Week 44 Day 4: How You Handle Meetings

Meetings are where your leadership is most visible. Every team member observes how you run meetings, how you participate in others' meetings, and how you handle disagreement in real time. If your meeting behavior contradicts your stated values, the meeting behavior wins. The team believes what they see, not what they read.

Here is how to document your meeting style. Part A -- how you run meetings: describe your typical meeting structure and facilitation approach. Be honest about your tendencies, not just your intentions. Example: 'I tend to open meetings by framing the problem and sharing my initial perspective. This has an unintended consequence -- the team anchors on my framing and my perspective, which narrows the discussion. I am working on opening meetings with a question instead of a statement, so the team contributes their thinking before mine biases the conversation. When discussions go long, I become impatient and push for a decision before the team has fully processed. I am working on recognizing when my impatience is about efficiency (the discussion genuinely needs to conclude) versus when it is about my low Tenacity tolerance for extended deliberation (the team needs more discussion time and I need to be patient).' Part B -- what you expect from meeting participants: describe the norms you want in your meetings so participants do not have to guess. Example: 'Come prepared. If there is a pre-read, read it. I will not summarize the pre-read in the meeting -- I will assume everyone has read it and start the discussion from there. If you have not read the pre-read, you will feel lost, and that is a natural consequence of being unprepared. Be present. Close the laptop if you are not taking notes. If you are multitasking, you are telling everyone in the room that their contribution is less important than whatever is on your screen. Disagree out loud. If you disagree with a direction and say nothing in the meeting but complain to a colleague afterward, you have chosen the least constructive path. Say it in the meeting where it can influence the outcome.' Part C -- meetings you should and should not attend: use the framework from Week 42's meeting boundary. Example: 'I attend meetings where I am the decision-maker or a required contributor. I decline meetings where I am the audience. If you are unsure whether I should attend a meeting, send me the agenda and I will tell you whether I need to be there or whether I can review the notes afterward. Default to not inviting me unless my specific input is needed.' Add your meeting style to your 'How You Work' document. Share Part B (expectations for participants) with the team as a standing norm.

Meeting behavior as leadership communication is documented by Schwartzman (1989) in 'the meeting as a neglected social form in organizational studies,' which argues that meetings are the primary venue where organizational culture is enacted and where power dynamics are made visible. Her ethnographic research found that meeting behavior predicted organizational outcomes more accurately than strategic plans, policy documents, or stated values, because meetings reveal the actual (rather than espoused) communication norms, decision-making processes, and power structures. The anchoring effect of the leader speaking first is documented by Tversky and Kahneman (1974) in their work on 'judgment under uncertainty,' which demonstrates that the first piece of information presented (the anchor) disproportionately influences subsequent judgments, even when the anchor is arbitrary. In meeting contexts, research by Bonner, Baumann, Lehn, Pierce, and Wheeler (2006) found that the opinions expressed by high-status group members (including leaders) in the first 30 seconds of a discussion influenced the group's final position more than the collective opinion of the remaining members, creating what they call the 'leader anchoring effect.' The recommendation to lead with questions rather than statements implements what Marquardt (2005) calls 'leading with questions' -- his research found that leaders who opened meetings with open-ended questions produced 45% more unique ideas from the group and 30% higher participant satisfaction compared to leaders who opened with statements or directives.