Meetings as Culture, Part 2: Solutions to the five meeting pitfalls that reveal your organization’s culture
.avif)
Solutions to the five meeting pitfalls that reveal your organization’s culture
Picture this: one meeting buzzes with energy, ideas flowing freely as the team reaches new heights of innovation and alignment because everyone is clear on their goals and roles. Another meeting with the same people, however, feels like a slow trudge through mud—disjointed, aimless, and draining.. These starkly different experiences are not just isolated incidents; they are windows into the soul of your organization’s culture.
In the first post of this series, we explored the challenges of unproductive meetings and how they mirror deeper organizational culture. Leaders set the tone for meetings and are accountable for their quality. Today, we'll delve into the five most common meeting pitfalls and share actionable insights from our BTS client experiences to help you overcome these challenges. By addressing these issues head-on, you can lead meetings that both enhance your company’s culture and accelerate business results.Here's how you can start turning the tide on ineffective meetings and use them as a catalyst for positive change:
1. The pitfall: Meetings that have no clear purpose or plan.
The conversation meanders as employees watch the minutes tick by and wonder, “Why am I here?”
The solution: State the purpose before the meeting starts. Keep it short and make sure it is clear. A good meeting has a single, clearly defined purpose. Are we meeting to share information? To solve a problem? To generate ideas? The meeting may involve different types of discussions, but ultimately those discussions should align with the purpose. If people are clear on the purpose before they join, they will come better prepared and be more engaged. They will know what meetings they need to be there for, and when to politely say “no” or have a colleague represent them. And you as the leader will guide the conversation more effectively because everyone has prepared for the same purpose.
2. The pitfall: At the end of a meeting, nothing seems different, new or clear.
When participants leave with no new actionable information or insights, no decision to guide them, or no input to weigh for a future decision, it can lead to overwhelm and in the end – frustration as nothing new happens as an outcome of the meeting.
The solution: Set and share a meeting target at the beginning. Think of the target as the meeting’s conversational destination that everyone is driving toward together, which adds specificity to the meeting’s purpose. Aligning expectations on a target focuses the conversation. It gives you the opportunity to uncover other agendas that might be lurking ready to derail the progress. Finally, it allows everyone to assess the group’s progress toward the stated target at the end of the meeting, and what enabled or hindered it.
Consider these examples:
- Meeting purpose—Information sharing.
- Meeting target—Everyone will gain an understanding of the priorities of each department and can help or stay out of the way as needed.
- Meeting purpose—Problem solving. Meeting target—Everyone will agree on an approach for handling delinquent accounts before the end of year.
- Meeting purpose – Connection and relationship building. Meeting target – Everyone will get a deeper understanding of each other, areas of work, priorities and other key beliefs, allowing us to work better together
3. The pitfall: Lopsided participation.
We've all endured meetings derailed by unhelpful tangents. Meanwhile, some participants remain silent, either because they are uncomfortable, feel unequipped to contribute, or don't see the meeting's value. Attempts to steer the conversation back on track may fail, especially with dominant personalities overpowering the discussion.
The solution: Active participation only. To counter lopsidedness, invite participants selectively. Ask yourself, "Who must be at this meeting to achieve the desired target?" Invite only those individuals. Break the habit of inviting people just because they've always attended. Observers often disrupt and distract. Meetings should be for active participants, not disengaged attendees or "spectators."
If essential participants tend to dominate conversations, address this privately. Share your expectations and coach them on the rules of engagement if necessary. The challenge lies in defying the unspoken social and political norms of your organization by inviting only those necessary to achieve the meeting's purpose. The larger the meeting with peripheral participants, the more it signals low organizational trust.
While limiting invitations might feel like a power move or a career risk, it's essential to clearly articulate your rationale for keeping the invite list focused. You can also seek advice from colleagues on who the essential participants might be. Understand that the first attempt to invite a smaller crew will be challenging, and subsequent efforts might be as well, but the benefits will be worth it.
Engaging the right participants allows the participants to feel buy-in, experience effective implementation, and co-author a future that aligns with your strategic goals.
4. The pitfall: the meeting ends with no defined next steps.
When no one knows what needs to be done, by whom, or by when, you can be sure of one thing: nothing will happen. If the only clear next step is to have another meeting on the same topic, you have failed.
The solution: outline topics and topic owners in advance. The purpose is the reason to move; the target is the destination; the topics are the stepping stones to get there. List the necessary topics to reach the target.
