Time is our most precious asset, and we’re always running out of it. Having spent the past seven years running a company all about productivity, I’ve found that meetings are generally the most inefficient activity across companies. So I started to cancel meetings.
That is until I found the meetings that truly needed to be added back. I learned through this trial-and-error process of canceled meetings that the most inefficient and unproductive are one-on-ones, especially among executives.
One-on-ones for individual contributors are necessary for morale, connection, and coaching. But for executives, they are costly, ineffective, and inefficient. I used to have standing one-on-ones with every member of the executive team, and they had one-on-ones with each other. Think about the cost of these meetings: the highest paid people meeting with each other individually, every week. But more importantly, what comes out of these meetings? And what happens when you cancel meetings?
I found it was the single source of enabling politically charged decision-making. Many executives use one-on-ones to privately align on their preferred decision or outcome for an upcoming topic. While they don’t necessarily have bad intent, it creates a culture of closed-door decisions made without transparency. Plus, the discrete and informal nature of one-on-ones created a slippery slope to complaining about others.
