TL;DR: Your meeting culture is a direct reflection of how you lead, and the holiday rush makes every unnecessary meeting more expensive. November is the right time to audit your standing meetings and cut the ones that aren’t producing decisions before December’s short calendar arrives.
Take a look at your team’s meeting calendar for the rest of the year. Really look at it.
How many of those meetings exist because something actually requires the group to be together? And how many exist because the team doesn’t have enough clarity, trust, or decision authority to move the work without them?
That question matters every month, but it matters a lot more right now. Between Thanksgiving week and the December holidays, most teams are about to lose a meaningful chunk of their working time. If the meeting calendar stays the same while the available days shrink, meetings eat an even bigger share of the time your team has left to finish the year.
Your meeting culture is one of the clearest signals of how you actually lead. A calendar full of standing check-ins tells me a leader doesn’t fully trust the team to move without them. A meeting that ends with no decision tells me accountability hasn’t been built. And a team that goes quiet in meetings has learned that speaking up isn’t worth it.
What Your Meetings Are Actually Saying 
Here’s a simple test. Count your team’s standing meetings and ask what each one actually produced in the last month. Most leaders run out of answers well before they run out of meetings.
The meetings that can’t answer usually exist for one of three reasons. They’ve always existed, someone asked for a touchpoint and you said yes, or you worry that things will fall through the cracks without them. That last reason is the one to pay attention to. If things fall through the cracks without a meeting, the meeting is covering for missing clarity and accountability.
Cutting those meetings rarely slows anything down. More often, the team gets time back for real work and things start moving faster.
The Three Meeting Problems to Fix Before December
Too many meetings usually means the leader is compensating for something, like unclear priorities that need constant realignment or a team that has to check in before it can move. Fix the root cause and the meeting stops being necessary.
Meetings without decisions are the most expensive kind. They take the same time as a productive meeting and produce nothing. If people leave without a clear decision or a next step with an owner, that meeting shouldn’t exist in its current form.
Meetings people dread are a trust signal. When people give short answers and count the minutes, they’ve learned something about what happens when they speak up. They learned it from how the leader responded in the past.
How to Audit Your Meeting Culture This Month
Before the holiday rush peaks, run every standing meeting through these questions:
- What has this meeting produced in the last month that wouldn’t have happened without it?
- Does it end with a decision or a clear owner for the next step?
- Could it be an email, a shared tracker, or a fifteen-minute call instead?
- Does it really need to happen during Thanksgiving week and the last two weeks of December?
Cut what can’t answer those questions, pause what can wait until January, and tell your team why. You’ll give them back hours they badly need right now.
Too Many Meetings Is a Leadership Problem, Not a Calendar Problem
None of this is complicated. It does require a leader who is willing to be honest about what their meetings are doing and what they reveal about how the team operates. The leaders who clean up their meeting culture in November head into December with a team that has time to finish the work instead of just talking about it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does my team have too many meetings?
Because meetings get added faster than they get removed, and leaders use them to compensate for problems that should be solved another way. Unclear priorities require constant realignment, and teams without real decision authority have to check in before they move. The meeting count is a symptom, and the leadership gap is the cause.
How do you improve meeting culture on your team?
Audit every standing meeting against one question: what has this produced in the last month that wouldn’t have happened without it? Cut the ones that can’t answer clearly. For the ones that stay, require a stated purpose and an expected decision before they go on the calendar, and then actually make decisions in them.
Should you cancel meetings during the holidays?
Cancel or pause any standing meeting that isn’t producing decisions, and be especially aggressive during Thanksgiving week and late December. Keep the meetings tied to real year-end deadlines and make them shorter. Your team will get more done with fewer, better meetings than with a full calendar and half the people out.
