If you want to know what a leader values, look at the calendar before the mission statement. Hours are scarce, and where they go shows what actually gets attention. The same is true for a leadership team's shared calendar.
Jim Marsh, author of Culture OS and Managing Principal of JEM Premier Coaching, describes his work as connecting values to behaviors to operating mechanisms, as stated on his public LinkedIn profile. A calendar is among the most common operating mechanisms in any organization. This article offers a practical way to audit yours. The audit method is written for this article and is not drawn from the book.
The calendar is a mechanism, whether you designed it or not
An operating mechanism is a recurring practice that makes a behavior routine. Meetings are the most visible example. Your recurring meetings teach people what matters: which topics get discussed, who attends, how long things take, and what gets skipped when time is short.
Many calendars were assembled gradually. A meeting began to solve a problem two years ago and never ended. The result is a schedule that reflects history more than current priorities.
Step 1: List the behaviors you say matter
Write down three behaviors you want from the team. Examples: making decisions at the right level, raising risks early, coaching people on how they work. Be specific enough that you could see them happen.
Step 2: Tag a typical month of leadership time
Pull your calendar for the last four weeks. Tag each recurring meeting and each large block of time by its main purpose:
- Decide: The meeting ends with decisions and owners.
- Review: Priorities and commitments are inspected.
- Coach: A leader develops someone's capability.
- Inform: Information flows one way and could be written.
- Escalate or fix: Responding to problems after they surface.
Add up the hours in each category. Most leaders are surprised by the size of the inform and fix categories.
Step 3: Compare the tags with the behaviors
For each behavior you want, find the place in the calendar where it is supposed to happen. If you want early risk flags, where do risks get raised? If you want decisions made at the right level, where do decision rights get settled? If you want coaching, when does it occur?
Gaps are common. You may find that a value like "ownership" has no recurring mechanism behind it at all, or that the one weekly meeting meant to review commitments has turned into a status readout.
Step 4: Move one block
Do not redesign the entire calendar. Choose one change:
- Turn a status meeting into a review by replacing updates with a short written update sent in advance and using the time to decide.
- Cancel an inform-only meeting and replace it with a written note.
- Add a fifteen-minute standing slot for at-risk commitments.
- Schedule coaching conversations before they are urgently needed.
Tell the team what you changed and why, and ask for feedback after a month.
An illustrative example
This scenario is hypothetical.
A leader says the team values early warning. Her calendar shows four hours a week of meetings in which updates are read aloud, and no recurring time for risks. She replaces one update meeting with a half-hour review whose first item is what could miss its date in the next two weeks. The first few sessions feel awkward. By week four, people bring risks without being asked, because the meeting asks for them.
Watch for the signal your changes send
When you cancel or change a meeting, the team reads it as a statement of priorities. Explain the reason in terms of the behavior you want. Also protect the new block when the schedule gets tight. If it is the first thing to be dropped, the team will conclude that the behavior is optional.
If you want to build a repeatable meeting rhythm around one live priority, the Culture-to-Execution Sprint covers leadership meeting rhythm as part of its work for intact teams.