Our Meetings Culture Is Broken

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The Readiness Gap

I ask this question a lot in my sessions: “What would you need to feel truly ready when presenting at work?”

The answers are always the same:

• • Knowing my stuff.
  • Having a clear flow.
  • Being able to handle questions without saying “I’ll get back to you.”
  • Not needing my slides as a crutch.

But when I ask – “So what does your actual preparation look like?” –  that picture begins to crack:

“Well… I run through my slides a couple of days before. If I’m lucky. In practice, it’s usually the night before. Sometimes the morning of! I scroll through a few times just to know what’s what.”

Wait, what?!

We know what readiness requires: reps!

In other words – time, iteration, saying things out loud, building a broader context around our core message so that we’re not hostage to whatever’s on Slide 7.

And yet we consistently don’t do any of that.

Just set priorities! 🙄🤪😤

I used to think this was a prioritisation problem.

Surely if you set your priorities right, and stand firm in your decision, that will fix the lack of time, the interruptions, etc. Surely it’s all a matter of willpower!

Don’t get me wrong – everyone can do it once. When that annual town hall is coming up, or that big board meeting, everyone can prioritise. Everyone can take space to prepare for the big do, because everyone else also gives space for it.

It’s all the other day-to-day meetings that are the death-by-a-thousand-cuts. When you don’t have a strong enough “excuse” to be unavailable for “quick calls” (that are never quick!), Teams or Slack messages, or emails marked “urgent” (urgent for the sender, not for you!)

Those are the meetings for which it’s impossible to prepare to the extent that you need.

It’s not you, it’s the system

After almost two decades watching hundreds of intelligent, talented professionals across 47 nationalities be unable to consistently carve out the space they need in order to feel prepared, despite all their efforts, all the coaching, all the time management training, all the good intentions and the motivation… I’ve concluded that this is not a personal failing.

It’s systemic.

When we expect individuals to perform to the best of their potential, and then take away the conditions that make that performance possible, we need to ask ourselves – how did we get here? And where to next?

Organisations need to address this question.

As Wharton psychologist Adam Grant put it, “in almost every field of excellence, people spend most of their time practicing and very little performing. (…) In leadership and management, and frankly, in most jobs, we do the opposite. We perform and we don’t practice.”

The same is true, I would argue, of our communication abilities.

We undervalue deliberate, intentional practice, and expect that performance will just happen. But that’s not how it works. The best communicators are the ones who took the time, studied themselves and others, rehearsed, tested, measured impact, tested again, rehearsed again. It’s not magic, and it’s not the default setting.

It’s learning. 

But here’s what nobody seems to be asking: where is that learning supposed to happen?

46% of professionals attend three or more meetings per day (Calendly, 2024 State of Meetings Report) and 60% of meetings are ad hoc or unscheduled (Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2025).

Employees are interrupted every ~2 minutes during core work hours, totaling ~275 interruptions per day for heavy collaboration users (Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2025).

And my personal “favorite”: PowerPoint edits spike 122% in the final 10 minutes before meetings (Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2025).

Most organisations implicitly expect excellent communication from their leaders. It’s baked into performance reviews, leadership competency models, promotion criteria.

But how many create the conditions for that communication to actually be excellent?

What can we do?

If you lead a team, or if you’re in HR or L&D, this is where you tag in.

This readiness gap won’t close without collective, organisation-level effort – no matter how much time management training or coaching around priority setting you pay for.

Here are 5 upgrades to organisational infrastructure I would love to test, together with a brave (/ audacious / downright nuts?! 😅) team:

1. Auto-block preparation time for every meeting where someone presents.

How this works: if a meeting invite includes a presentation, the system automatically blocks preparation time in the presenter’s calendar.
The length depends on the role. Keynote to the board? Two days. Team update? 30 minutes. No blocked time, no meeting on the calendar. If there’s not enough time during working hours and the presenter needs to spend evenings or weekends preparing, these hours get logged and paid as overtime.

Preparation shouldn’t be optional, and it shouldn’t be invisible work.

2. Cap the calendar. When it’s full, it’s full.

Set a maximum number of meeting hours per week – say, 40% of working hours. Once you hit it, the system doesn’t allow new meetings to be scheduled. Not “sends a warning.” Not “flags it in a dashboard.” Blocks it.

Yes, there will be push-back. Yes, exceptions will be requested. But it will make everyone think more consciously about what gets put on their calendar.

3. Kill the internal presentation. Replace it with a pre-read + discussion.

What if, for internal knowledge-sharing, the standard procedure was to send a 1-page pre-read, 24 hours before the meeting, and then have a facilitated discussion? The presenter prepares once, in writing. The audience comes ready with questions. The meeting itself becomes conversation, not performance.

Many internal presentations exist because that’s how we’ve always done it. But not every meeting needs a presentation, and a slide deck is not always the best format for the information being shared.

Reserve presentations for when they actually make sense: moments where how you say it is as important as what you say (idea pitches, town halls, board meetings).

4. Protect the last 48 hours before a high-stakes presentation. No new inputs.

Right next to the lack of time, a top disruptor is the constant interruption that fragments the time you do have.

You block Friday afternoon to rehearse your Monday board presentation. Then a “quick” Slack thread pulls you in. Someone reschedules a 1:1 into your prep slot. Your manager sends last-minute data and asks you to “weave it in.” By Monday morning, you’ve touched your slides six times and rehearsed zero.

How this works: 48 hours before any high-stakes presentation, the presenter enters a communication freeze. No new slide inputs. No “one more thing” from stakeholders. No reshuffling of the flow. The content is locked. The only job left is to internalise it: to say it out loud, find the rhythm, and build the muscle memory that lets you show up without clinging to your slides.

This protects the phase that matters most and that gets sacrificed first: the shift from knowing your material to owning your material.

5. Review your competency model. And check for inconsistencies.

Most leadership competency frameworks include something about communication: “communicates with clarity and impact”, “engages stakeholders”, “presents effectively at all levels.”

Look at your organisation’s meeting culture, internal norms, and workload expectations.

If it’s asking people to be excellent communicators without explicit processes on how that excellence will be achieved, that’s not an operational gap. That’s institutional inconsistency.

If communication is in the competency model, then the conditions for good communication need to be in the operating model. If they’re not, remove the communication metric from your appraisal framework. Stop assessing your employees by an impossible standard.

None of these ideas requires a budget. They require someone senior enough to make a decision.

And to support the organisation as it relearns how to get together.