For each topic, define one outcome and assign an “owner” to lead the discussion and handle related action items. This owner drives the group to agree on the next steps before moving on. This approach not only ensures clarity but also shares accountability and balances participation.
Arrange the topics from most to least important, ensuring all are essential to the target. Cut any non-essential topics.
5. The pitfall: we’re always in meetings and never able to get things done.
Meetings often drag on to fill the allotted time, or worse, participants rush through important discussions before the clock runs out.
The solution: schedule realistically. Schedule meetings based on the actual time needed to achieve the target. Not every meeting requires an hour—some may only need 20 minutes, while others might warrant an entire afternoon. Consider a meeting’s duration as a contract with the group. Overrunning the time signals a shortage of respect for participants and their time. If this happens regularly, look into the cultural norm that tolerates this cycle of delay. If the agenda is packed and you’re concerned about time, assign a timekeeper to monitor progress against the plan. Alternatively, defer some topics to another meeting. It’s better to have thorough discussions on fewer items than to give only token consideration to important topics.
By examining your current meeting practices, you can uncover inefficiencies that reveal deeper cultural issues. Whether it’s lack of preparation, poor time management, or dominant voices, each clue helps you make intentional changes. Redefining culture doesn’t require sweeping changes; small, deliberate steps in how you lead meetings can make a big impact. Start by clarifying meeting purposes, ensuring active participation, setting clear next steps, and scheduling realistically. Every meeting is both a microcosm of your culture—and an opportunity to reinforce your organization’s values and goals.
Imagine the ripple effect: a team leaving each meeting energized and aligned, spreading a culture of accountability, collaboration, and innovation. Small meeting changes can lead to a profound culture transformation. Remember, every well-led meeting sets the tone for a winning culture.
Related content
Related content
Technology choices are often made under pressure - pressure to modernize, to respond to shifting client expectations, to demonstrate progress, or to keep pace with rapid advances in AI. In those moments, even experienced leadership teams can fall into familiar traps: over-estimating how differentiated a capability will remain, under-estimating the organizational cost of sustaining it, and committing earlier than the strategy or operating model can realistically support.
After decades of working with leaders through digital and technology-enabled transformations, I’ve seen these dynamics play out again and again. The issue is rarely the quality of the technology itself. It’s the timing of commitment, and how quickly an early decision hardens into something far harder to unwind than anyone intended.
What has changed in today’s AI-accelerated environment is not the nature of these traps, but the margin for error. It has narrowed dramatically.
For small and mid-sized organizations, the consequences are immediate. You don't have specialist teams running parallel experiments or long runways to course correct. A single bad platform decision can absorb scarce capital, distort operating models, and take years to unwind just as the market shifts again.
AI intensified this tension. It is wildly over-hyped as a silver bullet and quietly under-estimated as a structural disruptor. Both positions are dangerous. AI won’t magically fix broken processes or weak strategy, but it will change the economics of how work gets done and where value accrues.
When leaders ask how to approach digital platforms, AI adoption, or operating model design, four questions consistently matter more than the technology itself.
- What specific market problem does this solve, and what is it worth?
- Is this capability genuinely unique, or is it rapidly becoming commoditized?
- What is the true total cost - not just to build, but to run and evolve over time?
- What is the current pace of innovation for this niche?
For many leadership teams, answering these questions leads to the same strategic posture. Move quickly today while preserving options for tomorrow. Not as doctrine, but as a way of staying adaptive without mistaking early commitment for strategic clarity.
Why build versus buy is the wrong starting point
One of the most common traps organizations fall into is treating digital strategy as a series of isolated build-vs-buy decisions. That framing is too narrow, and it usually arrives too late.
A more powerful question is this. How do we preserve optionality as the landscape continues to evolve? Technology decisions often become a proxy for deeper organizational challenges. Following acquisitions or periods of rapid change, pressure frequently surfaces at the front line. Sales teams respond to client feedback. Delivery teams push for speed. Leaders look for visible progress.
In these moments, technology becomes the focal point for action. Not because it is the root problem, but because it is tangible.
The real risk emerges operationally. Poorly sequenced transitions, disruption to the core business, and value that proves smaller or shorter-lived than anticipated. Teams become locked into delivery paths that no longer make commercial sense, while underlying system assumptions remain unchanged.
