Are Your Team Meetings Draining Capacity? Leanne Bridges Explores Inefficiency Traps

In a recent LinkedIn post, Leanne Bridges explores a common but often overlooked reason for team overwork: inefficient operational habits rather than a genuine lack of personnel. Bridges uses the example of a consultancy’s managing director (MD) who believed he needed to hire more senior staff to cope with the workload, only to discover a different root cause.

Bridges highlights how an initial assessment revealed that the team’s time was being consumed by suboptimal processes, not an unmanageable volume of tasks. She points out that despite the team being “flat out,” their efforts were often misdirected.

“The same decisions getting chewed over in meetings that should have taken five minutes. Four people pulled into calls for a decision one person could have made.”

This observation, according to Bridges, points to a significant drain on productivity. She argues that the issue wasn’t a lack of effort from the team members, but rather the way their work was structured and decisions were handled.

The Gap Between Instruction and Action

Bridges further elaborates on the challenge of implementing desired work practices, even after they’ve been clearly communicated. The MD in her example had repeatedly instructed his team to make decisions more autonomously and to avoid unnecessary meetings. However, the team continued their habitual patterns.

“They’d heard him. They just carried on the way they always had.”

“Telling people how you need them to work and getting them to actually do it are two different things,” Bridges writes, underscoring the difficulty in shifting ingrained behaviors. This disconnect meant the team remained perpetually busy, not due to an insurmountable workload, but due to the inefficiency embedded in their daily operations.

Rethinking Hiring Decisions

The core of Bridges’s argument is that the immediate assumption of needing more staff can be a costly misstep. In the consultancy scenario, the MD’s initial inclination to hire was based on the perception of insufficient capacity.

“And he assumed the only answer was another pair of hands. It wasn’t.”

Bridges posits that the real solution lay not in adding more personnel, but in optimizing the existing team’s processes and ensuring that communication led to tangible action. She suggests that once the team began to align their time with more impactful activities, their perceived capacity increased.

Focusing Conversations on Action

Ultimately, Leanne Bridges encourages leaders to question the fundamental drivers of their team’s workload. She concludes by posing a critical question for business leaders to consider:

“The question is usually not ‘who else do we need?’ It’s ‘are the conversations we’re having with the people we’ve already got actually changing anything?'”

This perspective challenges the conventional approach to capacity planning, urging a deeper examination of internal workflows and decision-making effectiveness before resorting to expansion. Bridges’s analysis suggests that by addressing how work gets done, organizations can often unlock significant hidden capacity within their existing teams.