Companies become what their meetings measure.
I completely believe this because meetings do more than occupy time on a calendar. They tell people what deserves attention, which numbers matter, what leadership considers progress and what kinds of explanations the organisation is willing to accept. When the same meeting takes place every week, the questions repeatedly asked inside it begin to shape how people work before the meeting even starts.
If leaders constantly ask how many tasks were completed, the company will become good at completing tasks. If they ask how much revenue was created, how many customers remained active or whether a critical risk was reduced, people will organise their work around those outcomes. If nobody asks about an important objective for several weeks, the organisation will slowly conclude that it is not truly important.
This is why a company’s meeting structure is not an administrative detail. It is an operating system for attention.
Earlier this year, we examined what our recurring meetings were measuring and whether those meetings were pointed towards the organisation’s most important objectives. The exercise forced us to ask a more useful question than whether our meetings were efficient: were they making the business more likely to achieve what it had said mattered most?
That is the standard against which a strategic meeting should be judged.
The argument against recurring meetings is incomplete
I recently read arguments from people who dislike recurring meetings, and I decided to test the idea. There are understandable reasons for the criticism. Meetings can interrupt concentrated work, encourage unnecessary presentation and give managers a comforting impression of control. A recurring meeting can continue long after its original purpose has disappeared because nobody wants to question something that has become routine.
But I discovered that the usefulness of recurring meetings depends significantly on the environment in which people work.
In some organisations, employees work together physically, interact throughout the day and can resolve many issues through ordinary conversation. Information travels naturally because people share the same space. In that setting, a formal meeting scheduled merely to exchange information may be redundant.
When people are not working in the same location, however, the dynamics change. Remote and distributed teams do not receive the incidental context that comes from hearing conversations, observing what another department is dealing with or asking a question immediately after noticing a problem. Without a deliberate rhythm, teams can remain busy while becoming increasingly disconnected from one another.
Recurring meetings can provide that rhythm. They create a predictable place for priorities to be aligned, dependencies to be exposed, decisions to be made and progress to be examined. The problem is not that the meeting recurs. The problem is whether the recurrence continues to serve a purpose.
The lesson is not that every company should have more meetings or eliminate them. It is that meeting design must fit the way the organisation actually works. A fully co-located team, a hybrid company and a distributed company may require different communication systems even when they are pursuing similar goals.
Rejecting recurring meetings as a general principle can be as unhelpful as scheduling them without one.
Every meeting teaches people what matters
The agenda of a repeated meeting becomes a hierarchy of importance. People prepare for what they expect leadership to ask, collect the information they know will be examined and protect themselves against the weaknesses likely to be challenged.
This can strengthen a company when the questions are well chosen. A weekly meeting that consistently examines customer adoption, service reliability, cash flow and the most important product milestones keeps these issues visible. It allows the team to notice changes early and direct resources towards obstacles before they become crises.
But the same mechanism can distort behaviour when the wrong things are measured. If a sales meeting celebrates the number of calls without examining qualified opportunities or closed revenue, employees may maximise activity that looks impressive and produces little value. If an engineering meeting measures tickets closed while ignoring reliability, the team may ship changes that create more work for customers and support. If a marketing meeting reports impressions without connecting them to demand, the company may become famous inside a dashboard while remaining commercially weak.
People usually become better at whatever leadership repeatedly asks them to display. This is why a metric should never enter an important meeting merely because it is easy to obtain. The company must understand what behaviour the number will encourage and whether that behaviour contributes to the desired result.
A meeting does not only measure the organisation. It changes it.
Point strategic meetings towards the main objective
The most important strategic meetings should be connected clearly to the organisation’s most important objective. This sounds obvious, but companies often maintain separate rhythms that produce large quantities of information without showing how the information fits together.
Product reports features released. Marketing reports campaigns launched. Sales reports conversations held. Operations reports transactions processed. Each department may appear productive, yet the company may still be no closer to the central outcome it intended to achieve.
The connection must be made explicit. If the company’s objective is to grow recurring revenue, how is product work improving conversion, retention or expansion? How is marketing creating qualified demand? How is customer success protecting the revenue already earned? How are engineering reliability and operational performance strengthening the trust required for customers to remain?
This does not mean every department should be judged directly by revenue. Some important work protects the company, builds future capability or reduces risks whose value is not immediately visible in sales. The point is that each team should understand how its objective contributes to the whole.
A good strategic meeting makes this relationship visible. It moves beyond departmental reporting and asks whether the combined work of the organisation is producing the result the business needs.
Activity is not achievement
One of the easiest ways for a meeting to become unproductive is to confuse activity with achievement.
Activity describes what people did. Achievement describes what changed because they did it. A team may conduct twenty interviews, publish fifteen pieces of content, release five features or contact one hundred prospects. These numbers show effort, and effort can be useful to examine, but none of them proves that the intended outcome occurred.
The interviews should improve understanding or lead to better hires. The content should produce attention from the right audience, shape perception or create demand. The features should improve adoption, retention, speed, reliability or another meaningful customer outcome. The prospects should become qualified opportunities and, eventually, customers.
When meetings stop at activity, people can succeed without the company succeeding. Every department completes its tasks, every presentation appears green and the business still misses its objective.
Leaders should therefore ask a second question after hearing what was done: what result did the work produce?
This does not mean activity has no value. In a process with a long conversion period, activity may be an important leading indicator. A sales team cannot close sufficient business without creating enough opportunities. A product team cannot learn without speaking to users and running experiments. However, the company must know the assumed connection between the activity and the result.
