Longer Meetings Might Be Good (Hear Me Out…)

Great strategic leaders have a calendar that enables them to put disproportionate effort toward activities that have the highest strategic impact. 

I’d bet the number of leaders with a dozen 30-minute meetings on their calendars every single day greatly exceeds those who have days that look more like three 120-minute meetings (even just 10% of the time). 

The former is a juggler’s calendar—designed around keeping all the balls in the air, and whatever others put in our diaries. 

On the other hand, the latter schedule—even if it occurs just a day a week—is designed to enable strategic progress. 

Because strategic leaders aren’t individual contributors, long meeting blocks aren’t about creating a “maker” calendar. Rather, they’re about creating the ability to convene the right people for meaningful work. 

When your team meets, do you have enough time to get real work done? 

When I ask that question in my coaching conversations, the answer is often No. Many teams’ pattern is to schedule short meetings in which the assigned topic is only partly discussed—and they end meetings with a pledge to find more time for further discussion at a later date. 

However, finding that time for more conversation becomes a scramble because the most senior leaders’ calendars are already slammed. So even if the topic requires just 20 more minutes to reach a conclusion, getting there might take days or weeks. 

Obviously, this slows down strategic progress! 

In these cases, a better use of time would be to schedule the meetings for longer—and actually get through the full cycle of discussion and decision-making. 

This is a mindset shift from “meetings” to “working sessions,” and from “fit the topic into the time available” to “fit the time to what the (strategic) topic needs.”

This quote from Peter Drucker is instructive: “The effective executive […] knows that he needs large chunks of time and that small dribblers are no time at all.”