If a consultant proposed hiring three additional full-time executives, your finance team would demand a business case. Even so, most leadership teams already spend the equivalent cost inside meetings nobody has ever audited.
The arithmetic is uncomfortable on purpose. Count your leadership team, multiply loaded hourly cost by hours in recurring meetings, multiply across a year. In mid-size organizations this routinely reaches several hundred thousand dollars, spent by standing calendar invitation, reviewed by no one.
I recommend a simple two-week audit, and I have yet to see one fail to pay for itself. For every meeting, capture four facts. What decision or output it produced, who was present but contributed nothing the outcome required, what it displaced, that is, what those people did not do instead, and whether anything decided was documented with an owner and date.
The findings cluster reliably. A third of recurring meetings produce status updates that a written summary would deliver better and faster. Attendance lists grow by politeness and never shrink; people attend defensively, to not be absent. Decisions believed made evaporate because nothing was recorded. The scarcest executive resource, uninterrupted thinking time, appears nowhere on the calendar because meetings colonized it.
The repairs are unremarkable and effective. Every meeting states its decision purpose or converts to a memo; attendance means contribution, and observers get the notes; every decision leaves the room with an owner and a date in writing; and reclaimed hours get deliberately reassigned, to client work, to development, to actual strategy, before the calendar refills itself.
Time is the one executive resource with no supplier. An organization that audits its money monthly but its attention never has its controls backwards.
Mel Meier, DBA is an applied social scientist and the founder of iB Consulting USA, a woman owned, WOSB certified advisory firm. She serves boards, associations, and executive teams through board advisory, organizational diagnostics, speaking engagements in the United States and internationally, and organizational assessments.
