The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business

Lencioni argues that meetings, long maligned as time-wasting and tedious, are in fact the single most critical activity for sustaining organizational health. He claims that if he could observe only one thing to judge an organization’s health, it would be its leadership team in a meeting because this is where values are lived, clarity is reinforced, and decisions are vetted. Bad meetings breed dysfunction; good meetings generate cohesion and alignment. His central critique is of “meeting stew,” where leaders cram tactical, strategic, administrative, and creative discussions into a single, unfocused session. Instead, he prescribes four distinct meeting types: daily check-ins (brief administrative exchanges), weekly tactical staff meetings (real-time agenda setting and progress review using simple scorecards), ad hoc topical meetings (deep dives into major strategic issues requiring extended time), and quarterly off-sites (broader reflection on strategy, team cohesion, and industry trends). Evidence is drawn from consulting cases where small changes, such as separating tactical from strategic discussions or instituting daily 10-minute check-ins, reduced inefficiencies and built stronger trust.

Placed in context, Lencioni writes against a late 20th- and early 21st-century corporate culture that often equated meeting frequency with inefficiency and sought to reduce them in the name of productivity. His insistence that “more meetings, not fewer” are needed inverts this conventional wisdom (139).