The meeting that never needed to happen.
More meetings is not more alignment. Sometimes it is just a more organised way of not deciding anything.
Running two shops and an events side out of one small team, most of what passed for communication was a phone call at an odd hour, or a message sent the moment something had already gone wrong. We did not really have meetings. We had emergencies with an agenda.
This is not really a communication problem. It is a rhythm problem.
Ad hoc communication feels responsive. In practice it means nothing gets caught until it is already urgent, and everything gets discussed at the worst possible moment to think clearly about it.
Where it actually starts
In a very small team, everyone is in the same room, so rhythm is unconscious — you overhear things, you catch problems by accident. The moment the team is not all in one room all the time, a second site, freelancers, remote working, growth, that accidental information-sharing stops working. Nothing planned has usually replaced it.
Why founders avoid building a rhythm
- Scheduling something regular feels like adding admin to already full days, when in the founder’s mind meetings are the opposite of real work.
- Bad experience with meetings elsewhere. A founder who has sat through pointless corporate meetings understandably wants nothing to do with anything resembling one, and swings too far the other way into no structure at all.
- Nobody has shown them what a good one looks like, short, decision-focused, same time every time, as opposed to the meandering catch-up that gives meetings their bad name.
What it is quietly costing you
- Problems only surface once they are already emergencies, at the worst possible time to solve them calmly.
- Decisions get remade repeatedly because nothing was written down or revisited at a known point.
- The team defaults back to the founder for anything unclear, because there is no other regular point at which clarity gets created.
What your thinking style has to do with it
- Driver: sees meetings as friction and will cancel or shorten them the moment something more urgent appears, quietly signalling to the team that the rhythm does not actually matter.
- Navigator: talks strategy and vision well, but the meeting rarely produces a concrete decision, because the conversation stays at altitude.
- Connector: keeps the room warm and enjoyable, but hard topics get softened until they quietly disappear from the agenda.
- Analyst: prepares an excellent agenda, then finds the meeting itself frustrating because the discussion inevitably wanders away from the plan.
A rhythm you have not designed does not disappear. It gets replaced by whatever is loudest that day.
What actually changes it
The coaching work is recognising which of these is playing out for you, and why. The operational work is building a short, deliberately boring rhythm: the same short set of questions, the same time, every time, rather than an open-ended discussion of everything.
- One short slot, weekly or fortnightly, same time every time, protected from being the first thing cancelled.
- A fixed, short list of questions rather than an open agenda: what is off track, what needs a decision, what is coming up.
- A clear line between what gets decided in the room and what gets taken away to think about, so the meeting actually ends with something settled.
Rhythm is the sibling of the systems blindspot I wrote about earlier in this series. One captures what is true about the business. The other catches what is changing. If you want an outside structure to build that rhythm against, that is exactly what ongoing work through the Growth Partnership is built for.
We eventually built a Monday morning slot that lasted fifteen minutes and covered three questions. It was the least glamorous change I made to that business, and one of the ones I would keep if I only got to keep one.
Further reading
Patrick Lencioni’s Death by Meeting is a genuinely useful, easy read on why most meetings fail and the small number of formats that actually work.
Coverage of the cost of unproductive meetings varies wildly depending on the study, but one widely cited UK estimate gives a sense of the scale, even allowing for how rough these figures tend to be.
- Ready to charge what your work is actually worth?