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Key Takeaways
- If your meetings are getting longer and your progress is getting slower, stop looking at the agenda and look at your property instead.
- The moment you clarify who owns a decision and who owns the next step, your meetings shrink and your team speeds up.
- To create meetings that move the work forward, start with a clear owner for each decision, identify the next step in simple language, and end each meeting with a shared report.
Last year I worked with a global hybrid team that had grown quite quickly. They had people in the United States, Europe and Asia, and the team really cared about the work. Everyone on the team showed up prepared.
But something strange kept happening.
Their meetings grew longer and weekly “syncs” turned into 90-minute sessions. Not only that, their check-ins doubled and their project calls started piling up on top of each other. People often joked that their real work started after hours, when they came in for what they called the “night shift.”
Leaders certainly felt the pressure as, despite working all day, production continued to slow down. As a result, they kept adding meetings because they felt the team needed more time to get on the same page. Instead, the pace of work slowed again.
They were confused because they believed that talking more would solve the problem, but instead it kept getting worse. Much worse.
When I joined them, my first job was to see how they worked. So I listened to their calls, listened to them make choices, and paid close attention to the moments when the energy dropped. After two days the cause of the delay became clear.
The real problem wasn’t the meetings. It was the total loss of ownership within the meetings.
Related: My Strategy to Help Leaders Reduce Their Meeting Time and Gain Back More than 10 Hours a Week
Meetings expand as ownership disappears
Leaders often think that one of the reasons meetings grow is because the team is too detailed or too cautious. What I see in many global hybrid teams is much simpler.
The team doesn’t know who owns the final set of decisions.
When this happens, people do the same thing regardless of whether the team is a business or technical team. This is what they do:
- They come together, hoping that someone else will make things clear
They repeat the topics they covered last week because no one is sure who decided what
They retry the ideas they previously discussed because no one has the final call
They repeat the same debate on three different calls, because there is no shared record of decisions
The result is that meetings grow because decisions are not left hanging.
In the global team I worked with, this emerged in small moments. For example, someone said that she “view a plan,‘But no one knew what that specifically meant.
Someone agreed”check out the next steps,but no one knew when they would do it. People wanted to move on but didn’t know who had the authority to close an item.
Those small gaps caused major delays.
You can’t solve meeting overload with more meetings
This is the trap that many leaders often fall into. When the team slows down, they add more meetings so people can get on the same page, thinking more time together will clear up the confusion.
Unfortunately, it actually does the opposite.
A conversation can help if the goal is clear and someone directs the next steps. Otherwise, a meeting becomes a hurdle as the group tries to figure out who owns it while they are talking.
This is why meeting overload is so frustrating. Everyone sees the problem, but no one can name it. People think they have a planning challenge, when in reality they have a clarity challenge.
The solution is to intentionally reduce the number of meetings by strengthening ownership, not by shifting agendas.
The global team’s turning point came from a simple step
After seeing their sessions, I requested a short work session with the core leadership group. We looked at the last ten decisions they had made. Then I asked a simple question for everyone.
Who made this call?
They became silent.
They scrolled through their notes, checked messages, and looked for email threads that might help. They wanted to answer sincerely, but they couldn’t.
They were smart, dedicated and did their best honestly. But they had no shared vision of ownership.
As soon as they saw this, things started to move forward.
I helped them transition to a clean structure.
- Each decision needed a clear owner.
Each action needed a clear owner.
Each next step needed a clear owner.
They didn’t need a heavy or complicated framework. They just needed a shared language and a simple custom.
By the end of the session, they were able to see the connection between the lack of ownership and the increasing number of meeting hours.
The root causes of the problems have been identified:
- People had made extra calls because the work had somehow slipped through the cracks.
They had repeated topics because the decisions were soft.
They were in loops because no one was sure who had the right to close a question.
Once ownership became clear, the meetings shrunk.
Related: Companies Spend More Than $37 Billion on Unnecessary Meetings Every Year – Use These 5 Tips to Make Sure Yours Are Worth Attending.
The reason why hybrid and global teams feel the pain faster
Hybrid teams can be effective, but often face more bottlenecks. Here are some examples:
- Time zones stretch work.
Messages cross each other.
People miss small signals during video calls.
Progress updates take place at different times throughout the day.
When a team is in the same room, the lack of ownership still slows down the work, but at least people can catch each other in the hallway and talk something through before it grows. Gaps are resolved fairly informally.
In a hybrid team, on the other hand, the lack of ownership creates a gap that no one sees until the next scheduled meeting. That delay causes a second delay and another, and soon the team is holding more meetings to repair the damage from the last set of meetings.
Right now it feels like it’s a time issue; however, it is really an ownership issue.
The one mistake leaders make makes this worse
When meetings start to feel heavy, many leaders react instinctively. What they usually do is tighten the agendas, shorten the time slots and reduce the number of attendees. While these are indeed good moves, the problem is that they don’t solve the root cause.
A meeting often doesn’t last long because the agenda is weak. More often than not, a meeting goes on for a long time because the team is trying to establish a sense of ownership that should have been clear before the meeting started.
In my experience, this is the biggest reason why meeting cuts fail.
Leaders reduce a meeting, but the work behind the meeting is not clear. The confusion spreads and the team works late. Meanwhile, decisions are becoming slower.
I see this pattern in growing companies of all sizes, all over the world and across industry sectors. Leaders believe they have created a “fast” culture. They want to move quickly and their teams work hard, but the structure behind the work has holes.
And those holes slow everything down.
How to create meetings that move work forward
The good news is that you can shorten your meetings and speed up your work at the same time. You just have to be intentional about bringing the property back to the center.
Here are three steps to help leaders do this with very little friction:
- Start with a clear owner for every decision: If a decision has no owner, the meeting will grow until someone tries to fill the gap.
State the next step in simple language: If the next step is not clear, the team will return to the topic in the next meeting.
Close any meeting with a shared record: If the team cannot see what has been decided, they repeat the discussion.
These steps seem simple, but are powerful when leaders apply them with discipline.
The global team I supported used these steps for two weeks and the results were truly impressive.
- The number of meetings decreased.
Their synchronizations became shorter.
People felt less stressed.
The pace picked up again.
They haven’t hired more people, added new software, or changed their goals. They did, however, make ownership visible.
Related: 4 Ways You Can Create a Culture of Ownership
Clarity always pays you back
The leaders in this story did their best. They were committed and pushed hard. Their problem wasn’t the effort. Their problem was structure, and this is the part that surprises many founders and executives.
She think work is slowing down because the team is not fast enough.
She think meetings are growing because the team talks too much.
She think progress is slowing because the team needs more direction.
They miss the hidden truth that when ownership is unclear, even large teams slow down.
Once leaders resolve that, work gets moving again.
Leaders who intentionally build clarity into the core of their work never have to force speed because their teams create it.