Meetings, meetings, meetings.

We hear from clients all the time who want to totally revamp their meeting culture. In fact, this is one of the requests we get the most.

And listen, meetings can absolutely be improved. You can clear up the purpose, be more predictable with your cadence, and establish a facilitator.

But the reality that most people don’t want to accept? The problem isn’t the d*mn meetings.

A bad meeting culture is usually a reflection of a much larger problem, not the problem itself.

Meetings are an easy scapegoat; they’re a concrete thing to point to and say, “This! We just need to fix this!” But when you try to hack away at the tip of an iceberg, you’re not going to see the type of progress you want. You’re going to get stuck.

The real driver of meeting dysfunction is almost always something that’s going wrong outside the meeting: unclear decision rights, poor communication, punishing failure, low trust.

We partnered with a client once who wanted to work on meeting culture. They were convinced their meetings were the thing holding them back, and they refused to hear it from us when we suggested that maybe, perhaps, their meeting dysfunction came from something deeper. They had already branded meetings as their boogeyman, and couldn’t see past that.

And so we did the thing. We made a lovely new guide with meeting best practices and launched a campaign. A year later, their meetings haven’t changed much and the deeper problems are still running the show.

If a team doesn’t have a healthy foundation, fixing simple things like meetings isn’t going to eliminate the problems.

Arguably, the most important element in building a team that can go the distance is communication. The best teams have shared habits for how information moves, how decisions get made, and what people say when the image is still incomplete.

That’s why my latest piece for Fast Company is all about ways to fix team communication without adding more meetings to the calendar.

Because adding even more time for people to talk won’t help if they’re not talking about the right things in the right ways.

If you or your team have fallen into the “let’s blame meeting culture for all our problems” trap, I hope you’ll check out the article. And if you end up putting any of the tips into practice, let me know what you notice!

And, most importantly, remember: it’s not the d*mn meetings!!

Karina Mangu-Ward

Partner, August Public

Thanks to everyone who joined our inaugural AI Learning Lab earlier this month. The second is coming up quick, and we might be even more excited about this topic:

The Shared Brain - Externalizing Team Knowledge for AI

June 18 @ 1PM EDT

As a reminder, these sessions are for people leaders navigating AI adoption in their teams, who understand the basics and are eager to dig into harder questions: Where is the real value? What does this mean for team design? What does it take to purposefully absorb AI into your org?

We’ve spent a lot of time getting into the weeds of what MCPs, CLIs, agent management and all the hype means for our clients and our own workflows, and we're so excited to share what we're learning.

We hope to see you there!