Last time, I made the case that the away day isn’t the fix, that most wellbeing initiatives treat the symptom while the actual system stays broken underneath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few people asked, fairly, “okay, so what do I do instead?” That’s the right question. Here are three tools I use with leadership teams, all deliberately simple enough to run this month, not next year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Get every recurring meeting on your calendar listed in one column. Next to each one, write down: what decision does this meeting exist to make, and who actually needs to be in the room to make it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You’ll find three categories almost every time. Meetings that make a real decision and need everyone there – keep those. Meetings that share information but don’t need discussion – kill them and send a written update instead. And meetings that used to have a purpose but nobody’s questioned since – cancel these outright. No update, no replacement, nothing. If nobody can say what decision it exists to make, it doesn’t need a substitute; it just needs to stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most teams I’ve run this with cut 20\u201330% of their meeting load in a single afternoon, without losing a single decision-making capability. That’s hours back in people’s week before you’ve spent a penny on anything else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Take it further: get everyone to audit their own attendance, not just the leader.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The version above works at team level, run by whoever holds the calendar. But it’s even more powerful done individually – ask every manager, and then every team, to look at their own week and sort each meeting into one of three categories:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The action is simple once it’s sorted: keep category 1. For category 2, stop attending and send a two-line written update instead, most people are stunned how rarely anyone asks for more than that. For category 3, drop off the invite list entirely. No update needed; you were never the reason it mattered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Run this across a whole team and you’ll usually find the same three or four meetings showing up in everyone’s “category 3” pile, which tells you something the calendar audit alone won’t: not just which meetings should die, but which ones have quietly become bloated with people who were only ever invited “to be safe.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once a week, ask your team one direct question: “What did you have to wait on someone else for this week, and who was it?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Do this for a month and a pattern will appear almost immediately, usually a single person, often someone senior, who has unintentionally become the approval gate for everything. It’s rarely malicious. It’s usually someone who cares enough to want sign-off on everything, and hasn’t noticed they’ve become the ceiling on their own team’s pace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once you can see it named and specific, you can actually fix it – delegate a category of decisions, set a rule for what needs escalation and what doesn’t, or simply give someone else the authority to say yes without checking first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For one week, keep a running list of everything you say yes to as a leader, every new task, extra project, “can you just,” or favour. At the end of the week, look at the list and ask which of those you said yes to because it was genuinely the right priority, and which you said yes to because saying no felt harder in the moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most leaders are stunned by how long the second list is. Every one of those yeses becomes workload someone else absorbs, a deadline that quietly slips, or a standard that erodes because there wasn’t capacity to do it properly. This exercise won’t fix your workload on its own, but it will show you exactly where your own conflict-avoidance is generating other people’s overload, which is usually the real starting point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n None of these three things need a facilitator, a budget, or a day out of the building. They need about an hour of honest attention and the willingness to act on what you find, which, if I’m honest, is the part most leaders skip. Finding the bottleneck is easy. Removing your own name from it is the hard part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Try one of these this week and see what it surfaces. I’d love to hear which one you run, and what you find.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last time I made the case that the away day isn’t the fix, that most wellbeing initiatives treat the symptom while the system underneath stays broken. This time, three practical tools I actually use with leadership teams to find what’s really wrong, no facilitator or budget required.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1052,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[69,63],"tags":[64,61,59,68,70],"class_list":["post-1049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture-by-design","category-leadership-behaviours","tag-culture-by-design","tag-honest-conversations","tag-leadership-behaviour","tag-organisational-culture","tag-workplace-culture"],"yoast_head":"\n\n
2. The Bottleneck Question<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
3. The Yes Audit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Small, but real<\/h2>\n\n\n\n