Most steering committees are expensive status theater. How to run one that makes decisions, and earns the hour it costs a room full of executives.
1 hrOf the most expensive calendar time in the organization, spent monthly.
3Buckets that belong on the agenda. Status is not one of them.
2 to 3Decisions a working committee should be able to name when the hour ends.
0Delegates. The moment a decision leaves the room, it was not a steering committee.
I have sat in a lot of steering committees. A program lead walks a room of senior executives through a deck they were sent two days earlier. Statuses flick by. Heads nod. Someone asks a clarifying question about a timeline. The hour ends, calendars reclaim everyone, and nothing has changed about the program except that a great deal of leadership time has been spent watching a slideshow.
That is reporting wearing a governance badge. Status theater with good catering.
The people most likely to call it out, the executives in the room, are usually the ones too polite or too busy to say so. So it persists on programs where the stakes are too high to waste a single one of those hours.
1What the hour is for
A steering committee exists to do the one thing the project team cannot do for itself: make the decisions and clear the obstacles that nobody below it has the authority to resolve.
Information. Does not need a meeting.
The schedule and where it stands
Test results and the open defect count
Budget consumed to date
Workstream statuses, however they are colored
Anything that could have been read in advance
Executive acts. Only this room can do them.
Budget you can release
A scope fight between two divisions you can settle
A vendor relationship you can lean on
A go-live date you can hold or move
A risk somebody senior has to accept and own
The discipline that fixes most of it
Ask at the end of every session what got decided, and hold yourself to it. A committee that cannot name two or three decisions from the hour it just spent has confirmed it was not needed.
2Who is in the room
The single biggest predictor of whether a steering committee works is who shows up. You need the people with real authority and real budget, the ones who can say yes in the room and have it stick.
I have watched a program stall for a month because the one person who could approve a scope cut sent a stand-in with no authority, and the stand-in did what stand-ins do. Noted the issue, promised to raise it.
The moment a decision has to leave the room to be made, you no longer have a steering committee. You have a pre-meeting for a meeting that will happen somewhere you are not.Be ruthless about the invite list. Fewer people, each with the power to act, beats a crowded room of observers every time.
3Run on decisions and risks
If the hour is for decisions, the agenda follows. Status goes out as a tight pre-read, early enough to be read, and you do not narrate it in the room.
1Decisions needing executive authorityThe two or three calls that are stuck because they sit above the program team's pay grade.Arrive with options and a recommendation, not with a question.
2Risks needing air coverExposures where someone senior has to accept the risk, fund the mitigation, or own the consequence.Name who is accepting it, in the minutes.
3Escalations that are jammedCross-functional fights, vendor issues, resourcing gaps the team has raised and cannot resolve alone.If it has been raised twice, it belongs here.
4The agenda, by the clock
Sixty minutes
Status is a pre-read. The room spends its time on what only it can move.
Three buckets, each one a thing the room can move. Anything that does not fit them is information, and information travels faster in a document than in an hour of executive time.
5The signals that it has become theater
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Everything is green, month after monthFixAsk what would have to be true for a workstream to report amber, and whether anyone has ever done it.
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The deck is walked through in the roomFixSend it 72 hours ahead and open the meeting at the first decision. Narrating a pre-read trains people not to read it.
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Delegates attend on behalf of the decision makerFixCancel and rebook rather than proceed. A session that cannot decide costs more than one that did not happen.
!
The same risk appears for three consecutive sessionsFixIt is not a risk any more, it is an unmade decision. Reframe it as one and force the call.
!
Minutes record attendance and topics, not decisions and ownersFixChange the template. If the minutes have no decision column, the meeting will not produce decisions.
If your committee read a status deck and adjourned, it did not steer. It observed.The test is simple enough to run this month: at the end of the hour, name what got decided. Two or three, with owners and dates, or the hour was not needed.
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