Chen Chia-sheng's Perspective: Why Do Bosses Love Meetings But Fail to Deliver Performance? Most Meetings Have Become Personal Showcases!

Looking back on a lifetime of countless meetings—of various types, sizes, scales, natures, and purposes—with different formats of execution, one common requirement remains: achieving the specific objectives of each meeting.

Recently, an entrepreneur mentioned that some business leaders hold over a thousand meetings a year. Considering holidays and days off, this means a boss may attend four or more meetings daily. If meetings lack a clear focus, they inevitably become long and inefficient. A meeting that should take half an hour could stretch to two or three hours. Add four or five participants from other departments, and how high is the cost of such a meeting? Do managers truly understand the real cost of a single meeting?

Hearing about a thousand meetings a year, one might think these entrepreneurs are superhuman—energetic and exceptional. Naturally, one wonders about their company’s performance. More often than not, the feedback is: poor business results, high staff turnover, and frequent customer complaints about service or product quality.

This management style reflects tactical diligence—appearing hardworking and serious. In business terms, this behavior is called "managerial performance." Managers are skilled at creating beautiful PowerPoint presentations but fail to secure contracts, deliver plans, or produce results. Too many corporate meetings reveal a clear lack of holistic strategic thinking, the design and operation of resources needed to win battles ("campaigns"), and the tactical execution required to implement those campaigns. This distinction between "strategy," "campaign," and "tactics" was recently emphasized by Jack Ma in a public talk, highlighting the "decoding" of strategic planning through the design of integrated resource deployment.

Under such managerial-performance leadership, employees feel disoriented, unclear about company or task goals, and see no business achievements. They end up busy but unfulfilled, feeling no growth. Employee turnover becomes inevitable. Yet, such bosses often blame employees for poor work attitudes and lack of professionalism, generalizing it as "today’s youth’s shared work attitude and values problem." This judgment is meaningless and misdirected. Blaming external social environments makes the issue seem unsolvable.

But consider: companies like Unitree Robotics, DeepSeek, and TikTok (Douyin), and many Chinese CEOs, are led by people around 30 years old. Why can this generation innovate and strive so effectively, building world-class enterprises? Clearly, bosses and managers need to adjust their perceptions of the new generation, their understanding of problems, and their thinking patterns.

Bosses and managers lacking systematic thinking, strategic vision, and clear goals tend to call meetings whenever problems arise—typical "firefighter" behavior. If meeting facilitation turns into a stage performance, forgetting "who I am" and "the meeting’s purpose," meetings become blame sessions where departments accuse each other of poor cooperation. More commonly, meetings turn into bosses’ and managers’ "lectures."

Attendees silently think, "Here we go again." Everyone looks at their laptops or phones, doing their own work—physically present but mentally absent. Bosses see this but feel helpless, unsure how to change the situation. What’s the real problem? How can we break this cycle?

Some bosses say, "I’ve been talking about these issues for years, but nothing changes—same problems keep recurring." They might hire a consultant, explain the situation, and ask the consultant to "change" employees’ attitudes. What do readers feel when seeing this? Can you identify the symptoms versus the root causes? How can we systematically analyze problems, understand their essence, and solve them at the core? While problem identification and resolution skills are taught in schools and workshops, they’re rarely applied to solve real-world daily challenges. This is a classic example of the "knowing-doing" gap.

"Recognizing the existence of a problem" is the turning point for growth. When bosses and managers talk about problems, it means they’ve noticed them. But trapped in habitual thinking and behavior, breaking free is difficult. They need external consultants, coaches, or management workshops to help them listen to differing opinions, think from new angles, and learn how top companies handle similar issues—expanding their cognitive horizons and breaking mental boundaries.

Bosses and managers must face problems with open minds, seeing them as opportunities for personal growth and evolution, not as exposures of personal inadequacies. Transforming problems into chances to demonstrate capability, while showing teams that in the new era, leaders don’t have all the answers but are willing to "learn together," "create together," and "win together." Through facing and solving problems, employees see an organizational culture that embraces people, encourages innovative thinking, and values problem-solving—essential for companies navigating the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment.