The Meeting Trap
You open a meeting invitation and wonder: why am I actually on this list?
The call comes from another department. The topic barely concerns you. And the person who sent the invite probably knows you only by name. Yet there you are, somewhere between twelve other names, half of whom are equally puzzled.
Behind every invitation like this, one of two situations is at play.
The first: the person organizing the meeting simply does not know who is responsible. So they invite everyone who might conceivably be relevant. Or they send the invitation to one person with a request to forward it internally. That person forwards it to someone else, who forwards it again. By the time the meeting starts, a group has assembled in which nobody is quite sure how they ended up on the list.
The second: the organizer knows exactly who they need. But they invite more people than necessary anyway. Not out of ignorance, but out of caution. So that nobody can say later they were left out. So that decisions have broader backing. So that they do not have to stand alone.
I know both situations. And I have sent those invitations myself. When I needed to speak with department heads, I still included the team leads, simply so that nobody would feel bypassed.
What happens in these oversized meetings is familiar. Many people stop listening, work in parallel, or mentally check out. We already calculated what that costs in the first two parts of this series.
But there is a second dynamic that develops in groups that are too large: people who have nothing concrete to contribute start joining the discussion anyway. Not out of bad intention, but because they genuinely believe they can add something useful. That is human and not fundamentally wrong. But it costs time, pulls the conversation off track, and extends meetings that were already running too long.
The result is a meeting that works well for nobody. Too large for fast decisions, too unfocused for real outcomes.
It is tempting to place the blame entirely on the person who sends the invite. But that falls short.
Whoever organizes a meeting cannot always clarify in advance who exactly is responsible. In practice, that would take too long. What they can do instead: rather than a long invitation list, send a clear broadcast to all relevant parties, with the key information and a named contact for follow-up questions. Not every piece of information needs a meeting.
At the same time, the responsibility also lies with the person being invited. The discipline to evaluate an invitation and decline when appropriate is an underrated skill. Whoever accepts every invitation out of fear of missing something is dealing with the FOMO problem we described in the first part of this series.
And then there is a third dimension that often goes unnoticed: company culture. As long as it is not accepted that an employee can decline an invitation, even the best personal discipline changes little. Saying no requires an environment that does not interpret that no as disinterest or refusal.
The invitation reflex is ultimately not an individual problem. It is a symptom of a culture in which presence is equated with relevance. As long as that remains the case, the invitation lists will stay long.
In many companies, this is exactly where unnecessary time losses and structural problems arise. Often this goes unnoticed for a long time — until projects start to stall.
