A founder deleted every recurring meeting except one Thursday demo and discovered her team didn't need constant check-ins. She realized her meeting habit came from anxiety about control, and removing them forced her team to own their work and step into leadership.
Chapters
one of the things we decided was to basically nuke all meetings, every single recurring meeting except for one, which was a demo day or a demo hour, 2 hours on Thursday. So it was the only meeting. And as somebody who grew the company and in some ways is a bit of a control freak and had operated with a sense of, I need to know everything that's going on or want to know everything that's going on because— You're a control freak. It made me more confident in some ways, or it made me believe that if I could then direct something or I could catch a mistake here or there, that that would be better for the company somehow. And I really had to sit with whether that was a true belief, whether it was actually the case that I somehow had to be involved in everything in order for it to go well. I started to get the sense that no, maybe this is actually just anxiety speaking and not actually a thing that was better for the company. And so that was what I think led us to trying this experiment. And I think the first couple weeks were tough because I felt like I no longer really understood at the detailed level that I was used to what was going on. But in other ways, I was like, actually, this could be what allows everyone else to be able to step up, take more ownership, grow in their own path as leaders. Now that we've run the experiment for a couple of weeks or months now, it's been great.
