If You Need a Meeting to Make Every Decision, You're Not Leading, You're Hosting Game Night

We’ve all been there: you open your calendar and it’s wall-to-wall with "decision-making" meetings that could’ve been a Slack message, an email, or better yet, a leader actually making a decision.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
If you’re calling a meeting for every single call, big or small, you’re not leading.
You’re crowd-sourcing authority like it’s trivia night and you forgot the answer to “Who’s responsible?”

Meetings Are Not a Substitute for Spine

A meeting should never be your first resort when you’re faced with a tough call.
Yes, input matters.
Yes, collaboration is beautiful.
But if you're bringing the whole team together just so nobody can point fingers at you later, you’re not empowering, you’re hiding.

Leadership requires judgment.
It requires ownership.
It requires the ability to make a call even if it's uncomfortable, unpopular, or risks being wrong.

And guess what? You will be wrong sometimes. That’s part of the job. Own it. Learn. Move on.

Meetings Should Be Multipliers, Not Muzzles

Great meetings energize, align, and unlock momentum. They’re strategic checkpoints, not tactical crutches.

Bad meetings?
They drain your team’s time and trust.
They make people think you don’t trust them, or yourself.
They turn your calendar into a slow, painful death spiral of indecision.

Here’s a simple litmus test:

• Do you already know the right call, but you're scared to make it? That’s a fear issue, not a collaboration need.
• Do you need input on a specific detail to move forward? Cool, a 15-minute sync might work.
• Do you need everyone to help you decide what snack to buy for the launch party? You’re running Game Night, not a dev team.

Leadership = Direction, Not Consensus

Stop trying to run your team like it’s a co-op board game.
Not every decision requires consensus. Hell, most of them don’t.
You weren’t given a leadership title to be the official Zoom meeting scheduler. You were given it because someone thought you could steer the ship.

So steer it.

And if you crash it? That’s part of the gig too. The best leaders learn faster from failure than others do from safety.

TL;DR for the Calendar-Happy Crowd:

• Stop defaulting to meetings.
• Make decisions. Own outcomes.
• Collaborate when needed, but lead always.
• Game night is for Settlers of Catan, not product roadmap pivots.