meeting unnecessary.
What I tell my leaders now
I tell them three things:
Default to ownership, not meetings. When a problem surfaces, the first question should be “who owns this?” — not “when can we meet about this?” If the ownership is clear, empower the owner to decide. If the ownership is unclear, fix that first. The worst thing you can do is schedule a meeting as a substitute for assigning responsibility.
Protect your team’s time like it’s budget. Because it is. Every hour someone spends in a meeting they don’t need to attend is an hour they’re not spending on the work you hired them to do. I’ve started asking my leaders to calculate the hourly cost of their recurring meetings. When you see the number, you start canceling things fast.
Make decisions reversible. One reason people defer to meetings is fear of making the wrong call. But most operational decisions are reversible. If you decide to change a process and it doesn’t work, you can change it back. If you assign ownership to the wrong person, you can reassign it. The cost of a wrong decision that gets corrected in a week is almost always lower than the cost of a right decision that takes three months of meetings to arrive at.
The deeper problem
Meeting culture is a symptom, not a disease. The disease is organizational fear — fear of making the wrong decision, fear of being accountable for an outcome, fear of moving forward without coverage from the group.
Healthy organizations make decisions quickly because the cost of indecision is understood to be higher than the cost of an imperfect choice. Unhealthy organizations hold meetings because meetings feel like progress while allowing everyone to avoid the personal risk of deciding.
If you want to fix your meeting culture, you have to fix the thing underneath it: give people clear authority, make it safe to be wrong, and reward decisiveness over deliberation. The meetings will take care of themselves.
— Bruno