If that connection does not appear after a reasonable period, the activity should be questioned rather than praised indefinitely.
Break objectives into tasks without becoming trapped by the tasks
An organisation must translate its objectives into work people can execute. A large goal remains abstract until it is broken into milestones, responsibilities and tasks. The team should know what needs to happen this week, who owns it and how completion will be verified.
But decomposition introduces another risk: people can become so focused on completing the plan that they forget the plan was only a hypothesis about how to reach the objective.
Suppose the team believes that fifty actions will take the business to point A. By the time forty actions have been completed, the company should be observably closer to point A. Customer behaviour should be changing, revenue should be moving, a risk should be declining or an important capability should be taking shape.
If forty of the fifty tasks are complete and the business is no closer to the result, the team should not celebrate being eighty per cent finished. It should ask whether the original theory was wrong.
This is where meetings become valuable feedback systems. They allow the company to compare execution with consequence. Are the tasks producing the movement we expected? If not, is the measurement delayed, is the execution poor or was the underlying assumption incorrect?
A task list should not become a shield against reality. Completing work that does not create the expected change is information, and the organisation must be fast enough to use it.
Measure leading indicators and final outcomes
Strategic meetings need both leading and lagging indicators.
Lagging indicators describe outcomes that have already occurred: revenue, profit, customer churn, failed transactions or cash consumed. These measures are essential because they reveal the actual condition of the business, but they may arrive too late to guide daily action.
Leading indicators help the team see whether current behaviour is likely to create the desired future result. Qualified opportunities may lead to revenue. Product activation may lead to retention. Successful payroll runs and timely remittances may lead to customer trust. Faster response and resolution times may lead to stronger satisfaction.
The danger is treating a leading indicator as though it were the final objective. More leads are not valuable if their quality is poor. More registrations are not meaningful if users never activate. Faster ticket closure is not an improvement if issues are closed without being resolved.
The meeting should preserve the chain of logic between the work and the result. We did this, therefore we expected this behaviour to change, which should eventually produce this business outcome. At each stage, the team should be able to see whether the hypothesis remains credible.
This creates accountability without reducing complex work to one simplistic number.
Meetings should expose dependencies
Many organisational problems are coordination problems. A team may be unable to achieve its objective because it depends on work from another team, and that dependency may remain invisible until the reporting period is almost over.
Recurring strategic meetings should surface these relationships early. If marketing needs a product capability before launching a campaign, if sales needs compliance material to close an enterprise customer or if customer success needs an engineering fix to prevent repeated complaints, the dependency should become part of the shared plan.
It is not enough for one department to report an excellent score while another department fails because the first did not provide something necessary. The company does not experience departmental success and failure separately; it experiences the combined outcome.
This is one reason I prefer people to own outcomes rather than merely tasks. Ownership requires a leader to understand who depends on their work, communicate early when a commitment is at risk and participate in solving the wider problem. A meeting that makes dependencies visible helps replace blame with coordination.
The question should not be, “Which team caused the delay?” The more useful question is, “What must move now, who owns it and what obstacle needs to be removed?”
A useful meeting must produce decisions
Reporting alone is rarely a sufficient purpose for gathering several people. Much information can be shared in writing and read before the meeting. The live conversation becomes valuable when it creates something that asynchronous communication cannot produce as effectively: a decision, a resolution, a trade-off, a commitment or a shared interpretation of changing facts.
Every important meeting should make clear what happened because the people met. Was a priority changed? Was an owner assigned? Was an obstacle removed? Was an experiment approved? Was a failing approach stopped?
Without a decision or useful alignment, recurring meetings can become performances in which people narrate work that has already happened. Participants learn to prepare polished updates rather than surface the uncertainty that leadership most needs to see.
The meeting should create enough psychological safety for people to say that something is not working, while maintaining enough accountability that the same unresolved issue does not return every week without action.
Good meetings reduce ambiguity. They do not merely redistribute it.
Remove meetings that no longer serve the objective
Because meetings shape organisations, founders should review them periodically. A meeting that was essential during one stage may become unnecessary after a process stabilises, teams become co-located or a better reporting system is introduced.
Every recurring meeting should be able to answer a few basic questions. What objective does this meeting support? What decisions are expected to happen here? Who genuinely needs to attend? What information should be reviewed in advance? How will we know that the meeting remains useful?
If the purpose is only to transmit information, an update may be enough. If two people need to solve an issue, the entire leadership team may not need to watch them do it. If a meeting consistently ends without decisions, learning or changed action, its recurrence should be challenged.
The goal is not a calendar with as few meetings as possible. The goal is an organisation with the right rhythm of attention and decision-making.
Measure what you want the company to become
Companies become what their meetings measure because repeated questions eventually direct repeated effort. The calendar reveals the organisation’s priorities more honestly than the strategy document when the two are not aligned.
If an objective matters, it should appear in the company’s operating rhythm. Its progress should be measurable, its assumptions should be testable and the tasks connected to it should produce visible movement. When the movement does not appear, leaders should be willing to change the work rather than defend the plan.
Recurring meetings are not inherently good or bad. In distributed organisations, they can provide essential coordination and shared context. In any organisation, they can also become expensive rituals. Their value depends on whether they keep people focused on outcomes, reveal dependencies early and convert information into decisions.
Founders should therefore look carefully at what their meetings celebrate, ignore and repeatedly ask. Those patterns are training the company.
Measure activity alone, and the organisation will become busy. Measure departmental performance alone, and it may become fragmented. Measure meaningful outcomes and the relationships required to achieve them, and the company has a better chance of learning how to move as one.
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