3 Habits Holding Back Your Leadership Team Meetings (And How to Fix Them)

Imagine this…

You’re sitting on Zoom in your biweekly, two-hour leadership meeting. The CEO is calling on each of you for updates. Half the team is on mute. One of your colleagues went off-camera twenty minutes ago and hasn’t come back. Your inbox won’t stop pinging. Your team lead has already called you three times. Then the CHRO unmutes: time to build next year’s hiring plan. The next hour and a half slips into a circular debate with every leader advocating for more headcount. From there, the conversation spirals into questions about long-range plans, shifting timelines, capital constraints, and somehow you end up discussing whether the current pipeline still reflects the company’s strategic direction.

By the time you glance at the clock, you’re 45 minutes over and nothing’s actually been decided. 

Sound familiar?

At Compass, we’ve sat in on hundreds of leadership meetings across early- and growth-stage life sciences companies. And here’s the truth: that kind of chaos isn’t a sign your team is broken. It’s a sign your structure needs a tune-up. 

Here are the top three habits we’ve seen hold back leadership team discussions — and how to start addressing them:

1. Lack of Discernment 

There will always be more to do than time, money, or people allow. But high-performing leadership teams find ways to cut through the noise and focus on what matters most right now.

That means identifying the 3 to 5 priorities that move the business forward and giving those your full attention. Other topics still matter but they may need to wait. 

This kind of clarity doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built through strong goal setting and long-range planning. When your objectives are clear, you can anchor every discussion around two simple questions: 

• What are we trying to accomplish in this phase of the company? 

• What are the cross-functional deliverables that will get us there? 

Want to practice this? Start each meeting by revisiting your top 3 strategic goals—and ask, “Is this discussion moving one of them forward?” Without that shared focus, even the best teams can slip into reactive mode and stay there. 

2. Weak Accountability 

Even with clear priorities, progress stalls without shared accountability. Every leader on the executive team should feel responsible not just for their function, but for the company’s forward movement. 

This kind of accountability isn’t just top-down — it’s peer-to-peer. Leadership meetings should be a space where executives challenge, support, and hold one another to the commitments they've made together. One easy shift? Assign clear owners and deadlines to every key takeaway and make progress review a standing agenda item for the next meeting.

But that only happens in a culture of trust. And trust takes intention through open dialogue, shared wins (and losses), and yes, even the occasional offsite or happy hour. (We had to sneak in a team-building plug somewhere...) 

If your team doesn’t feel safe saying things like, “We’re off track” or “We need to reset this conversation”, it’s a sign that the foundation needs strengthening.

3. Function-First Thinking 

In early-stage biotech, resources are tight and trade-offs are constant. When leaders approach meetings solely from a functional lens, it becomes harder to align around what's best for the company overall. 

The strongest executive teams operate with an enterprise mindset. They show up as senior leaders of the business—not just heads of their respective departments. That means thinking beyond their own team’s success and advocating for the broader health of the organization. 

CEOs play a key role in modeling and reinforcing this. A practical place to start? At your next leadership meeting, ask each executive to share not what their team needs, but what the company needs from their team. It helps reframe roles from functional advocates to company stewards.

Set the expectation that every leader is there to move the whole business forward. That’s what builds alignment. That’s what drives momentum. 

If any of this felt a little too familiar, you're not alone – and you're not doing it “wrong.” Leading in early-stage biotech is hard. The pace is fast. The stakes are high. And the noise can be deafening. 

But your leadership meetings don’t have to feel like a black hole of time and energy. With the right structure, rhythm, and mindset, they can become the engine that drives clarity, accountability, and momentum. 

At Compass, we help executive teams reset how they meet—so they can make faster decisions, hold tighter alignment, and stay focused on what actually moves the business forward. Whether it’s strategic offsites, long-range planning, or live meeting observation and coaching, we bring the tools and perspective that turn meetings into momentum.

If your team meetings could use a reset, we’re here when you’re ready.