3 Ways Meetings Drain Your Team and Create Conflict at Work

If you are a manager who feels stuck in meetings that go nowhere, you are not alone. Many leaders schedule meetings hoping to create alignment, solve problems, or move work forward, but instead experience meeting fatigue, disengagement, and conflict at work. 

In this episode, Desiree explains why meetings without decisions drain your team and your time, how information-heavy meetings quietly disengage employees, and why meetings have become the default response instead of a leadership tool. You will learn how misalignment around meeting purpose leads to frustration, a lack of team accountability, and stalled leadership development. This episode focuses on front-end fixes managers can make before meetings even begin, so meetings become a tool for clarity, trust, and stronger team management rather than a source of stress.

Key Takeaways

• Meetings without clear decisions create frustration, rework, and conflict at work
• Information meetings are a major cause of disengagement and meeting fatigue for teams
• Using meetings intentionally is a leadership development skill that improves team accountability

 As you listen, think about your next meeting and ask yourself what decision actually needs to be made and who owns it.

Episode Links: 

How to Make Meetings More Effective and Engaging | Lessons from Death By Meeting By Patrick Lencioni

The Best Way to Overcome Dysfunction and Build a Cohesive Team | Lessons from 5 Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni 

5 Steps to Make One-on-One Meetings Build Trust Instead of Waste Time 

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Transcript

Desiree (00:01.088)
If you are a manager, there is a good chance that your calendar is full of meetings and you might love meetings or you might hate them, but either way, they are a necessary part of team management. The trouble comes in when you start to hear things like, well, that could have been an email or we've talked about this already at length. Why are we talking about it again? Or did we make a decision? I'm not actually sure. Those are signs that there is a misalignment or a misunderstanding of what our meetings are for. And that creates meeting fatigue,

conflict at work, and a breakdown in team accountability. So if you want to use meetings as a leadership development tool to create a more cohesive team, then lean in because we are going to break down the three main things that we need to know in order to make our teams and our meetings more effective.

Desiree (00:52.15)
And dare I say maybe even more.

Desiree (01:00.63)
and dare I say, maybe even more fun. So welcome back to You're the Boss, Now What? I'm your host, Desiree Petrik, and our goal here is to help you lead yourself and your team with more confidence. So lean in and let's get started.

Desiree (01:15.788)
In today's episode, we have three main topics. We have three main things that are going to help us to reduce meeting fatigue, to increase engagement, and to actually make sure that our meetings are not only a necessary part of work, but something that people don't dread. So number one, we're gonna talk about how meetings without decisions drain our teams. And not only that, it drains our time. So let me set the scene for you.

I was working with a group of 15 plus people. They believed in a lack of hierarchy. Everyone needed to have the same weight in every decision, which is a decision. It's something that that team felt very strongly about and that's okay. But in their meetings, they required full consensus from every single one of their leaders in order to move a decision through. Every single person had to raise their hand. Yes, they agree. Yes, they wanted something to move forward.

As you can imagine, this caused a little bit of frustration. It caused a lack of movement. It caused a repetitiveness of conversation. It caused frustration among people who were disagreeing because then the decision couldn't be moved through. If you're experiencing something like this, maybe not with that much intensity, but you might see meetings that consistently run long because no one can come to a decision. You might see that team members are clearly holding back opinions

because they don't want the meeting to run long, because they don't want to engage or to start conflict. You might see agreement in the room, people raising their hands just to get it over with, but it's followed up by frustration and gossip and conflict afterwards. You might see little momentum. In other words, no one's following through on what the decision was in the meeting because there's no accountability because people just wanted the conversation over with. It wasn't actually.

agreement on what was decided. Now to close the loop on this conversation with this team, we put a few different things into play that helped them to start to have more engaging meetings. So I'm here to tell you it is possible and we're going to talk about ways to fix things on the front end of meetings. But please know that next week we are going to discuss how to actually hold your team accountable when something like a lack of follow through happens.

