There’s a quiet signal that reveals more about your company’s culture than any KPI or engagement survey: how your leaders spend their time. Spoiler: most are wasting it.
My biggest concern is when I hear that management meetings are calendar fillers. No, they shouldn’t be squeezed in between “real work”, on the contrary, they are the real work, when run well: they focus energy, align priorities, and enable decisions. But too often, they become default fixtures with aimless talk, passive attendance, or worse: multitasking.
Last week, a client told me he uses certain meetings to catch up on email, because “nothing happens there anyway.” That should terrify any executive. If your managers are physically present but mentally elsewhere, that’s not participation, it’s organizational waste.
Meeting Tourism Is Real
Ever had people in the room just because they’re “supposed to be”? That’s meeting tourism: showing up without a role, silently orbiting the real discussion.
At Netflix, this behavior is explicitly discouraged. As outlined in their famous culture deck, every person in a meeting should either contribute or challenge, otherwise, they don’t belong. Even senior execs are questioned: “Why are you here?” Attendance is not a proxy for importance. Value is.
Time Is a Mirror of Priorities
What gets scheduled gets done. What gets your leaders’ uninterrupted time gets your company’s attention. Look at the recurring meetings in your calendar. What’s the ratio of:
🧭 Strategy vs. status updates?
✅ Decision-making vs. “sharing information”?
🗓 Planned time vs. last-minute chaos?
If your calendar doesn’t reflect your top three company priorities, you’re not running your strategy, you’re reacting to your inbox.
Should a CEO Prepare for a Meeting?
Trick question. A better one: What message does it send when they don’t?
If the leadership team constantly “teaches” the CEO things during meetings, two things might be true:
a) You’ve hired a brilliant generalist who trusts their team.
b) Or: your top leader is winging it, and everyone knows.
Leadership behavior is contagious. If the CEO doesn’t prepare, others won’t either. If the CEO cancels every other meeting or multitasks during them, guess what the rest of the org will normalize?
Should Any Manager Prepare?
At Amazon, senior leadership meetings famously begin with 6-page memos read in silence during the meeting. No slides. No pre-reads. Just reading and thinking, together. It’s deeply intentional. This works at Amazon because it’s a cultural norm at the top that is expected, enforced, and systematized.
But I’ve seen Hungarian companies with 1,000–5,000 employees trying to mimic this without the structure. In a recent conversation, a business line head said: “We don’t have time to prepare so we just invite the specialist of the topic to introduce the memo.”
Result? Too many questions, confusion, and disengagement.
You can’t import rituals without adapting them to your leadership maturity level.
The Best Ability is Availability
It is a leadership superpower. But not the always-on, reactive kind, rather, intentional, accessible presence. Take Satya Nadella at Microsoft. One of his first moves as CEO was to open monthly town hall Q&As where any employee could ask questions. He spent full days listening to product teams, not to drive decisions, but to absorb context and build empathy.
This wasn’t PR. It was a strategy to rewire culture. Presence, in this case, was performance.
Another client of mine (a COO at a logistics firm) started blocking two 45-minute windows per week as “walk-in hours” for his 12 direct reports (which is definitely too much for weekly one-to-ones).
Engagement, clarity, and even speed of decision-making improved within a month. Sometimes, availability solves what company structure ruins.
Your company’s calendar is your culture in action. If your meetings are reactive, vague, or filled with passive participants, don’t blame motivation, blame the system, and fix it. Because time is the most expensive resource your management team owns.
The question is: are you investing it or just spending it?
Should you have concerns about your practice, contact me and let’s clear them up together!
#timeisprecious #leadershipdevelopment
