I’ve been in a lot of meetings. Most of them shouldn’t have happened.
I’m not talking about the rare, focused kind where problems get solved and decisions get made. I’m talking about the meetings that exist purely because someone, usually someone with a title, has it on their calendar every Tuesday at 9 a.m. and they don’t know what else to do with that slot.
The “check-in.”
The “touch base.”
The “round table” that isn’t round and doesn’t lead anywhere.
I once had a standing daily meeting where department heads were supposed to share updates about production flow. In theory, this was useful. In practice, it was a shouting match between people trying to deflect blame for missed numbers. Every day was a new version of “Your team is holding us up.” Followed by “Well maybe if your team didn’t hog all the resources…” It was like watching territorial raccoons fight over trash labeled “Process Improvement.”
Nothing got solved. But it kept happening every morning because “communication is important.”
Sure. But bad communication isn’t neutral. It’s negative value. It doesn’t just waste time. It actively wears people down.
The worst part is that no one actually wants to be there. You can feel it in the room. People zoning out. Fake-laughing at unfunny jokes. Checking the time. Wondering if there’s a polite way to vanish. But they still show up, because that’s what we’ve all been trained to do. Keep showing up, even when the thing we’re doing has long since stopped being useful.
And then there are meetings where people show up just to complain about things no one in the room has the power to fix.
I’ve been in so many of those. Third-party contractors yelling about the same issues week after week, even though they’ve already been told a hundred times that the solution has to come from someone four pay grades above us. They know that. They keep bringing it up like we’re just going to break protocol and reprogram the entire logistics network out of spite.
That kind of meeting doesn’t just waste time. It creates conflict. It breeds resentment. People vent because they’re frustrated, but no one leaves feeling better. Nothing changes. It’s just a group therapy session run by someone with a clipboard and no authority.
Eventually, you realize the meeting isn’t about solving anything.
It’s about being seen having a meeting.
It’s about proving you care. Proving that you’re doing something. Proving to some invisible metric that you’re engaged. And that’s how you get a room full of adults sitting around a whiteboard every week pretending not to be actively dissociating.
Here’s what I’ve learned the hard way:
If the meeting doesn’t have a purpose, cancel it.
If the meeting’s only purpose is to vent, call it what it is and bring snacks.
If people are just repeating the same complaints from last week, it’s time to figure out why they don’t just escalate it, or accept htat they just like the sound of their own outrage.
Most importantly, if you find yourself running one of these meetings, don’t take the silence as agreement. People aren’t quiet because they’re content. They’re quiet because they’re trying to disappear.
Sometimes, the best leadership move you can make is to say, “You know what? We don’t need to do this.”
Then let everyone go back to doing something that actually matters.