Desiree (03:37.272)
But for today, I really want to stick to the front end. How can we make sure that our meetings are as engaging and as effective as possible? So how can we fix this? How can we fix a lack of decisions draining our team's energy and our team's time? The first thing that we can do is not only decide on, but to share the purpose of a meeting before it starts. So at the beginning of a meeting, be clear about the goal. Make sure that it's known whether we need to have a decision made

by a certain time at the end of the meeting and

Desiree (04:18.804)
Or if it's simply a meeting about discussing the information that we currently have, discussing the possibilities of negative ramifications, discussing different people's opinions. Is it a meeting where a decision needs to be made and it might even be time sensitive? Or is it simply a conversation to get deeper into whether or not we're getting closer to a decision? If we don't explain that upfront.

then the people on our team who are a little more tactical, they're a little more last 10 % focus, they want to have movement, they want to have clarity, they are going to get frustrated by waiting for something that isn't coming. They had the expectation of leaving that room with a decision, even though the intent was to never have a decision made. If we can be clear about it upfront by deciding and explaining what the purpose is before the meeting starts, everyone's expectations, if nothing else, will be clear.

That's one way on the front end, we can help a little bit of this meeting fatigue. Now, part two to that is naming who owns the final decision. If it's decided that yes, a meeting needs to be made by 11 a.m. and here's who will make that decision. You as the leader might be put in that position. You might say, I want to hear what everyone has to say. And you might say, I want there to be productive conflict. I don't want this to be a yes, sir.

yes, ma'am type of meeting. want this to be, I disagree with this route because, and give everyone that opportunity to agree or disagree or share a devil's advocate perspective or whatever it might be, but make sure that we know who the final decision maker is going to be so that we at the end of the meeting can look towards that person and say, you don't have to come to,

Desiree (06:20.93)
This way, not only does that person understand the responsibility that is now put on them, but everyone else also know who's that responsibility is so that we're not feeling like there's a need to over debate something or to disengage because it doesn't matter. We're clear on the beginning.

Desiree (06:44.118)
It's clear in the beginning. I already alluded to this, but separate input from agreement. In other words, you have 10 people around your table, 10 people on your team that need to be included in making a decision. If the goal of the meeting is to gather perspectives and we're not needing a yes from everyone, this gives people permission to disagree without feeling like they're holding the meeting hostage. We all know that one person who asks a lot of questions.

or who gives that devil's advocate perspective within the last five minutes of a meeting, even though they didn't speak up beforehand. We know that person who is not going to say what they mean unless someone really provokes them.

Desiree (07:39.106)
We all know what it's like to be in a meeting that feels like it's going nowhere and it feels like it's going to.

Desiree (08:00.66)
Making it clear that we want people's perspective and we want conflict in the best kind of way makes it known that it's okay to prolong the conversation a little bit. Sometimes it's even okay to go over the meeting length if that's a value that your team shares is really good decision making over meeting.

Desiree (08:33.006)
The last piece of the puzzle on this one around commitments and decisions draining team meetings is that we need to separate the concept of input from the team from the concept of agreement from the team. Because if the team gets the...

Desiree (08:57.366)
If the team is feeling like in order to go back to their work and deal with their massive to-do list, if they feel like in order to get them out of that room, they have to agree with something, that is...

Desiree (09:21.486)
There's one more piece of the puzzle to this. And that is that it's important to remember that some employees truly are just team players. They care deeply about the success of the team. They care deeply about the success of the company, but they actually don't have an opinion either way. I say this because I am someone who feels it's important for every person to have a voice. I wanna go around the table. I want everyone to say how they feel, what they think.

I think it's important for creating some of that psychological safety, et cetera. All of this being said, I kept having the conversation with people who seem not really to have an opinion, didn't really want to talk out loud. And I was taking it as, well, they just don't care or they're too scared to public speak or insert, give an excuse here. And sometimes it was, but sometimes it was truly that the person was just such a team player that they could have an opinion, but not actually care about the...

the opinion that was made because they were on board no matter what. They were truly willing to do what needed to be done based on what everyone else was okay with and what they agreed to. Now, I'm going to let you decide if that's okay or not, or if you feel the need to push harder or not. But I have come to understand that some people are just team players who are willing to go with the flow and that's okay too. So it's important to make sure that we are understanding and getting to know our employees and creating language around something like

I care deeply, but I don't have an opinion. I'm still working on it. I don't know about you, but it's a bit of a hard concept for me to grasp, because I always have an opinion about everything. But some people truly don't. So as we are talking about and finishing up this conversation on meetings and having a decision or making it clear that no decision is necessary, this is going to immediately feel like less of a drain on our time and our energy.

