You're in a meeting about a meeting about a meeting. And nobody in the room is
going to say the real thing.
One unknown on a six month project. One risk. The kind of thing you knew would happen because unknowns inevitably happen on six month projects.
And now product and engineering are on a call. Not solving the problem. Rehearsing the story. Making sure the slide deck is right before it reaches the PMO.
Because god forbid something slips by a few days and the wrong person finds out in the wrong room.
The status updates get cleaner as the situation gets worse. When the slide deck looks polished but the project is on fire underneath, the team isn't solving the problem. They're managing perception. The meeting is where the work gets performed.
Leaders who never see the mess can't lead through it. An audience can applaud or criticize. But they can't help. Because they don't know what's actually happening.
And while four people are on a call perfecting a slide, nobody is fixing the thing that went wrong.
The Scrum That Nobody Understands
Most people in tech have never actually seen a scrum.
They know it as a methodology. Standups. Sprint planning. Retros. A set of ceremonies that got bolted onto software development.
But a scrum in rugby is something completely different. Watch any rugby match. A scrum is guys linking arms and pushing together. Locked on. Driving forward as one unit for a single objective.
That's what great engineering teams look like. Not performing for leaders. Not packaging updates.
The original software methodology was inspired by that. Takeuchi and Nonaka wrote the Harvard Business Review paper that drew the rugby parallel. Sutherland and Schwaber built the methodology on top of it. The intent was exactly this. Teams pushing together. But somewhere between the intent and the implementation, most orgs turned it into a reporting structure. We took a word that means "push together" and turned it into "perform separately."
What Accessibility Unlocks
Some bosses made me hesitate before asking "can I call you real quick?" I'd sit on a problem longer than I needed to because reaching up felt like an interruption. My productivity suffered. My decision-making slowed down. And the information my boss needed to lead effectively never reached them because I was filtering it through my own hesitation.
The data sits in people's heads, waiting for a channel that feels safe enough to flow through. When the channel doesn't exist, the team builds their own. Pre-meetings. Packaged updates. Rehearsed stories. Theater.
Then some bosses made the channel completely open. I could manage up freely. Surface risks early. Get a quick gut check on a decision without turning it into a formal meeting. My productivity changed overnight. Not because those bosses solved my problems. Because they made it safe to bring the problems to them.
That's what I try to build for my team now. I'll jump on a Slack huddle in five minutes if I'm available. Not scheduled. Not "let's find time next week." Five minutes. If I'm not available, I'll point them to someone who can help. Engineers message me and within minutes something that had them stuck for two hours is moving again.
The goal isn't that I'm always available. The goal is that nobody stays stuck because they're afraid to ask.
The pre-meetings exist because that channel doesn't exist. The packaging exists because the leader isn't safe enough to receive the unpackaged version. The theater exists because honesty doesn't have a stage.
Three Hours
Being available for a five-minute Slack huddle works when your team is in one time zone. It's a different problem when you're leading across North America, Europe, and Asia.
I can't be the person who picks up for everyone. And pretending I can would make me the bottleneck I keep telling my teams not to build. So the system has to scale without depending on me being awake.
Each time zone needs a person the team can go to. Not necessarily their tech lead. Just someone with enough context and trust that an engineer in Europe doesn't have to wait half a day for me to wake up in the US. If they can't operate without me for eight hours, I haven't built a team. I've built a dependency.
The other piece is protecting the overlap. For most of my distributed teams, the window is somewhere between 8 AM and 11 AM Eastern. Three hours. That's it. And I watched that window fill up with portfolio reviews and steering committees until the engineering leads had to call it out collectively in a leadership meeting. Those three hours are the only time the whole team is live at once. Every large meeting that doesn't need the global team is stealing from the one window where real collaboration can happen.
If the system only works when you're awake, it's not a system. It's a dependency.
Why My Teams Don't Perform for Me
My teams don't perform for me. That's not an accident.
Most orgs talk about being flat. They put it in their values. They don't act it.
In practice I will literally do any type of work. I don't care what it is. If the team needs data entry done, I'll do data entry. If something needs to be tested, I'll test it. Leaders should be first to do the work nobody else wants to do. Because that's how you set the bar. Not by talking about culture. By showing the team that no task is beneath you.
Direct feedback goes both ways. I don't just give it. I ask for it. In every one-on-one, I ask what I can be doing better. If my team doesn't feel safe telling me where I'm falling short, they definitely don't feel safe telling me when a project is falling apart.
Outside my team, I don't call anyone a vendor. I treat them like I treat my team. So when I found out one of them was scheduling a preliminary meeting to prepare before talking to me, I killed it.
"We don't need a pre-meeting. We just need to get in a room together and talk."
The pre-meeting existed because someone assumed I needed information packaged. I didn't. I needed honesty.
Every layer of packaging you allow is a layer of truth you lose. Whether it's your team, your partners, or your leadership chain. The theater forms when people believe you need the performance. It disappears when you prove you don't.
The Problem Is You
If your team needs three meetings before they feel safe enough to have an honest conversation with you, the problem isn't the meeting structure.
The problem is you.
The theater didn't come from nowhere. It came from signals. From the time you reacted badly to a surprise in a meeting. From the time someone brought you an unpackaged problem and got pushback instead of partnership. From the time the messenger got treated like the problem instead of the message.
You didn't ask for theater. But you built the stage every time you made honesty feel risky.
What It Looks Like When the Stage Comes Down
A month ago, one of my tech leads stepped into a project area he hadn't worked in before. Different domain. Different patterns. Different kind of pressure. He didn't schedule a meeting. He didn't package it. He just came to me and told me what was on his mind. The struggles he was having. The uncertainty about how to approach it.
That conversation only happens when the stage is down. When the person across from you trusts that bringing you an unpolished problem won't get them judged, reassigned, or managed.
I asked him one question. "How would you approach it?"
He paused. Then he started talking through it. As he laid it out, the uncertainty dissolved. The approach was sound. The experience was there. He just needed someone to ask the question instead of handing him the answer.
I said "great, go run with it."
The style was new. The skill wasn't. The difference was that someone helped him see he already had what he needed.
A few weeks before that, my tech lead and scrum lead pulled me aside. They were in a real conflict with the product manager. The PM was escalating hard about a date, convinced the timeline was blown.
They came to me unpackaged. No slide. No pre-meeting. Just "we need to talk about this."
So we looked at the data together. What date had we actually been communicating to stakeholders? What buffer had we built into the timeline? Turns out the date we'd been committing to externally hadn't moved. We'd been smart enough to build margin into what we communicated. The fire the PM was raising didn't exist.
No panic. No churn. No emergency meeting chain. Just three people looking at the facts and realizing the answer was already there.
That conversation doesn't happen on a stage. It happens when people trust that bringing you a mess won't create a bigger one.
Your team is either solving problems together or performing for you. The difference is whether you're in the scrum with them or you built them a stage to perform on.
I write daily about engineering leadership at jonoherrington.com.
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