Don't Prepare

Stop preparing for meetings on topics your staff are in charge of. The whole point of delegating is that someone else does the prep, and you take the role of evaluator and guide.

What happens if the meeting is poorly organised or the team aren’t on top of the issues? The solution isn’t for you to put the monkey on your back; instead, cancel or stop the meeting, issue a one-minute reprimand, and reconvene when everyone’s actually ready.

Not only will you reclaim time you might have wasted on unnecessary review and groundwork, but the team will also get a strong cultural message from you that they, not you, need to do the planning and setup to make everything smooth for you.

An extreme example: a client told me recently that in a previous role, he’d worked with White House employees who had only 10 minutes a week with the President of the United States. To use that brief time most effectively, the staffers rattled through every current issue quickly, asking the Commander in Chief to choose “go”, “no go”, or “tell me more”. They definitely didn’t ask POTUS to read anything beforehand!