Heavy
Level 3. Scores 51 to 75. Your team meets well over the reference. Shortening will not fix it.
Your leadership team spends well over the reference rhythm in recurring meetings, and the annual figure on the page is real money. Most teams in this band know they meet too much, and most of them have tried to fix it by shortening meetings, which does not work, because the rhythm grows back. The fix at this level is structural: fewer meetings, fewer people in them, and a decision list that says what each one is for.
Start with cost per decision. In a Heavy rhythm there is almost always one meeting with a very high cost per decision: the long one, the weekly that has become a status round, the monthly that reviews what the weekly already decided. That row is where the money goes. It usually exists because it once made decisions and now makes reports, and nobody has said so.
The second pattern is duplication. Heavy rhythms often have two meetings doing one job: a stand up and a weekly that both cover status, or a monthly and a quarterly that both cover numbers. Put the rows side by side and ask what would be lost if one of them went. Usually the honest answer is a feeling of being informed, which a written update provides at a fraction of the cost.
A founder I worked with had a leadership team that met every morning, twice a week at length, and again at the end of every month to review what the weekly had already decided. I asked what the monthly was for. Nobody could say.
They cancelled it, moved the status part of the weekly into a written update, and kept two things: the short daily stand up and a weekly where every item opened with "the issue is". Within a month, decisions that used to wait for the monthly were being made on a Tuesday. Nobody missed the meeting they cut. They missed the feeling of it for a couple of weeks, and then they stopped.
What to do this month: cancel one recurring meeting outright, the one with the highest cost per decision, for four weeks. Replace it with a written update that takes ten minutes to read. At the end of four weeks, ask the team what broke. If the answer is nothing, it stays cancelled. If something broke, bring back a meeting half the length with half the people.
Heavy rhythms are also where the leader's own load hides. If your span score is Stretched, the meeting hours in this calculator are a large part of why.
Next step: the meeting rhythm is a large share of a stretched leader's week. Size the rest with the span of control calculator.
Next step
The other results
- LeanYour team meets less than the reference. Is anything decided?
- WorkingYour rhythm is near the reference. Now ask what each is for.
- Meeting BoundYour team has replaced deciding with meeting.
About this result
This is one of 4 results from the Leadership Team Meeting Cost Calculator, a free tool that shows the score without an email. Aggregate figures are at the statistics page once 30 completions have been reached. More free tools are at the tools shelf.