S2E4. How to 'Meeting' Better - The Chaos of Scale

How many of your meetings actually need to exist… and how many are just… there?

In this episode of The Chaos of Scale, Andy Golding takes aim at one of the biggest hidden drains on time, energy, and momentum in scaling companies:  meetings. The weeklies, the standups, the “quick syncs” that somehow multiply until your calendar looks like a failed game of Tetris.

This isn’t just a rant—it’s a rethink.

We unpack why recurring meetings quietly kill productivity, how they introduce “delay drag” into your workflows, and why most meetings are far more expensive than anyone realizes. Then we flip the script: what if meetings weren’t the default? What if they were intentional investments designed to drive decisions, not just fill time?

If you’ve ever sat in a meeting wondering why you’re there—or waited days to solve something that could’ve been handled in 10 minutes—this one will hit home.

Expect practical shifts, a few uncomfortable truths, and one simple action that could give you (and your team) hours back every single week.

#Leadership #Productivity #ScalingStartups #WorkplaceCulture

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Transcript

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Quick question. How many meetings did you have yesterday that actually didn't need to exist? If you're working in a scale app, there's a very good chance that your calendar looks something like someone started playing Tetris and failed. And somewhere along the way, meetings became the default way that we solve problems, even when they're actually slowing everything down. Hello and welcome to The Chaos of Scale, the podcast dedicated to helping scaling businesses navigate the human side of growth. I'm your host, Andy Golding. And today we're talking about something that quietly steals more time, more focus, and more productivity from scaling companies than almost anything else. Meetings. Or more specifically, we're talking about how to meeting better. Recurring meetings, weekly check-ins, bi-weeklies, stand-ups, monthly updates, steering committees, sinks about sinks. And before you know it, your calendar is so full that the only time you actually have to do any work is either never or at obscene hours. So today we're going to unpack some ideas that might change the way that you think about and approach meetings. Firstly, let's dive into why recurring meetings are often the silent killers of productivity. Then we're going to look at why meetings are way more expensive than we think that they are. And finally, we're going to look at how can we design meetings that actually move things forward. As always, I promise to leave you with at least one thing that you can think differently about and one practical action that you can take to show up as a rad or even more rad human at work. You know the drill. If you find value in today's episode, please like, subscribe, share, and for some extra kudos and gratitude, please consider leaving a review. The Scourge of Recurring Meetings. One of the most common patterns that I see in scaling organizations is the explosion of recurring meetings. The weeklies, the bi-weeklies, the monthlies, the stand-ups, the product reviews, the sprint reviews, the syncs. And the intention is usually good. We think if we create a regular space to talk about this, we'll keep things moving forward. But so often the opposite happens. Recurring meetings create so much calendar clog. Your diary fills up with meetings that made sense six months ago, maybe even three months ago, but since then we haven't ever stopped to ask whether they still need to exist. And because they're recurring, they just keep showing up in our calendar, so we just keep showing up in the meeting, week after week, month after month. And we start to attend them almost by default because they're in the calendar, so we should go to the meeting. On the odd occasion, on the rare occasion, we maybe show up prepared, but most of the time we just show up and share air with people. Sometimes we actually just show up and spend the first 10 minutes making small talk, avoiding the most uncomfortable question of what did we actually need to talk about today? When meetings lose their purpose but stay on the calendar, they quietly drain hours of productive time across the organization. I actively decline recurring meetings, and when somebody mentions one, I say, I prefer not to do recurring meetings. Because especially as a leader with multiple direct reports, my goal is to be available to help my team when they actually need help, not when the calendar says that we're allowed to talk. If someone on my team is stuck, I don't want them waiting for the next 15-minute check-in slot three days from now. I would much rather speak to them 30 minutes after they ask for help, unblock them quickly and let them keep moving. Because when we unblock people faster, everything they're working on keeps flowing. That knock-on effect is felt throughout the organization and momentum stays alive. Sometimes people initially find it quite confronting when I decline recurring meetings because it can feel like a bit of a rejection. But when I explain why, and I explain that it actually helps me show up as a more responsive and more available leader and colleague, people always end up nodding. My goal is not to have fewer conversations. My goal is to have better timed conversations, to be able to speak whenever we need to, not when the calendar says we should or we can. And this leads me naturally into the hidden cost of recurring meetings. So often they actually break the natural flow of work and conversation. So imagine you realize on Tuesday that you're stuck with something and you need input from a colleague. In a healthy working rhythm, you reach out to them immediately, send a message on Teams or Slack or whatever you're using, pick up the phone and solve the problem. But if there's a recurring meeting with that person or that team on Thursday, something strange starts to happen. Instead of resolving it now, you think, I'll just bring it up in the meeting. So the problem sits there for two days, maybe longer. And while the problem sits there, the work stalls and bye bye momentum. So instead of this continuous collaboration, we kind of create these batch processing conversations. And in fast-moving scale-ups, that just slows everything down. I once actually did the math on this. I was working at a SaaS procurement scale up, and I calculated how much time the average employee was spending in recurring meetings, weekly meetings, bi-weeklies, monthlies, all of the regular calendar fixtures. And the answer was sobering and quite disconcerting. Every single employee was spending 60 hours per quarter just in recurring meetings. That's a week and a half of work time. Imagine what we could have built or shipped or improved with 60 hours of company time times 150 employees. Recurring meetings quietly eat at enormous amounts of productive time. And they add this delay drag if we're not intentional about them. This delay drag is I want to have solve this problem on Tuesday, but I have the meeting with you on Thursday, so I just delay everything and drag the problem with me through the week until we have our meeting. And never mind the fact that often the fastest way to solve something is not a meeting. A quick conversation, a 10-minute catch-up, a quick call often helps unblock, move along. The other thing to think about is that meetings are expensive. And this is something that most people never think about. Meetings are not necessarily, they can