The Meetings You Should Not Be In
As a senior leader, meetings on your calendar decide your day.
You eat and breathe between them, in the few seconds you are finding a conference room.
After being exhausted at the end of the day, you still wonder what did you accomplish?
You regret attending some of them as it left your big rock rocks/actions unattended.
You hope to do better the next day. However everyday becomes a ground-hog day.
The reason that you can't stop this treadmill is likely because
You are afraid of not knowing: If you are not in the room you will hear things late, second hand, and possibly wrong.
Absence gets read: Not being in the room can look like disengagement, or like a signal that the work no longer matters.
Control/lack of trust: If you are not there it might go wrong, and you would rather catch it early.
Habit. You joined when you ran that function. You have not run it for two years.
Being needed is pleasant. The meeting where you are the unlock feels good in a way that is hard to give up.
There is also an underlying belief
There is a cost to not being there.
However what is not explicit is
Your presence is not free.
More than half of the time the opportunity cost is higher:
The obvious cost is that your calendar is full, so the work only you can do slides to the evening, or to the weekend, or to next quarter. The gravel fills the week and the big rocks wait.
The second cost is less visible. When you are in the room, the room changes. People check your face before they commit to a view. The discussion narrows towards what they think you want. A decision that belonged to your direct gets handed up, because you are sitting right there and it is easier. The meeting stops being about the problem and becomes partly about managing you.
So there are two trade-offs: Whether the hour is worth it to you, and whether your being there is what makes the meeting useful or what keeps it from being better.
Some rubrics around what to attend and what to leave:
Which ones to leave
You are the most senior person by two levels, and your presence stops the level below from leading.
You own nothing in it and decide nothing in it.
You are there to gather information that could be written down in six lines.
It is a status review for work you are not accountable for.
You joined because of a role you no longer hold.
The original reason for the recurring meeting ended, and nobody cancelled it.
You attend in case something comes up.
You are there to bail out your next level for every weekly meeting.
Which ones to keep
You are the decision owner, and your absence stalls it for a week.
The relationship is the point rather than the content.
You are watching someone deliberately in order to develop them, and they know that is why you are there.
What you need cannot be summarised, because it is tone, hesitation, or who looked at whom.
High stake.
Reciprocal title mandate to be in the call.
Many people know most of the above and still can't seem to quite get out. Baby steps here:
Say why, out loud: “This is yours to decide, and I want it decided at your level”
Hand over the decision rights explicitly: Name what others can decide without you, and name the one or two things you still want to decide.
Build the information channel before you go: How would you get informed through a person or report if you don't attend the meeting,
Permission to fail: Give yourself and your direct permission to fail initially.
Why this is in your own interest
A leader whose organisation needs them in every room is a leader who cannot be moved. Nobody says that out loud in a succession conversation, but everyone can see it on your calendar. The clearest evidence that you are ready for a bigger scope is a team that decides well without you sitting there. So leaving the meeting is not generosity. It is how you stop being load-bearing in the structure you are trying to leave.
Reflections for leader of leaders:
Look at next week. Which meeting should run better without you in it?
Which meeting are you still attending because leaving would mean trusting a specific person with a specific thing?
Which decisions come to you only because you happen to be in the room when they come up?
If someone read your calendar as evidence of what your team can do without you, what would they conclude?
