Your Calendar is Busy. Your Leadership is Reactive.

I’ve worked in organisations where you run from one meeting to the next all day… and then open your laptop properly at 6pm to do the work that actually requires your thinking.

You grab a coffee in between. You glance at your inbox while someone is talking. You leave one room already thinking about the next meeting.

It’s exhausting, and after a while, you stop questioning it.

The weekly meeting stays in the diary. The agenda (let’s assume there is an agenda!) never really changes.  No real decisions. The same updates. The same conversations. A few eye rolls. A few people arriving late….. and we all accept it as normal.

Meetings start to feel like they’re happening to you.

When that’s the case it’s usually a sign your organisation has normalised reactivity, and somewhere along the way, we’ve forgotten what meetings are for.

I believe meetings should be decision-making containers. Not status signals. Not ‘just in case’ placeholders. Not a performative busyness.

They are Decision-Making containers.

Yet research, including the work of Rebecca Hinds, shows that we now spend 80-90% of our time at work collaborating with other people. That’s most of our working lives.

And still, we often give almost no thought to how that collaboration with people is designed.

A full diary looks important. Back-to-back meetings look productive. Being invited feels validating.

Add in the default 30 and 60-minute calendar slots and Parkinson’s Law (give us the time, and we’ll use the time) quietly takes over. Work expands to fill the time available and conversations stretch because they can. And suddenly there is no space left to think, to reflect and to strategize.

Rebecca Hinds also speaks about something I found fascinating - when a meeting host is visibly prepared, when context is shared in advance and it’s clear why each person is in the room, engagement increases.

The effort changes energy, which means the opposite is also true……

A recurring meeting with no updated agenda. No verbs for agenda items– eg: debate budget assumptions for FY 26/27. No clarity on whether we’re deciding, discussing or just informing. No preparation.

And this sends a message as well.

If meetings are decision-making containers, then the design matters.

-          What decision are we making in this room? And If there isn’t one, do we need the meeting?

-          What problem are we solving?

-          Who owns the outcome when we leave?

These are leadership choices, and not administrative decisions.

There are some simple shifts I’ve seen make a real difference.

-          Start every agenda item with a verb. Decide. Prioritise. Align. Resolve. Review.

-          Default to 25 or 50 minutes instead of 30 or 60. Notice how much sharper conversations become. And an extra bonus here is that it gives everyone time to reflect ahead of the next meeting….

-          Halve something. The time, or the frequency or the invite list. Rebecca Hinds talks about the half rule because constraints force clarity.

-          Be explicit about the type of meeting. Is this information, discussion or decision? They are not the same thing.

-          Review recurring meetings every few weeks. Just because it’s always been there doesn’t mean it still earns its place.

If you spend most of your working life in meetings, then how you design them says a lot about how you lead.

Meetings shape energy. They shape confidence. They shape whether you are leading intentionally or reacting constantly.

And if they feel like they’re happening to you, that’s worth paying attention to.

PS. If your 1:1s are the first thing you cancel when the diary gets busy, that isn’t a time management issue. It’s a cultural signal. It tells your team that development and connection come after urgency. Over time, that message sticks.