Team Meetings That Work

I sat with a client last week who told me his team meetings were "a waste of everyone's time."

I asked him what happened in them.

He said, "We go around the room, people give updates, we talk about problems, and then everyone goes back to work."

I asked, "What decisions get made?"

He paused. Then said, "Honestly, not many."

That right there is the problem with most team meetings. They are reporting sessions dressed up as leadership conversations. People show up, they recite what happened, and then they leave. Nothing changes. No one is held to anything. The meeting ends and the business continues running on momentum and hope.

The meeting is not the problem. The structure is.

When a meeting has no decision-forcing mechanism, it becomes a status theater. Everyone performs being busy. The owner leaves frustrated. The team leaves confused about what actually matters.

A meeting that works does one thing above everything else. It moves the business forward by forcing clarity on what needs to happen, who owns it, and by when. That is it. Everything else is noise.

If your meetings feel like a burden, they probably are one. Not because meetings are bad, but because yours may not be built to produce anything.

So here is the question worth sitting with: If you removed every update from your next team meeting and only kept the decisions, would there be anything left to discuss?

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From "The Owner's Almanac" - 90 days to build a business that runs without you. Available on Amazon.