because it feels like the meeting has a purpose, it has a goal, there's clarity around it, there is an understanding of the expectation of it, and that is going to help us to immediately make meetings feel more engaging, it's gonna make them feel more necessary, and make them feel like they have an endpoint, so we're not talking in circles. If you want a little bit more of an understanding on this, especially when it comes to the trust and the ability,

Desiree (11:45.55)
to have some of that productive conflict that I mentioned multiple times. There's an episode on the five dysfunctions of a team by Patrick Lincione and it's the most listened to episode on this entire podcast. So if you want to listen to that, go to the show notes, go to that link and I promise you that framework is gonna change everything that you think about team engagement, trust, conflict, accountability, et cetera. But I digress, moving on. Number two, big concept number two is this. Informational meetings are creating

a lot of your meeting fatigue. Two super short examples. I was part of a team. We only met once a month. We were a very small team. We talked at length every single day. But once a month, we felt it was important to get together for a team meeting. We would sit in a room. We would have our notebook of the things that we were doing, and we would spout them off, and then we would leave. There was very rarely a conversation. There was very rarely a need.

for any feedback because if we needed feedback, we would just ask in the moment. And it was an informational meeting. Now, I think that getting together as a team is extremely important. We need to be spending time as a full team, but you can do that in ways that build a little more joy. Go out to eat together, order food in, play a game. I don't know. But an informational meeting that's unnecessary, spouting off information that everyone already knows.

Probably not necessary. Another example, every single morning at 8 a.m. when I worked at a different company, we would have a production meeting. We would go down the list of where all of the jobs were at any given moment. And 99 % of each job was in the same state as it was the day before because it was just a little bit slower of a production.

Desiree (13:46.21)
because the turnaround times were just not as fast as a daily meeting would suggest they needed to be. And I will come back to again, when something was needed, we would go to the individual who had control or ownership at that time and just ask them. So I think this one could be argued a little bit, but the point I'm trying to make is that my meeting fatigue from going to a meeting that didn't feel like it needed my presence,

started to make me hate my job. It made me dread meetings. It created a lack of flexibility of being able to drop my kid off at daycare or being able to go to pastries with parents or being able to schedule a sales meeting at that time if it was the only time someone had. It created a lack of flexibility which increased my meeting fatigue. Whether it was needed or not was never really discussed. It just was. So again, informational meetings are creating meeting fatigue.

But here's the thing, it doesn't come from hard conversations or decisions. That's what meetings are for. We want meetings that require hard conversations and that require us to make decisions. The meetings that actually create fatigue are the ones where people show up because they were told to, they listen, they nod, and they leave, and nothing changes, or they were not required, or nothing was asked of them during that meeting. There is an entire episode

of this podcast where I covered death by meeting by Patrick Lincione and it talks about four different kinds of meetings, who needs to be at them, how long they need to be, when during the week they need to be. So I'm not going to cover all that here. If you want, I'm going to link the episode for the death by meeting in the show notes and you can go and listen, but we're going to just dive a little bit deeper. How can we proactively stop this meeting fatigue? You might then ask, how do I know? I'm the manager. No one's technically told me they're sick of meetings. How will I know?

if they're sick of them. Well, it might look like this. Your meetings are filled with updates that could have been read ahead of time. In other words, you send out a meeting every day or every week with some updates that don't require feedback. Your team members start to multitask or zone out or check email. One of my biggest pet peeves is when people are on their phone or on their computer during meetings. I don't care if they're paying attention or not. It is disrespectful. Period. Hot take on that one. Sorry if that's you.

Desiree (16:12.014)
The next thing is if questions are coming up after the meeting that probably should have been answered

Desiree (16:28.6)
that should have been answered in the meeting where you now have to schedule another meeting to talk about it, that's a sign that it's just an informational meeting and not being used in the right way. Or if you have a sense that meetings are taking time away from real work, if people are feeling overwhelmed by too much to do and questioning if meetings could have been emails, that means the meetings are not helping. They're actually hurting. That's how you can tell if your meetings are causing more fatigue.

if they are informational more so than actually getting something done. But I know you're not here to talk about, do I have this problem? A lot of you probably know that you do in some sense or another. So how do we actually fix it? We're gonna separate the information from the discussion. In other words, can updates be shared ahead of time? So during the meeting, we can ask questions, talk about alignment, make decisions. We can have some of those hard conversations.

Nothing frustrates me more than a meeting where me who has not a single financial understanding bone in her body has to listen to a financial update for 30 minutes going through an entire spreadsheet. It's a waste of time. Headlines only. Bottom line upfront, again, it is a conversation about personalities. It's a conversation about our geniuses and our

ability to digest information in that kind of a setting, but we need to invite who needs to be there first off and we need to make sure that we're not just reading informational slides out loud. This is how we're going to fix these issues. Can you send out information beforehand to who needs to have it so that they have time to formulate a thought so they have time to formulate questions and go from there? Next piece is be clear about what preparation is expected.

If the information is shared beforehand, say whether it's optional or required to not only attend the meeting, but to actually have an opinion on it. For me, you don't want my opinion on your end of your budget. It would not be helpful. It's when we don't give expectations and someone feels that they're supposed to have an opinion or they have to go to a meeting, even though they never get anything out of it. That ambiguity is where we guarantee

Desiree (18:53.43)
that there is wasted time during meetings. Maybe the meeting is necessary, but is everyone in the room supposed to be there? The next point is using meetings to clarify and not to broadcast. In other words, if there is no discussion or no decision meeting, a full meeting with everyone on the team is probably not the right tool in that moment.

Desiree (19:21.792)
And the last piece of this one here is I'm sure that you have been to a meeting where it starts off good, it starts off strong, and then it gets into a one-on-one conversation between the person leading the meeting and one of the team members. In other words, it turns into a performance update or clarification on something that doesn't involve anyone else around the table or coaching on how to handle something. Those one-on-one meetings are not meant to be handled within a team meeting.

Can they potentially help a team to engage or to give suggestions or opinions? Yes, they can. And so I'm not telling you you can't, but let me ask you this. Are you having consistent one-on-one meetings to answer some of those things and to go over some of those things? If the answer that you just gave was no, then go and listen to the meeting, one-on-one team meeting.

Desiree (20:27.776)
If the answer to that was no, go to the link in the show notes, listen to the episode around one-on-one meetings with your employees, because I promise you, if you are not having effective one-on-one meetings, those things are going to bleed into your team meetings, which is honestly what's probably causing a lot of the draining of energy. It's causing a lot of the frustration of why was I even there? I didn't say anything. So go listen to that episode if you want to have a little more understanding around one-on-one team meetings. But

Overall concept here is that informational meetings are creating a lot of meeting fatigue. So there's a lot of things that we can do on the front end to fix it. Last piece here is that meetings have become the default instead of an actual leadership and team cohesiveness tool. And I'm coming to a conclusion that I was actually kind of surprised by, but I think for a lot of managers, meetings have become the automatic response to any question or update or uncertainty.

I can't speak for everyone, for those I've worked with, it comes down to because it feels safer. Leaders default to meetings because they don't want to leave anyone out. They don't want people to feel excluded. They don't want someone to be upset or to think that decisions are happening behind closed doors. So instead of having a quick tatatat and deciding something in that moment, that actually only required the two or three people who happened to be in on the meeting.

We schedule something later. We spend a whole hour and we invite everyone. And while the intention is good, the outcome is usually more conversation and more frustration. And why was I invited to this? And yeah, maybe they would have gotten upset if they weren't, but is it because we just didn't explain it to them? We didn't explain the decision and how it was made afterwards. We can't just schedule meetings to be safe so that everyone's in the loop. We...

don't need to invite people that don't actually need to be part of the conversation. We are slowing decisions down because there's too many voices in the room. And I know the pressure that you feel at a meeting to play to everyone.

Desiree (22:56.622)
Okay, so how do we fix this? If you just got a little bit of anxiety talking about this, you know exactly what I'm talking about. How can we fix this? We differentiate transparency from participation, which means not everyone needs to help make the decision in order for the decision to be respected, in order for the people on our team to feel respected and to make sure they're informed. In the five dysfunctions of a team, one of the concepts is commitment.

where he talks about we need buy-in and we need clarity. That's all great. We need those things. But what we really need and what I see a lot of teams missing is this cascading communication. A decision gets made in a one-on-one meeting and no one knows about it or only certain people know about it, which makes it feel like it was being hidden. Or a decision even gets made in an executive meeting. But when the executives leave the room, those decisions are not shared, even with the people who are needing to know those decisions.

