What if the biggest challenges on your team aren’t actually about performance—but about how people work together?
We spend an enormous amount of time at work collaborating with other people. We meet, communicate, make decisions, solve problems, hand work from one team to another, and try to move toward shared goals.
But how often do we actually stop and ask:
Is the way we work together working?
That question was at the heart of my conversation with Mamie Kanfer Stewart, founder of Meteor, leader of the One Goal Meeting movement, and host of the Modern Manager podcast.
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And while we talked a lot about meetings, our conversation ultimately went much deeper. Because ineffective meetings are often just a symptom of something larger: the way teams and organizations have designed—and sometimes failed to redesign—how they work together.
When the Way We Work Becomes the Problem
Many workplace practices start with good intentions.
A weekly team meeting gets put on the calendar because the team needs to stay connected. A process is created to keep everyone informed. One team hands work from one department to another because that’s how responsibilities have traditionally been divided.
But over time, organizations change.
Teams grow. Priorities shift. Technology changes. Roles evolve. And yet the way people work together often stays exactly the same.
The result can be a lot of activity without a lot of value.
People spend hours in meetings that no longer have a clear purpose. Teams become siloed. People make assumptions about what other departments do or need. And managers become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of coordination required to get work done.
The hidden cost isn’t simply time.
It’s energy, morale, frustration, and lost opportunities for meaningful collaboration.
Mamie shared that when organizations improve their meetings—even by a little—the impact can extend far beyond getting time back. People get energy back, morale improves, and they have more capacity to focus on work that actually matters.
Collaboration Breaks Down When We Make Assumptions
One of my favourite parts of our conversation was our discussion about cross-functional collaboration.
It’s incredibly common for teams to become focused on their own world.
Sales is focused on sales. Operations is focused on operations. Marketing is focused on marketing. Technology is focused on technology.
The problem is that the organization’s goals don’t exist in separate departments.
They require people to work together.
Mamie’s approach to this is incredibly practical: create team playbooks.
A team playbook helps a team get clear on why it exists, what it is trying to accomplish, who its stakeholders are, how it serves them, and how it wants to work—including how it communicates, makes decisions, and runs meetings.
Then comes the really interesting part.
Teams share their playbooks with the teams they collaborate with and identify what they believe they offer each other.
Mamie described an exercise where teams discovered things like, “We didn’t know you could do that” and “We had no idea that’s what you needed from us.”
Those moments reveal something important: a lot of workplace friction isn’t caused by bad intentions. It’s caused by a lack of understanding.
When we don’t understand another team’s priorities, constraints, responsibilities, or needs, we fill in the gaps with assumptions.
And assumptions create friction.
What If We Designed Work Around What People Actually Need?
This idea also came through strongly in our conversation about meetings.
Mamie recommends involving the people who actually participate in a meeting when deciding whether the meeting is still serving its purpose.
One team she worked with discovered that their weekly meeting wasn’t actually meeting anyone’s needs.
The leader wanted visibility into everyone’s numbers.
The team wanted to know how they were doing against their goals—and they wanted more opportunities to build relationships with their colleagues.
Once they talked about what they actually needed, they realized they didn’t need the weekly meeting at all.
They could use a dashboard for the numbers and have a monthly conversation focused more on connection and relationship building.
That’s a powerful example of what happens when we stop asking:
“How have we always done this?”
and start asking:
“What would actually help us do our work better?”
Leaders Don’t Need to Have It All Figured Out
We also talked about something I think is particularly important for managers: being a leader is hard.
Most managers aren’t intentionally creating dysfunctional cultures. They’re not trying to micromanage their teams or make people’s lives harder.
They’re often doing the best they can while juggling an enormous amount of responsibility.
And sometimes they simply don’t have the time, capacity, or skills yet to do everything they know they should be doing.
That’s where Mamie sees an interesting opportunity for AI.
Rather than thinking about AI simply as a tool for generating documents or doing research, she encourages managers to use it as a thought partner.
For example, a manager could use AI to think through a difficult feedback conversation, explore different approaches, identify potential blind spots, or prepare for an upcoming meeting.
The goal isn’t to outsource the human work.
It’s to make the preparation and thinking process easier so managers have more capacity for the human work that matters most.
Start With One Small Question
At the end of our conversation, I asked Mamie what she would want leaders to take away.
Her answer was wonderfully simple:
Define the desired outcome.
Before your next meeting, write:
“At the end of this meeting, we will have…”
Then complete the sentence.
If you can’t finish it clearly, that’s useful information.
Maybe the meeting isn’t necessary.
Maybe the format needs to change.
Maybe the right people aren’t in the room.
Or maybe you need to have a conversation about what the meeting is actually for.
And I think this principle extends far beyond meetings.
Before we add another process, another communication channel, another recurring commitment, or another layer of complexity, we can ask:
What are we actually trying to accomplish, and is the way we’re working together helping us get there?
Because sometimes the biggest opportunity for better performance isn’t asking people to work harder.
It’s creating better ways for people to work together.
About Mamie Kanfer Stewart
Mamie Kanfer Stewart is the founder of Meteor, leader of the One Goal Meeting movement, and host of the Modern Manager podcast. She helps managers and organizations build smarter, happier workplaces by creating high-performing teams, fostering trust, and transforming the way people collaborate. Connect on LinkedIn and learn more about Mamie’s work here.
Let’s Connect:
If this episode spoke to you, I’d love to hear from you!
And if you’re interested in exploring ways we can work together—through leadership coaching, team development, or speaking at your next event—please reach out. You can reach me at kristen@kristenharcourt.com
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