Meeting Bound
Level 4. Scores 76 to 100. Your team has replaced deciding with meeting.
Your leadership team spends two to three times the reference rhythm in recurring meetings, and the annual cost on the page is the cost of the leadership team not doing the work only it can do. This is not a calendar problem. A team in this band has replaced deciding with meeting, and the meetings are now the place where the absence of decisions is managed.
Two things are usually true in a Meeting Bound rhythm. The first is that nobody can say what any given meeting is for. Ask each attendee of your most expensive row what decision it makes, and you will get different answers or none. The second is that the meetings exist to give the leader visibility, and the leader is present in all of them, which makes the leader the constraint on every decision, since nothing is decided in a meeting the leader has not attended.
The cost per decision figure, if you entered decisions, will be the highest number on the page and probably the highest any leader would be comfortable seeing in print. That is the number to put in front of the team.
A CEO in one of my rooms sat in every recurring meeting his company ran. He called it staying close to the business. I asked what he would lose if he dropped half of them. He said visibility. So we looked at what visibility was costing him. Not the salaries in the room. The decisions that waited for him, and the people who had stopped deciding because they knew he would be there.
That is the real price of visibility. You see everything, and nothing moves without you. What I tell a leader in that seat is simple. You do not need to be in the room to know what happened in it. You need a team that tells you in writing, and a weekly where they decide in front of you rather than wait for you.
What to do this quarter, in order. First, list every recurring meeting and, next to each, the decision it exists to make, in one line, written by the meeting's owner and not by you. Second, cancel every row with no decision and replace it with a written update. Third, for the rows that remain, halve attendance: only the people who decide. Fourth, run the reduced rhythm for a quarter and measure decision speed, not meeting satisfaction, because satisfaction goes down before speed goes up.
Meeting Bound teams rarely fix this from inside, because the person who would have to cut the meetings is the person they were built for. That is what a peer group or a coach is for.
Next step: if the leader in every meeting is you, that is the bottleneck pattern. Read what executive coaching does with it on the executive coaching cost index or see whether the CEO mastermind fits.
Next step
Read what executive coaching does with the bottleneck pattern
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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.