Three months into the role, she asked to see the agenda for the monthly leadership review. Sixteen items. Eleven were carry-forwards from the previous month. Four of those had been carry-forwards the month before that. She said nothing in the meeting, and did what most new Chiefs of Staff do when they find a room of capable people staring at a moving list of unresolved things: she wrote it down and waited to understand the pattern.
The pattern was not complicated. This leadership team had a calendar. What it did not have was a cadence. A calendar tells you when meetings happen. A cadence tells you what gets resolved and when, and what has to be true before the next conversation can be useful. Most teams inherit their rhythm: the weekly executive meeting set up three years ago when there were eight people in one building, the monthly review an investor once asked for, the quarterly offsite that exists because it always has. None of it has been redesigned since. It accumulated, the way furniture accumulates in a room nobody decides to redecorate. When a calendar accumulates, it fills. When a cadence is designed, it clears.
Why it happens
Nobody cancels a recurring meeting, because it feels like cancelling accountability. Each one began with a real purpose, and killing it seems to say the purpose no longer matters, so better to keep it, shrink it to thirty minutes, send apologies and have someone cover. The result is a full calendar and a leadership team that, on the things that matter most, is not moving. The Chief of Staff is usually first to see it clearly, sitting across the whole rhythm of the organisation, across functions and levels and weeks and months. They notice the same item surfacing in three different forums. They hear the corridor conversation that belongs in the room, and sit in the room full of conversations that belong in the corridor. That vantage is specific to the role and badly underused; it is the spot from which an operating rhythm can actually be diagnosed, and, with enough standing, redesigned.
The cadence audit
Before redesigning a leadership team’s operating cadence, diagnose what you have. Reforge’s operating-cadence work makes the case that leadership forums should be reserved for decisions and escalations, with general updates moved to async.1 Four questions that sound simple and are not:
- What does each standing meeting actually produce? Sit through three sessions of each forum and note what was resolved, deferred, or left ownerless. The agenda is a statement of intent; the output is what counts. If a forum reliably produces status, and the team spends its most expensive time receiving it, there is no protected space left for decisions.
- Does the tempo of the forum match the tempo of the work? A daily standup in a team on quarterly cycles is theatre. A monthly review in a business whose ground shifts weekly is too slow to catch anything before it compounds.
- Where are decisions repeated or deferred? An issue that appears in three consecutive reviews without resolution is structural: wrong people in the room, wrong information on the table, or no clear owner. Name the pattern before month four, rather than facilitating the fourth inconclusive round.
- What is happening outside the official rhythm that belongs inside it? The CEO’s corridor debrief after the board meeting, the standing call nobody else attends, your own one-to-ones where more gets decided than in any formal forum. Those channels exist because the official ones are not fast or safe enough, and that is information about where the cadence is failing.
What to do this week
Take one standing meeting in the next seven days and ask: what decision or action came out of this that could not have come another way? Answer it clearly and the meeting is earning its place. Fail to, and you have found a forum consuming leadership time without producing leadership output. One meeting, one question, is enough to start.
The risk for the Chief of Staff who does this well is that the cadence gets designed, implemented, and then drifts back to its old shape over six or eight months, one new standing meeting at a time. The calendar fills again. The carry-forwards return. Someone asks for a new recurring session and nobody retires an old one. An operating rhythm is only as strong as the discipline behind it, and holding that discipline in a room full of busy people who mean well is the part of the work no framework will ever capture for you.
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