What if the biggest lever for changing your culture isn’t a strategy offsite, it’s the meeting you have every Monday at 10am? In this episode of The Secret Life of Great Leaders, host Michael Bunting sits down with Rebecca Hinds to unpack why meetings are the tip of the iceberg for everything broken in an organisation, and why fixing them takes a lot more than a better agenda.
Rebecca’s fascination with teamwork started as a competitive swimmer and Stanford graduate, watching what made elite teams outperform the sum of their parts. That curiosity carried her through a PhD grounded in ethnographic research and into writing Your Best Meeting Ever, a book built on one core idea: meetings are the most important product in your organisation, and the least optimised.
Together, Michael and Rebecca explore why so few organisations actually measure their meetings, even though meetings are where culture gets built or broken, decisions get made, and alignment gets set. They dig into the four dimensions that reveal a lack of intentional design, why “meeting doomsday” is sometimes the only real fix for years of accumulated meeting debt, and why the ratio of a leader’s talk time to their question-asking says more about the health of a team than any engagement survey.
What You’ll Learn:
- Why meetings are the visible tip of the iceberg for every other dysfunctional behaviour in an organisation
- How treating meetings like a product, with real users and real feedback, changes the way you should design them
- The four dimensions that reveal whether a meeting was intentionally designed: length, cadence, agenda, and attendees
- Why Parkinson’s Law means a 30-minute meeting will expand to fill 30 minutes, whether it needs to or not
- How ROTI, a simple two-question survey, reveals whether a meeting was actually worth the time invested
- Why a “meeting doomsday” calendar cleanse is sometimes the only real way to clear years of accumulated meeting debt
- Why the ratio of a leader’s talk time to their question-asking is a hallmark of genuine collaboration
- Why transparency, not more meetings, is the real antidote to the toxic cycle of “pre-meetings before the meeting”
- Why fixing your meetings might be the single highest-leverage lever for changing your organisation’s culture
Rebecca Hinds is the author of Your Best Meeting Ever and a former competitive swimmer turned Stanford graduate whose PhD in ethnographic research grounds her work on teamwork, collaboration, and now AI in the workplace. She works day-to-day at Glean’s WorkAI Institute, where her research explores how organisations can fix broken collaboration at scale.
Episode Highlights:
- [00:00] Intro
- [00:25] How Rebecca Became an Expert on Meetings
- [03:09] The Three R’s: Role Modeling, Rewards, Rituals
- [10:41] The Three M’s: Modeling, Meetings, Metrics
- [11:36] Treat Your Meetings Like a Product
- [13:18] What Lack of Intentionality Really Looks Like
- [17:36] Meeting Debt and the “Meeting Doomsday” Cleanse
- [20:08] How to Measure a Meeting: The ROTI Method
- [22:44] What AI Can Now Tell Us About Our Meetings
- [24:50] Why Fixing Meetings Is a Culture Lever, Not a Cost
- [41:58] Transparency, Pre-Meetings, and Remote-First Culture
- [43:38] Closing Thoughts and Where to Find Rebecca
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