The Meeting That Could Have Been the Solution (But Never Was)

Some workplaces run on caffeine. Others run on fear. But toxic workplaces? They run on meetings. Endless, soul sucking, calendar filling meetings.

Every problem, no matter how urgent, somehow gets delayed until the next scheduled call. Systems are crashing? “Let’s put time in the diary.” Customers are leaving in droves? “We’ll review that in next week’s sync.” The office could be burning down, smoke billowing through the vents, and someone will still suggest, “Let’s schedule a recurring slot to talk about fire safety.”

Talking in Circles

The worst part isn’t just the wasted hours. It’s that nothing ever gets decided. You sit through 90 minutes of back and forth, only for the “conclusion” to be one of three familiar phrases:

• “Let’s circle back.”
• “We’ll need alignment.”
• “Let’s take this as an action item.”

Which is corporate speak for: “We’ve achieved nothing, but we’ll happily waste more of your time later.”

You leave the room with a list of tasks that don’t solve the actual issue, a sense of déjà vu from the last ten identical meetings, and a creeping suspicion that this is all designed to keep you too busy to notice nothing is improving.

Who Thrives in This Environment

The true masters of toxic meeting culture aren’t problem solvers — they’re performers.

They know how to fill airtime with jargon, buzzwords, and strategic ambiguity. They can talk for 15 minutes straight without offering a single concrete idea. They look engaged, they sound impressive, and they walk away praised for their “leadership presence.”

Meanwhile, the people who actually understand the problem sit quietly, waiting for a gap in the noise that never comes. If they dare to speak up with something practical, they’re told to “hold that thought for the working group.”

The Cost of Non Decisions

While leadership congratulates themselves on another “productive discussion,” the real world moves on:

• Deadlines slip. Work doesn’t magically complete itself while the calendar fills.
• Customers churn. They don’t care about alignment — they just want results.
• Systems rot. Bugs linger, processes decay, outages multiply.
• Morale collapses. Nothing crushes motivation faster than knowing every solution will die in a PowerPoint deck.

And by the time the company does make a decision, it’s too late. The useful people the ones who could have actually fixed things are already halfway out the door, tired of watching their effort dissolve into slideware.

The Endless Loop

The most painful part? The cycle never ends.

Every week brings another round of meetings about the same unresolved problems. The same empty phrases. The same faces nodding along, pretending this time it will be different. But it never is.

The company slowly drowns, not from lack of talent, not from lack of resources, but from lack of courage to act. Action is risky. Action might upset someone. Action leaves evidence of who made the call.

Discussion, though? Discussion is safe. Discussion can be spun as “progress.” Discussion makes it look like someone is in control, even when everything is falling apart.

So the meetings continue, the problems worsen, and the toxic boss smiles, satisfied that another week has been filled with talking instead of doing.

Because in their world, fixing problems is dangerous — but endless meetings? That’s job security.