The issue is rarely technical. It is temporal.
Optimizing for short-term optics, particularly client-facing signals of progress, often comes at the expense of longer-term adaptability. A cleaner interface over an ageing platform may buy temporary parity, but it can also delay the more important work of rethinking what is possible in the near and medium term.
Conservatism often shows up quietly here. Not as risk aversion, but as a preference for extending the familiar rather than exploring what could fundamentally change.
Licensing as a way to buy time and insight
In fast-moving areas such as AI orchestration, many organizations are choosing to license capability rather than build it internally. This is not because licensing is perfect. It rarely is. It introduces constraints and trade-offs. But it was fast. And more importantly, it acknowledged reality.
The pace of change in this space is such that what looks like a good architectural decision today may be actively unhelpful in twelve months. Licensing allowed us to operate right at the edge of what we actually understood at the time - without pretending we knew where the market would land six or twelve months later.
Licensing should not be seen as a lack of ambition. It is often a way of buying time, learning cheaply, and avoiding premature commitment. Building too early doesn’t make you visionary, often it just makes you rigid.
AI is neither a silver bullet nor a feature
Coaching is a useful microcosm of the broader AI debate.
Great AI coaching that is designed with intent and grounded in real coaching methodology can genuinely augment the experience and extend impact. The market is saturated with AI-enabled coaching tools and what is especially disappointing is that many are thin layers of prompts wrapped around a large language model. They are responsive, polite, and superficially impressive - and they largely miss the point.
Effective coaching isn’t about constant responsiveness. It’s about clarity. It’s about bringing experience, structure, credibility, and connection to moments where someone is stuck.
At the other extreme, coaches themselves are often deeply traditional. A heavy pen, a leather-bound notebook, and a Royal Copenhagen mug of coffee are far more likely to be sitting on the desk than the latest GPT or Gemini model.
That conservatism is understandable - coaching is built on trust, presence, and human connection - but it’s increasingly misaligned with how scale and impact are actually created.
The real opportunity for AI is not to replace human work with a chat interface. It is to codify what actually works. The decision points, frameworks, insights, and moments that drive behavior change. AI can then be used to augment and extend that value at scale.
A polished interface over generic capability is not enough. If AI does not strengthen the core value of the work, it is theatre, not transformation.
What this means for leaders
Across all of these examples, the same pattern shows up.
The hardest decisions are rarely about capability, they are about timing, alignment, and conviction.
Building from scratch only makes sense when you can clearly articulate:
- What you believe that the market does not
- Why that belief creates defensible value
- Why you’re willing to concentrate risk behind it
Clear vision scales extraordinarily well when it’s tightly held. The success of narrow, focused Silicon Valley start-ups is testament to that.
Larger organizations often carry a broader set of commitments. That complexity increases when depth of expertise is spread across functions, and even more so when sales teams have significant autonomy at the point of sale. Alignment becomes harder not because people are wrong, but because too many partial truths are competing at once.
In these environments, strategic clarity, not headcount or spend, creates advantage.
This is why many leadership teams choose to license early. Not because building is wrong, but because most organizations have not yet earned the right to build.
This article was originally publish on Rotman Management
IN OUR CONSULTING WORK with teams at all levels—especially senior leadership—my colleagues and I have noticed teams grappling with an insidious challenge: a lack of effective prioritization. When everything is labeled a priority, nothing truly is. Employees feel crushed under the weight of competing demands and the relentless urgency to deliver on multiple fronts. Requests for prioritization stem from both a lack of focused direction and the challenge of efficiently fulfilling an overwhelming volume of work. Over time, this creates a toxic cycle of burnout, inefficiency and dissatisfaction.
The instinctive response to this issue is to streamline, reduce the number of initiatives, and focus. While this is a step in the right direction, it doesn’t fully address the problem. Prioritization isn’t just about whittling down a to-do list or ranking activities by importance and urgency on an Eisenhower Decision Matrix; it also requires reshaping how we approach work more productively.
In our work, we have found that three critical factors lie at the heart of solving prioritization challenges: tasks, tracking and trust. Addressing these dimensions holistically can start to address the root causes of feeling overwhelmed and lay the foundation for sustainable productivity. Let’s take a closer look at each.
You’re buckling in for an overseas flight in a brand-new Boeing 777. The pilot comes on the PA: “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, our flight time today will be six and a half hours at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet. And I should mention that this is the first time I have ever flown a 777. Wish me luck.”
Before setting foot in the real world, pilots, military personnel and disaster response teams use intense simulations to learn how to respond to high-intensity challenges.Why should we place corporate leaders and their teams in situations without first giving them a chance to try things out? The risks are huge — new strategy investments can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. BTS offers a better way to turn strategy into action: customized business simulations.
‘Now I Know What it’s Like to be CEO’
A customized business simulation of your enterprise, business unit or process, using real-world competitive dynamics, places leaders in a context where they step out of their normal day-to-day roles and gain exposure to the big picture. Participants make decisions in a risk-free environment, allowing them to experience critical interdependencies, execution best practices and the levers they can use to optimize their company’s key performance indicators. It takes the concept of a strategy and makes it personal, giving each individual the chance to see the direct impacts of their actions and the role they play in strategy execution.
Leading corporations are increasingly turning to business simulations to help build strategic alignment and execution capability when faced with the following business challenges:
- Key performance objective and new strategy implementation.
- Accelerating strategy execution and innovation.
- Improving business acumen and financial decision making.
- Transforming sales programs into business results accelerators.
- Leadership development focused on front-line execution.
- Implementing culture change as tied to strategy alignment.
- Modeling complex value chains for collaborative cost elimination.
- Merger integration.
Within minutes of being placed in a business simulation, users are grappling with issues and decisions that they must make — now. A year gets compressed into a day or less. Competition among teams spurs engagement, invention and discovery.
The Business Simulation Continuum: Customize to Fit Your Needs
Simulations have a broad range of applications, from building deep strategic alignment to developing execution capability. The more customized the simulation, the more experience participants can bring back to the job in execution and results. Think about it: why design a learning experience around generic competency models or broad definitions of success when the point is to improve within your business context? When you instead simulate what “great” looks like for your organization, you exponentially increase the efficacy of your program.
10 Elements of Highly Effective Business Simulations
With 30 years of experience building and implementing highly customized simulations for Fortune 500 companies, BTS has developed the 10 critical elements of an effective business simulation:
- Highly realistic with points of realism targeted to drive experiential learning.
- Dynamically competitive with decisions and results impacted by peers’ decisions in an intense, yet fun, environment.
- Illustrative, not prescriptive or deterministic, with a focus on new ways of thinking.
- Catalyzes discussion of critical issues with learning coming from discussion within teams and among individuals.
- Business-relevant feedback, a mechanism to relate the simulation experience directly back to the company’s business and key strategic priorities.
- Delivered with excellence : High levels of quality and inclusion of such design elements as group discussion, humor, coaching and competition that make the experience highly interactive, intriguing, emotional, fun, and satisfying.
- User driven: Progress through the business simulation experience is controlled by participants and accommodates a variety of learning and work styles.
- Designed for a specific target audience, level and business need.
- Outcome focused , so that changes in mindset lead to concrete actions.
- Enables and builds community: Interpersonal networks are created and extended through chat rooms, threaded discussions and issue-focused e-mail groups; participants support and share with peers.
Better Results, Faster
Well-designed business simulations are proven to significantly accelerate the time to value of corporate initiatives. A new strategy can be delivered to a global workforce and execution capability can be developed quickly, consistently and cost-effectively. It’s made personal, so that back on the job, participants own the new strategy and share their enthusiasm and commitment. This in turn yields tangible results; according to a research report conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by BTS, titled “Mindsets: Gaining Buy-In to Strategy,” the majority of firms struggle to achieve buy-in to strategy, but those that personalize strategy throughout their organization significantly outperform their peers in terms of profitability, revenue growth and market share.
Business Simulations: Even More Powerful in Combination
Comprehensive deployment of business simulation and experiential learning programs combines live and online experiences. The deepest alignment, mindset shift and capability building takes place over time through a series of well-designed activities. Maximize impact by linking engagement and skill building to organizational objectives and by involving leadership throughout the process.
Putting Business Simulations to Work
Simulations drive strategic alignment, sales force transformation, and business acumen, financial acumen and leadership development, among other areas. A successful experiential learning program cements strategic alignment and builds execution capability across the entire organization, turning strategy into action. Results can be measured in team effectiveness, company alignment, revenue growth and share price.
Learn more about business simulations
Learn how BTS Business Simulations can help with your initiatives.
Fill out the form below to have a BTS representative contact you.