Skip to content
Leap Company
ExpertiseStructure

The meeting overruns. The decision gets made somewhere else.

We map out who decides what and what each meeting is for, then redesign it with the people who sit in those meetings. That way decisions get made where they belong, and time goes back into the work.

What we mean by structure.

How the work is organised: roles, mandates, meetings and processes. It determines who decides what, and how work is divided and coordinated.

In our model, structure is one of three conditions, alongside culture and technology. Together they determine whether the four domains can develop, and so whether you reach your goals. A clear structure gives people room to do their work. An unclear one mostly eats time.

See how our expertise fits together

Structure in every domain.

Structure touches all four domains of our model. In each one we ask the same question: does the structure you have help, or does it get in the way?

  • Craftsmanship

    Do professionals have the mandate to make decisions within their field, and is there time set aside to keep their skills up to date?

  • Shared vision

    Is there a meeting where the course is translated into what teams do, or does it stay in the management team?

  • Team learning and collaboration

    Does the meeting rhythm leave time to look back and learn from each other, or is every meeting about the latest fire?

  • Systems thinking

    Are meetings set up so that teams and departments see each other’s work, or does each part decide about its own piece?

Sound familiar?

How do you organise things so that people can do their work well and your goals are met?

  • It is unclear who decides what, or who is responsible for what.
  • Meetings take up a lot of time, but don’t always lead to decisions or action.
  • Work gets stuck between teams or departments.

How we can help

A lack of clarity or progress isn’t necessarily down to the structure alone. Behaviour, leadership or systems can also stop the work from running well. That is why we also look at culture, leadership and technology.

How we work on structure

For each part of our approach, the examples from our work that relate to structure. Click one to read how we tackled it; it opens on the services page, with the structure examples highlighted.

Meetings get added. They never get taken away.

It starts small. Something goes wrong, so a meeting gets added. A few years later the management team meets on Monday, the team leaders on Tuesday and the project group on Wednesday. And the decision gets made on Thursday, by the coffee machine.

Structure is the part of an organisation you can draw: who has which role, who decides what, which meeting is for what and how often it meets. It sounds dry. It does decide where everyone’s week goes.

Almost three working days a week.

That is how much time managers spend in meetings on average: almost 23 hours a week, compared with fewer than ten in the 1960s. Leslie Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley and Eunice Eun wrote this in Harvard Business Review in 2017.

Their conversations with hundreds of managers also showed that one-off tricks don’t help much. A shorter meeting or a tighter agenda just moves the problem. What works is taking a fresh look at the whole rhythm of meetings, together with the people who sit in them.

Who decides on this?

That is the question we ask most, and the answer almost always differs from person to person. With the Governance app, every team member fills in who is responsible for the most important topics. Then we put the answers side by side. Where the pictures differ, that’s where the friction is. “Don’t know” counts as an answer too: if nobody in a team knows who is responsible for something, that is a finding in itself.

Then we design the rhythm together. Which meetings are there to steer and which to get the work done, who sits in them, and what comes out of them. We write roles and mandates down in plain language, so that a new colleague understands them too.

If you want to steer, you also need to see what is running. That is why we often set up portfolio management and capacity management: one list of all initiatives, what is running each quarter and how much time it takes, and each week whether the team can handle it. On the services page you can see how a spreadsheet like that fills up.

Example of a meeting structure mapped out: meetings per level with frequency and purpose, and where information gets stuck
A meeting structure mapped out: the meetings at each level, with their purpose, rhythm and where information gets stuck. A made-up example.
A large sheet on a board headed Who does what, where and when, with columns full of notes on meetings, roles, purpose and topics

Questions we often get

What does a good meeting structure look like?

One in which every meeting has a single purpose and produces something, a decision or an action. A meeting that never produces anything can go. Put all your meetings side by side and you’ll quickly see where they overlap and which decisions fall through the cracks.

What is a mandate?

The room to make decisions yourself, within agreements that are clear in advance. A mandate only works once it is written down and everyone has the same picture of it. That second part is rarely the case. So we measure it first.

Should you tackle structure first, or culture?

Both at the same time. Changing only the structure is like putting on one shoe. And behaviour that looks like culture, such as waiting to see what happens, often comes from nobody knowing exactly who decides what.

From our blog

Short pieces from practice. They open on the blog.

Sources

  1. Perlow, L. A., Hadley, C. N., & Eun, E. (2017). Stop the meeting madness. Harvard Business Review, July–August 2017. hbr.org/2017/07/stop-the-meeting-madness

Other expertise

See how our expertise fits together

Where do decisions actually get made in your organisation?

We work with organisations to set up meeting structures, roles and mandates. In a first conversation we talk about how things run now and where they get stuck.

Portrait of Maarten Glaser