Morning. You have one weekly meeting. It's doing the work of four.
Leadership.
The Meeting Stack
Picture the weekly meeting you'll chair in the next few days. Is that one meeting, or four queuing for the same room — status, this week's fire, and the strategic question raised at minute fifty-five and deferred again? If it's four, the fourth never happens. It hasn't happened all year.
Patrick Lencioni founded The Table Group, a Californian management consultancy, and wrote The Five Dysfunctions of a Team in 2002. Two years later he published Death by Meeting (Jossey-Bass, 2004), whose argument is that meetings aren't too numerous but too undifferentiated: teams pour every kind of conversation into one weekly slot and produce what he calls meeting stew, a tepid mixture in which the urgent always eats the important. His answer is to unbundle. A daily check-in of about five minutes, standing, on the day's activity. A weekly tactical of forty-five to ninety minutes on metrics and near-term obstacles. A monthly strategic of two hours or more on one or two topics, researched in advance, where argument is the point. And a quarterly review, one to two days and off site, on strategy, competitors and the team itself. Different clocks, different agendas, different rules. The trap is shortening the meeting you already have: you take twenty minutes off the weekly, call it discipline, and the strategic question is still homeless on Friday.
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