What it's for
- Approving / rejecting major change requests above a delegated threshold.
- Resolving cross-functional conflicts the team can't handle alone.
- Reviewing project health (RAG) and authorizing course corrections.
- Allocating shared resources across multiple projects.
What it isn't
- A status update venue (that's your status report).
- The PM's decision-making body (the PM owns day-to-day decisions; steering owns escalations).
- An audience for slides (90% of bad steering committees).
↳ the slide-presentation antipattern
The PM presents 30 slides. Sponsors nod politely. Nothing gets decided. The meeting was theater. Replace with: 1-page pre-read sent 48h before, in-meeting time spent on decisions-needed and discussion. The PM's job is to extract decisions, not to inform.
The good steering committee
- Pre-read distributed 48h before. Status, risks, decisions needed.
- Meeting opens with the question: "What decisions does the team need from us today?"
- Each decision item gets 5–10 min — context, options, recommendation, decision.
- Decisions are recorded with rationale. Owners assigned for follow-up.
- Meeting ends in < 60 min. If it's longer, the agenda was wrong.