"I Dread Our Leadership Meetings"

I wish I could say this was something I heard from one client, one time, in one particular context. But I hear it all the time. From CEOs, COOs, VPs, department heads. From people who run companies with 30 employees and people who run companies with 3,000. The words change slightly; the feeling doesn't.

"Our leadership meetings are a waste of time."

"We just go around the room and give updates."

"I leave more frustrated than when I walked in."

"We never actually decide anything."

If this sounds familiar, you're in great company.

The Update Trap

Here's what I see in almost every executive team I work with: the leadership meeting has become a reporting meeting. Each person takes their turn giving a status update on their department, everyone else half-listens while mentally rehearsing their own update, and then you all leave feeling like you just sat through something that could've been an email.

And you're right. It could've been.

The problem isn't that updates are happening. The problem is that updates have taken the place of the actual work the leadership team needs to do together. When the meeting becomes a series of individual reports, the team never has to think collectively, make hard tradeoffs, or surface the tensions that are quietly slowing the business down.

I worked with a CEO who told me his team's weekly leadership meeting had been running the same way for three years. Same agenda. Same format. Same people talking in the same order. He described it as "comfortable and completely useless." When I asked what decision the team had made together in the last month, he couldn't name one.

That's not a meeting. That's a ritual.

What Leadership Meetings Are Actually For

A leadership meeting should be the one place where the people running the business come together to do what none of them can do alone. That means the agenda isn't a list of department updates. It's a short list of questions the business needs this group of people to answer together.

Questions like: Where are we misaligned, and what's it costing us? What decision have we been avoiding? What do we need to say to each other that we haven't said yet?

Those questions are uncomfortable. Which is exactly why most teams replace them with updates.

Three Things That Change Everything

I've redesigned leadership meetings for dozens of executive teams, and the changes that make the biggest difference are almost always the same three.

Start with connection, not content. I know this sounds like the "touchy feely stuff" that busy leaders want to skip. But, when people check in with where they actually are; not a polished, above-the-line performance, but an honest read on how they're showing up; the rest of the meeting is different. People listen differently. They give each other more room. They're willing to say harder things.

Kill the update round. Send updates in writing before the meeting. If someone hasn't read them, that's a separate conversation. Meeting time is for the things that require the team to be in the room together: decisions, tensions, strategic tradeoffs, and the conversations nobody wants to have. If it doesn't require collective thinking, it doesn't belong on the agenda.

End with commitments, not summaries. Most meetings end with someone saying "great discussion" and everyone going back to exactly what they were doing before. Instead, close with this: What did we decide? Who is doing what? What are we going to say to our teams about this? If you can't answer those questions, the meeting didn't produce anything.

The Uncomfortable Part

Here's what I've noticed: when I redesign a leadership meeting, the first few sessions are harder than what came before. The old format was comfortable precisely because it didn't ask much of anyone. You showed up, gave your update, nodded along, and left.

The new format asks you to think together, disagree openly, and make decisions you'll be held to. That's not comfortable. It's also the whole point of having a leadership team.

I worked with one team that, after three weeks of the new format, told me they wanted to go back to the old way. "It was easier," the CFO said. The CEO paused and said, "Easier for who?" That question changed the room.

They kept the new format. Six months later, they told me it was the single biggest shift they'd made as a team.

The Real Question

If you dread your leadership meetings, the issue isn't scheduling or facilitation tricks or a better agenda template. The issue is that the meeting isn't doing what it should be doing: creating a space where the leadership team actually leads together: disagrees, works through hard issues, and eventually, after everyone has been heard, makes commitments to show up as a united front for the rest of the business.

So here's what I'd ask you: What would your leadership meeting look like if it were designed around the hardest conversation your team needs to have this week?