Meetings Start Off Great. Then They Die.

Aleksander Traks
May 5
2 min read

You ever notice how meetings start out as a good idea?

Someone says, “Hey, let’s do a quick sync so we don’t miss stuff,” and everyone’s onboard. First couple times, people are engaged. They share things. There’s actual value.

But then a month goes by.

And suddenly it’s just people saying words into the void. No one’s getting anything out of it. No one really knows why we’re still doing it. But we keep going — because now it’s a thing.

It’s like… the husk of a good idea.

A person sitting calmly in a historical courtyard in Baku, reflecting on the contrast between timeless settings and the hollow repetition of modern team rituals. — *Sometimes the setting is ancient, but the ritual still feels hollow. Leadership is about meaning, not tradition.*

Standups Are the Poster Child for This

I’ve seen more daily standups go sideways than actually help.

They start with structure — three questions, short and sweet. But over time, they turn into report-fests. Someone’s just talking at the manager. Everyone else is zoning out, waiting for their turn to recite yesterday's calendar.

And when that happens? The meeting’s already dead. We’re just dragging it around like a team-building zombie.

The worst part is that most people feel it. They know it’s not helping. But they keep showing up.

Because that’s what teams do, right?

Why It Happens

Because rituals are easy.

They look like leadership.

They look like “alignment.”

And they make managers feel like things are moving.

It’s way easier to follow a process than to ask hard questions like:

Does this actually help anyone?
Would anyone notice if we stopped doing this tomorrow?
Is this helping the team — or just giving one person the illusion of control?

Let’s be real. A lot of team rituals don’t help the team — they just make the managers feel organized.

A colorful circular diagram showing the five stages of ineffective rituals in management: Initiation, Illusion of Leadership, False Alignment, Manager Satisfaction, and Lack of Evaluation. — *How dead rituals survive: a cycle of comfort, illusion, and unchecked repetition.*

Here’s What You Actually Need

Start with the people. Not the format.

Do they need more visibility into each other’s work? Cool — create a space where that happens.

Do they need to connect more as humans? Great — build that in.

Do they just need a way to say, “Hey, I’m stuck” without it turning into a 30-minute group debugging session with 10 bored spectators?

You don’t fix that by following some standup playbook. You fix it by listening.

The format is secondary. You can throw out the 3 questions. You can skip updates altogether. The important part is whether people leave the meeting with more clarity, not just more words.