be, but not entirely emotionally expensive. They're financially expensive because every person that you add to a meeting increases the cost of that meeting. So do the math. A one-hour meeting with six people in it is six hours of company time. Eight people, eight hours, ten people, ten hours. And now you multiply that across every meeting with more than two people over the course of a week, a month, a year. What is the cost of all of those recurring meetings? The cost can get immense. In fact, I would say that meetings are one of the largest invisible investments that companies make with their time and money. And yet we treat them like they're free. And the second problem is the more people you add to a meeting, the more diluted it becomes. Because decision making by committee is so rarely efficient. So now we have eight hours of company time with eight people in a meeting, and it's not actually the most efficient way to get it done. Because when no when nobody is clearly accountable for a decision, we often bring everyone into the room just in case. But what we end up with is a room full of people discussing something that only one or two people actually need to decide, which also slows things down and it keeps ownership incredibly blurry and it increases the cost of the meeting. In scaling organizations, this very often happens. We we show up with a proverbial rugby team to a meeting because we don't actually know who owns this and who should be the final decision maker. So instead of clarity, we default to inclusion, and suddenly a meeting that could have been three people becomes ten people. I remember uh an executive meeting that really crystallized this for me. We had the full C-suite and all directors in the room. So this is the highest level of leadership in the organization. And there was a long debate going on about what should or should not be discussed in that meeting. People were bringing operational updates, department issues, small decisions, and saying, Well, should we discuss this here? Shouldn't we? What should be the what is the criteria? And I stopped the conversation and I said, Look, I don't have the answer as to what we should be bringing here, but I do have a framing that I think could help. I said, This is the most expensive meeting in the company. Think about it. The most expensive people in the organization are here together in the room for an hour. So executive meetings should focus on investing. That is an investment of company time and company money. So what is the best way we use this investment? Strategy, major decisions, cross-company alignment, not operational updates that can be handled elsewhere. Although then we do need to make sure that we have the structure to discuss these more minute things elsewhere. But thinking about meetings through a cost lens or an investment lens becomes an incredibly powerful filter and it forces you to ask different questions. Not who should be in this meeting, but rather is it actually necessary? Who really needs to be here? What decisions are we making? And is this actually the best use of people's time? Meetings are also not the place to share information. Yes, you heard that right. They are not the place to share information. Meetings are a place for making decisions. If you have pre-shared the slides and the content, do not show up and re-present them. Show up and say, right, based on the deck, we need to clarify X, decide Y, or plan for Z. This uses time well. And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking people never do the pre-reading, they show up unprepared. And yeah, you're absolutely right, because you're trapped in a vicious cycle that makes it okay for people to not show up prepared because they know that they're gonna arrive in the meeting and you're just going to present the same deck to them. Of course, they're thinking that because why should I bother doing the pre-read if you're just gonna spend the first 15 or 20 minutes of the meeting representing it to me? But if you don't do that, if you do not represent it at the meeting and you rather go straight into action mode, the game changes. And for the people who will inevitably show up and say, Oh, sorry, I didn't do the pre-read, one, if they are the key decision maker, so that's a pity. We don't have time to recover that now. Let's reschedule until you've had a chance to review the document. Or you could say, number two, if they're not a critical decision maker, my apologies, we won't be recovering that now. We're gonna focus on making decisions and taking action. And this is gonna feel uncomfortable, it's gonna feel a little bit spicy the first couple of times that you do it, but you will only need to do this once or twice before you start shifting the behavior around meetings, before people do start showing up prepared. Because people should leave meetings with clarity, with action, with decisions, not with more questions. A meeting shouldn't lead to needing another meeting. A meeting should lead to action, solving a problem, moving a project forward. How do we fix meetings in general? There's, I think we can all agree, a lot wrong, a lot of room for improvement. And here are some things that we might try. The first will come as no surprise. I'm gonna tell you to kill unnecessary recurring meetings. If you got relentless and radically reviewed your calendar and deleted every single recurring meetings, which ones would you miss? Which ones might find their way back into your calendar? And that's fine, maybe those are necessary, but for all of the others, congratulations, you've just saved a whole bunch of time. Because if a meeting doesn't have a clear purpose anymore, get rid of it. You can always schedule a conversation with that person or those people when it's needed. A second way to meeting better is to think about meetings from a cost perspective. Think about them from a company time cost and an investment of time perspective. So before you add someone to a meeting, ask yourself: do they really need to be here or can they be informed afterwards? What's the best way that you can spend company money and time with the right people to invest in moving that project forward by calling a meeting? And when you do decide that a meeting is necessary, then you can be prepared and use the time invested wisely. A third thing to think about is protecting the flow of work. Encourage people to solve problems when they arise, not when the next meeting happens. Reach out, have the quick conversation, keep the work moving. Meetings should accelerate progress, not delay it. Your action item from today's episode or something you can try this week. Open up your calendar and look at all of your recurring meetings. And for every single one, ask a simple question. If this meeting disappeared tomorrow, what would actually break? If the answer to your question is not much, then congratulations because you might have just found a way to give yourself and your team some time back. The chaos of scale is noisy and it's fast-paced and it's full of competing priorities, your calendar should not become a reflection of that. Your time and your team's time is one of the most valuable resources that you have available to you. So treat meetings like the investment that they really are. Design them intentionally, use them sparingly, and make sure that they are actually moving the work forward. Thank you for joining me today. If you found value in this episode, please like, subscribe, share, and for some extra kudos and gratitude, leave a review. Until next time, keep navigating the chaos and showing up as a rad human at work.