So cascading communication just means once a decision is made, that decision is cascaded down through the team to anyone and everyone who needs to know. This is one of those informational things like, hey, this decision was made. Here's why it was made. Here's how it will affect you. And here's how we believe it is going to help our team moving forward and going from there. So another way that we can talk about fixing this on the front end is invite the people who need to be there based on contribution, not on courtesy.

I feel like I've already beat this dead horse, but ask yourself who truly needs to weigh in? Who might feel left out? Here's another hot take. Can you give people the option to opt out of a meeting? Maybe it's those people who are a team player and they are going to be okay no matter what you decide and they would rather sit and do work at their computer and do emails so they don't have to take it home. Maybe that's the case. Maybe it's just someone who...

Desiree (25:02.19)
So I ask you again, can you give people the option to opt out of a meeting? Maybe your answer is no, but something to think about. And then the last piece of this, and this goes for everything. Just remind yourself that clarity is kindness. Clever decisions and focused meetings, they're gonna reduce the frustration far more than over inviting and making sure everyone is comfortable and that there's never any conflict and that no one's feelings ever get hurt.

We don't ever want that. That's obviously not the goal, but making sure that we are being transparent with our decisions, that we're being clear about why a decision was made and how it will affect people. That is more important than being part of a meeting where a decision is never made because you're scared to hurt someone's feelings. Yeah, might be a hot take. I'd love to hear what you think about that. Send me an email on LinkedIn if you, or a message on LinkedIn if you totally disagree.

We went a little over time, but I want to recap here because meeting fatigue usually isn't about having too many meetings. Meetings are necessary and I personally love meetings. But then again, I like to talk, but the problems come in when meetings don't lead to decisions. They're draining your team. They're draining your time. When meetings are used to share information instead of create clarity, people disengage. They get frustrated. They start to gossip and get annoyed. And when meetings come,

Desiree (26:29.452)
And when meetings become the default, because we're afraid to leave people out or upset someone, they stop being a leadership tool and they start slowing everything down. So remember, meeting fatigue, whether it's obvious because your team comes up and tells you they're sick of meetings, or if it's a little more subtle and you're just starting to hear rumblings around the office.

Desiree (26:59.522)
Just remember that those signals of meeting fatigue, it's telling you something about the decision-making, the ownership, and how safe it feels for people to speak up on your team. So I hope that these concepts helped you. If nothing else, I hope they helped you to answer some questions, to not only ask yourself the hard questions, but to answer some questions, is my team experiencing any of this? And don't worry, it might feel like we left off on a cliffhanger because what do you do after the meeting?

if you did make a decision, but nothing gets done with it. If it still feels like just an open loop that keeps getting repeated. Well, over the next two weeks, we're going to keep building on this concept. Next week, we're going to talk about how to hold your team accountable after those meetings so that no decisions actually turn.

Desiree (27:51.438)
So decisions actually turn into follow through. And the week after that, we're going to look at how to use working genius so that we can help lead our teams better by aligning our people to the right kind of.

Desiree (28:16.704)
And the week after that, we're gonna dive even deeper about...

Desiree (28:28.398)
And the week after that, we're going to dive even deeper to use working genius to align the people that need to be in the room for the right kind of work so that we can make sure people are as effective, as efficient, as joy-filled, as least burned out as...

Desiree (28:50.616)
And the week after that, we are inviting my friend Tessa back to look at how using Working Genius can help you lead better meetings by aligning people to the right kind of work in the room. So thank you so much for joining me for this episode of You're the Boss, Now What. I hope this gave you some clarity around why meetings might be a point of contention for your team. And I hope to see you back for the next couple of episodes. Make sure you hit the follow button so you don't miss any of them coming up and make sure that you go to...

Desiree (29:45.932)
and go to you'rethebossnowwhat.com if you want to sign up to get on the email list so that you get reminded about every new episode. But until next time, just remember that leadership is a privilege, but it's also a really big responsibility. And you're the boss now. So what are you going to do with it?