Do We Need Another Meeting?
- Paul Baker
- Aug 3
- 5 min read
Do you have any meetings in your diary today?
Meeting leadership is a topic I wish I had given greater consideration to when I was regularly leading museum teams. Looking back, there were aspects of meetings that I instinctively understood and managed well, but I also recognise opportunities I missed to make them more purposeful and engaging.
This blog has been inspired by the work of organisational psychologist Adam Grant, whose podcasts and interviews I would highly recommend if you're interested in leadership and organisational culture. His ideas prompted me to reflect on my own experiences rather than simply accept meetings as an unavoidable part of working life.
So, gather round the table. This meeting is about to begin.
Are all meetings necessary?
How many of you believe your organisation holds too many meetings?
Are they all necessary? Are they a good use of your time? Do they genuinely allow everyone's voice to be heard? Has video conferencing made collaboration easier, or has it simply made it easier to schedule yet another meeting?
Perhaps the most important question is this: do your meetings actually achieve anything?
Many professionals spend a significant proportion of their working week moving from one meeting to another. Invitations appear in calendars almost by default, often with little explanation of why attendance is needed. In some organisations it can begin to feel as though attending meetings has become a role in itself.
What would happen if half of those meetings disappeared? Would productivity suffer, or would people have more time to focus on meaningful work? More importantly, would the meetings that remained become more valuable?
Start with the purpose
One of the simplest questions we can ask before arranging a meeting is, why does this need to be a meeting?
If the objective is simply to communicate information, an email or recorded update may achieve exactly the same outcome. If you are looking for honest opinions, would individual conversations produce richer insights than a group discussion? Is the meeting format really the best environment for everyone to contribute?
When meetings are necessary, a clear agenda is invaluable. Better still, each agenda item should indicate what is expected from those attending. Is the item intended to:
provide information?
celebrate success?
make a decision?
solve a problem?
generate ideas?
seek feedback?
Giving participants this clarity helps them prepare appropriately and understand why their presence matters.
What are meetings actually for?
Adam Grant highlights four broad reasons why teams benefit from meeting together. They are to:
make decisions
strengthen relationships
create something together
learn.
It's a useful framework because it encourages us to question everything else. If a meeting isn't serving one of these purposes, there may be a better way to achieve the same outcome.
Personally, I would never underestimate the importance of bringing people together simply to celebrate success or strengthen relationships. Teams are built through shared experiences, not just shared workloads. However, whatever the purpose, the quality of the meeting matters far more than the fact it happened.
A familiar scenario
Imagine your organisation needs to make an important decision.
The meeting organiser produces a six-page report outlining the background, options and recommendations. Appreciating that everyone is busy, no one is expected to read it beforehand.
The meeting begins.
The first twenty minutes are spent bringing everyone up to speed. One conscientious colleague, who did read the paper and arrived prepared, quietly wonders why they bothered.
Once everyone has a basic understanding of the issue, the chair begins working around the room asking for opinions.
On the surface this feels inclusive. In reality, many people are being asked to express a view before they've had sufficient time to process the information. Others are trying to judge what their colleagues think before committing themselves. Some are simply waiting to hear what the most senior person in the room believes.
Is this really the best way to make an important decision?
Whose opinion carries the greatest weight?
Leadership has a significant influence on the quality of discussion.
There is a well-known concept called the HIPPO effect, which stands for the Highest Paid Person's Opinion. If the leader expresses a strong preference at the beginning of a discussion, many people will consciously or unconsciously align themselves with that position. Diversity of thought begins to disappear and groupthink can quietly take hold.
One of the most valuable things a leader can do is hold back their own opinion until everyone else has had an opportunity to contribute. That doesn't mean abandoning leadership. It means creating space for genuinely different perspectives before reaching a conclusion.
If the outcome has already been decided, let's be honest about it. There is little point presenting the meeting as a collaborative decision-making process if the purpose is simply to persuade everyone to support an existing position.
Who gets heard?
How a meeting is facilitated has an enormous impact on its effectiveness.
If people repeatedly feel ignored, they eventually stop contributing. Why would they continue investing energy if they don't believe it makes any difference?
Equally, organisations need to recognise that people process information differently. Some formulate ideas quickly and enjoy thinking aloud. Others need time to reflect before arriving at their best contribution. Neither approach is better, but a meeting that only rewards quick responses risks overlooking some of the strongest thinking in the room.
Research discussed by Grant also suggests that people who speak most often are frequently perceived as more capable and influential, regardless of whether they have the best ideas. The result can be that confidence is mistaken for competence.
As someone who is neurodiverse, this resonates with me. I have to consciously manage my instinct to contribute quickly. Early in my career I realised that speaking last often produced better conversations. It allowed others to express their thinking without my comments shaping the discussion, and it forced me to listen more carefully before responding.
I still have to remind myself to do it.
Making meetings worth attending
A successful meeting isn't measured by how full the agenda was or whether it finished on time. It's measured by whether the people attending leave believing their time was well spent.
Did the meeting reach a decision?
Did it strengthen relationships?
Did it generate new ideas?
Did everyone have a genuine opportunity to contribute?
If the answer is no, perhaps the meeting wasn't the right solution in the first place.
Some organisations have gone as far as cancelling every recurring meeting before deciding which ones genuinely deserve to return. It's a simple but powerful exercise because it forces people to justify the purpose of each meeting rather than accepting it as part of the routine.
It might be an interesting challenge for your own organisation.
One final question
The next time you're about to schedule a meeting, pause for a moment and ask yourself a simple question.
Does this really need to be a meeting?
If the answer is yes, make sure people know why they are there, what is expected of them and how they can contribute. If the answer is no, perhaps you've just given everyone back some of their most valuable resource: time.
As Course Director of GEM's Emerging Leaders Programme, this is one of the leadership topics we'll be exploring as part of the revised programme. Effective meetings don't happen by accident. They are designed, facilitated and continually improved.
If this article has prompted you to think differently about the meetings in your own organisation, I'd love to hear your experiences. Details of my leadership workshops and consultancy can be found on my website, and I'd be delighted to explore how I might support your organisation.
Paul Baker
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