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The key path
- If your meetings keep getting longer and your progress is getting slower, stop looking at the calendar and instead, take a look at what you own.
- When you make it clear who owns the decision and who owns the next step, your meetings shrink, and your team moves faster.
- To keep working meetings moving, start with a clear owner for each decision, name the next step in plain language and close each meeting with a shared record.
Last year, I worked with a global hybrid team that has grown quite rapidly. They had people in the United States, Europe and Asia, and the team really cared about the work. Everyone on the team showed up.
But something strange kept happening.
Their meetings grew longer, and weekly “sync” sessions turned into 90-minute sessions. Not only that, their check-ins doubled, and their project calls started to stack on top of each other. People often joked that their real work began after hours, when they entered what they called the “night shift.”
The leaders definitely felt the pressure as despite being busy all day, the output continued to slow down. As a result, they kept adding meetings because, in their minds, more time was needed to align the team. Instead, the pace of work dropped again.
They were confused because they thought that more conversation would solve the problem, but instead, it is getting worse. Much worse
When I joined them, my first task was to see how they worked. So, I sat on their calls, listened to how they made choices and paid close attention to the moments where the energy dropped. After two days, the source of the slowdown became clear.
The real problem was not the meeting. It was a complete loss of ownership within the sessions.
Related: My Strategy for Helping Leaders Reduce Their Meeting Time and Reclaim 10+ Hours a Week
Meetings are dispersed when ownership is lost
Leaders often think that one of the reasons for increased meetings is because the team is too detailed or too careful. What I see in global hybrid teams is very simple.
The team does not know who owns the final set of decisions.
When this happens, people do the same thing regardless of whether the team is a business or a technical team. Here’s what they do:
They get together, hoping someone else will clarify things
They revise the topics they covered last week because no one is sure who made the decisions.
They retry ideas they discussed earlier because no one has the final call
They repeat the same discussion in three different calls because there is no common record of decisions
The result is that meetings grow because decisions don’t last.
In the global team I worked with, it showed in the small moments. For example, someone said they would “Take a look at a project,“But no one knew exactly what it meant.
Someone agreed”Review the next steps,“But no one knew when they would. People wanted to move forward, but didn’t know who had the authority to stop something.
These small gulfs created a huge slowdown.
You can’t fix meeting overload with more meetings
These many leaders usually fail. When the team slows down, they hold more meetings to get people aligned because they think more time together will fix the confusion.
Unfortunately, it actually does the opposite.
A meeting can help if the goal is clear and someone drives the next steps. Otherwise, the group is trying to detect ownership while the group is talking.
This is why meeting Overload feels so frustrating. Everyone can see the problem, but no one can name it. People think that when in reality, what they have is a clear challenge.
The solution is to intentionally reduce appointments by consolidating ownership, not by moving calendars.
The world team’s turnaround came from a simple step
After watching their sessions, I asked for a short working session with the core leadership group. We take a look at his last ten decisions. Then I asked everyone a simple question.
Who made this call?
They became silent.
They looked at notes, checked messages and looked for email threads that might help. He sincerely wanted to answer, but he couldn’t.
He was smart, determined and honestly trying hard. But they had no common view of ownership.
As soon as they saw this, things started moving forward.
I helped them move to a clean structure.
every The decision A clear owner is required.
every Action A clear owner is required.
every The next step A clear owner is required.
They didn’t need any heavy or complicated frameworks. All they needed was a common language and a simple habit.
By the end of the session, they can see the link between missing ownership and increased meeting times.
The root causes of the problems were identified as:
People were making extra calls because work somehow slipped through the cracks.
He kept repeating the topics because the decisions were soft.
They were stuck in loops because no one was sure who had the right to close a question.
As ownership became clear, the meetings shrunk.
RELATED: Companies Spend Over $37 Billion Every Year on Unnecessary Meetings – Make Sure You Have Ones Worth Attending
The reason why hybrid and global teams feel the pain quickly
Hybrid teams can be effective, but they have to deal with more friction points. Here are some examples:
Time zones make work difficult.
Messages cross paths.
People remember small gestures in video calls.
Progress is updated at different moments during the day.
When a team is in the same room, missing ownership still slows things down, but at least people can catch each other in the hallway and talk before it escalates. The differences are quite informally defined.
On the other hand, in a hybrid team, missing ownership creates a void that no one sees until the next scheduled meeting. That delay begets another delay and another, and soon the team is having more meetings to undo the damage from the last set of meetings.
At the moment, it feels like it’s a one-time issue. However, this is really an ownership issue.
A mistake leaders make that spoils it
When meetings start to feel overwhelming, many leaders react instinctively. What they usually do is to tighten the agenda, shorten the time blocks and reduce the number of participants. While these are really good moves, the problem is that they don’t address the root cause.
A meeting is often not long because the agenda is weak. More often than not, a meeting is long because the team is trying to establish a sense of ownership that should have been obvious before the meeting even started.
In my experience, this is the number one reason why meetings fail.
Leaders convene a meeting, but the work behind the meeting is unclear. Confusion spreads, and the team acts later. Meanwhile, decisions slow down.
I see this pattern in growing companies of all sizes around the world and in various industry sectors. Leaders believe they have created an “agile” culture. They want to move fast, and their teams work hard, but there are holes in the structure behind the work.
And those holes slow everything down.
How to Create Meetings That Move
The good news is that you can shrink your meetings and speed up your work at the same time. You just need to intentionally bring the property back into the country.
Here are three steps to help leaders do this with much less friction:
Start with a clear owner for each decision: If no one owns a decision, the meeting will continue until someone tries to fill the gap.
Name the next step in plain language: If the next step is unclear, the team will revisit the topic at the next meeting.
Close each meeting with a shared record: If the team cannot see that a decision has been made, they will repeat the discussion.
These steps seem simple, but they are powerful when leaders apply them with discipline.
The global team I supported used these steps for two weeks, and the results were truly impressive.
Their meeting count decreased.
Their coordination decreased.
People felt less pressure.
The pace picked up once again.
They didn’t hire more people, add new software or change their goals. However, they made ownership visible.
Related: 4 Ways You Can Create a Culture of Ownership
Clarity always pays you off
The leaders in this story were doing their best. They were determined and pushing hard. Their problem was not effort. Their problem was structure, and this is the part that surprises many founders and executives.
He Think that work slows down Because the team is not that fast.
He Think meetings grow Because the team talks a lot.
He Think growth drops Because the team needs more direction.
They miss the hidden fact that when ownership is unclear, even great teams slow down.
Once the leaders fix it, the work moves again.
Leaders who are purposefully clear at the heart of their work never need speed, because their teams create it.
