I have a confession.
I love meetings.
I know – that’s a very unpopular opinion.
I don’t love sitting around conference tables talking for the sake of talking. I love what meetings can do. They’re where teams connect. Where ideas collide and become something better. Where decisions get made. Where accountability is created. Where people leave clearer, more aligned, and ready to move forward together.
Meetings are where organizations happen.
Which is exactly why bad meetings are so costly.
A coaching client of mine recently shared something that really concerned me. His calendar was so full of meetings that he barely had time to do the work he was responsible for. His morale was dropping, and he was heading toward burnout.
The problem wasn’t the number of meetings. It was that too many of them weren’t producing enough value to justify the time they consumed.
Most leaders calculate the cost of meetings by multiplying salaries by the number of people in the room. Don’t do that—it’s too upsetting. Besides, that’s actually the least interesting cost.
The real cost isn’t the meeting. It’s what the meeting leaves behind: delayed decisions, fuzzy accountability, eroding trust, and people slowly believing their time—and their ideas—don’t matter.
I’ve noticed that people usually leave a bad meeting with one of three questions:
What are we actually doing?
Who owns this?
Why was I here?
When those questions remain unanswered, the meeting wasn’t neutral. It created more work.
Follow-up meetings get scheduled. Decisions get revisited. People leave with different assumptions. Momentum slows while everyone tries to figure out what should have been clear in the room.
Multiply that across dozens of meetings every week, and the cost isn’t measured in hours.
It’s measured in lost productivity.
In delayed execution.
In declining morale.
In weaker relationships.
In slower decisions.
In lower trust.
That’s culture damage.
The irony is that people rarely complain because meetings are long. They complain because nothing changed.
People don’t resent meetings. They resent pointless meetings.
That’s why I believe improving meetings may be one of the highest-leverage things a leader can do. Every meeting either builds trust or erodes it, creates clarity or confusion, strengthens accountability or weakens it, moves the work forward or quietly stalls it.
So the next time you evaluate a meeting, don’t ask, “Was this a good use of an hour?” Ask, “What changed because we came together?”
Because if the answer is “not much,” the meeting didn’t just waste time. It cost your organization something far more valuable.
This week, identify the one meeting that consistently frustrates people the most. Don’t cancel it. Redesign it. Because the meeting everyone dreads isn’t just a problem – it’s probably your greatest opportunity to improve communication, strengthen culture, and accelerate results.
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