> the meeting itself should be a point of collaboration
A meeting of the executive team is a point of decision, not of collaboration. Individual contributors make meetings for collaborating, middle managers make them mostly for problem discovery, high management make them for decision communication (not decision making).
Most times I see middle managers meeting (and when I participated when I was one) were about "X is happening, the problem is not (entirely) on my area, let's find where it is so we can fix it".
In my experience, managers have no problem looking busy. They can do that without thinking or conscious effort just by letting the system work the way it wants to. What takes conscious effort is doing anything else.
A meeting of the executive team is a point of decision, not of collaboration. Individual contributors make meetings for collaborating, middle managers make them mostly for problem discovery, high management make them for decision communication (not decision making).