Why Data Leaders Hate Meetings (and What to Do About It)
The heaviest burden of data leadership often isn’t related to technology. It’s the calendar.
You are caught in a constant, crushing squeeze — and there’s never enough time. Above you, stakeholders demand new features, status updates, and ever-increasing adoption of AI. Below you, your technical team just wants to be left alone to code in their "flow state."
And you? You are the shock absorber in the middle.
You attend meetings that drag on without purpose. You watch your team disengage and multitask. You end your days exhausted, pining for the time when you were an individual contributor and could actually finish your work in normal business hours. I know some of you have even pretended you’re on PTO so you could actually get work done.
Sure, cancelling all meeting invites and retreating to your individual work sounds really, really nice. But deep down, you know the hard truth: You cannot code your way to organizational alignment.
Aaron Klein, founder of Contio, told me in our recent conversation:
"The process of leading is the process of working through other people."
People do not naturally move in the same direction, so our goal cannot be to eliminate meetings; it's to stop using them for administration and start using them as Alignment Engines.
Here are the six things I’ve observed data leaders hate most about meetings, and the playbook to recast them into alignment engines.
“Meeting Stew" (Lack of Focus)
Leaders get frustrated when meeting types are mixed — specifically when a tactical meeting (like a standup) gets hijacked by a strategic debate about a topic. Patrick Lencioni calls this all-too-common dynamic “Meeting Stew.” This confusion of the objective purpose of a meeting wastes people’s time and traps them in discussions they don't need to be part of.
Leader’s Playbook: Interrupt your team when they’re headed down a rabbit hole and ask them to schedule a follow-up. Do not let discussions on strategy hijack tactics (or vice versa). Conflict is uncomfortable, but it is your job to keep meeting times focused and productive.
“The Flow Killer” (Lack of Productivity)
Data leaders, especially those leading engineers and developers, hate when meetings disrupt "flow state". Switching contexts from deep technical work to a meeting and back again is jarring and drains your team’s productivity.
Leader’s Playbook: Ruthlessly evaluate the purpose of all of the standing meetings for those on your team. Standing meetings are fine as a venue for alignment, but they must be tied to solving real challenges or they must be cancelled. Aaron Klein suggests an even more radical approach: strive for three to four meeting-free days a week for your makers.
“Groundhog Day” (Lack of Resolution)
Nothing is more draining to a team than leaving a meeting feeling like nothing was accomplished, only to realize the lack of decision-making means you now have to schedule another meeting with the same folks to get to the originally intended outcome.
Leader’s Playbook: State the objective of every meeting you lead upfront aloud to all attendees. If you feel the meeting shifting, ask the room: "How does this relate to our objective?" If it doesn't, ask the team to park it for later.
"The Hostage Situation” (Lack of Autonomy)
Teams feel frustrated when forced to attend meetings they had no say in organizing and when they have no choice but to attend, particularly when they are four or five levels down in an organization.
Leader’s Playbook: Openly invite and graciously receive feedback from your team when they feel their attendance isn’t needed in a room. This feedback allows you to reconsider or sharpen the objective of the meeting ahead of time. That said, Aaron Klein says meeting imbalance is an unavoidable reality as a leader. Explicitly stating upfront that “I intentionally invited you knowing I will get more out of this than you” makes the meeting objective clearer to all.
“Flying Blind“ (Lack of Context)
Walking into a room without knowing why you are there and without any preparation is a recipe for broken meetings. Different people process information differently, and most internal processors require time to think beforehand to have productive conversations. It is impossible to have brilliant meetings when people are unprepared.
Leader’s Playbook: Encourage your team to leverage AI to prep for each meeting. Lead by example by using AI to build a clear agenda, set a clear objective for the meeting, practice defending key arguments for each position you will debate, and do deep research on the tradeoffs of various approaches. Admit you used AI to prepare and challenge your team to follow your lead by doing the same.
“Surveillance” (Lack of Candor)
There is a growing dislike for AI bots that record every interaction, as this creates an environment where people feel unsafe to speak up, disagree, or offer candid feedback in a meeting that will be recorded, transcribed, and stored away forever.
Leader’s Playbook: Leverage AI tools that help you focus on the people in the meeting and the objective at-hand. Use AI tools that help you prep before the meeting, rather than those that just record the misery during the meeting. Be willing to shut off the recordings and the bots from time to time to invite more open candor within your team.
Listen to the full conversation: Check out my latest episode with Aaron Klein on the Cross-Pollinated Leadership Podcast, where we discuss the "Meeting OS" he and his team at Contio are building and how to turn your meetings from a drain into a driver of growth.