Sorry to be overly negative/confrontational/whatever, but an annoyingly frequent (for me...once a quarter or so) part of my own "what does this engineering boss

Sorry to be overly negative/confrontational/whatever, but an annoyingly frequent (for me...once a quarter or so) part of my own "what does this engineering boss do all day" is push back on people who have no idea what my team does every day or how they do it, or what makes them as productive as they are or even what the output eventually is, drop by to tell me what they think I should be doing (usually accompanied by a rep from the PMO and shilling a new tool to enable said 'way I should be doing it'). If all you have is a hammer... On the other hand, I get a lot of managers who ask my opinion about how they are running things, which for me starts with "why did you make the decisions you made up to now and tell me what is or is not working", not "let me give you my dissertation on the One True Way...". IMHO he should devote less meeting time to each of them or merge some of the meetings. Fair enough, "less time in meetings" is always something to pursue. Perhaps aggressively, even ruthlessly. Lawyers schedule meetings in 6m increments and I've considered it. Unless the OP can't, for any number of reasons. Which we don't know. N.B. - I get lots of time back teaching people that if you think you only need 15m, then it's pretty easy to only schedule 15m and not 30m just because it's the default (in Outlook). would you schedule a separate daily standup for each of the task/project small-t team you're supervising Since 'standup' implies things that do not apply to how my team organizes work, I'm pretty sure 'no'. You'd need to know that to advise. Kinda my point. and organize separate social events for each of your "groups of teammates" as OP is doing I see: 4:30 PM — Going-away get together for team #2 member Which in no way implies separate social events. If you mean: 9:00 AM — Holidays peak preparation meeting for team #1 1:00 PM — Holidays peak preparation meeting for team #2 I guess it could be social. But since it explicitly says "peak", I'm slightly skeptical that in the real world it means anything other than organizing operational coverage when lots of people are taking time off for whatever they're working on. Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.