After meetings, a familiar conversation often takes place. It unfolds in twos and threes by the lift or in someone’s doorway as they head back to their desk, and it’s often more honest than the meeting itself. People share what they really thought, what they saw coming, and what they decided, around the twenty-minute mark, wasn’t worth raising in front of everyone.
If you are the one who called the meeting, you are not in that conversation. You are the reason it is happening.
That sentence isn’t comfortable to read, and I don’t mean it unkindly. Most of the leaders I work with are decent, capable people who would genuinely rather be told the truth, and who are quietly puzzled about why they keep hearing it late. The answer is rarely that their people are difficult or disloyal. It is that their people worked out, a long time ago, that saying the difficult thing in that room costs more than it is worth. Nobody decided that, and nobody ever said it out loud. It simply settled.
That’s what a meeting really comes down to: not the agenda, the room, or the hour, but what the people in it feel comfortable saying out loud. The details we often debate, like how long it should last, who should attend, and whether everyone has prepared, matter far less than that. A meeting where people can speak honestly is well worth an hour of anyone’s time. Without that openness, even a smoothly run meeting can feel like costly theatre.
In my experience, there are three kinds, and people feel able to say different things in each. Many organisations are running one of the first two while telling themselves they are running the third.
The Amphitheatre
In this room, it is safe to say anything that strengthens your position, and nothing else. You will recognise it by:
– Conflicting interests and agendas
– Suspicion and doubt
– One-upmanship
– Ambiguity where there should be a decision
– Every word and intention under scrutiny
The giveaway is how much agreement there is and how little of it is real. People don’t say everything they think, because anything offered here can be quoted back at them in six weeks. Once someone has taken a position, they cannot be seen to leave it, so they keep defending it long after they have privately stopped believing it, and the room spends an hour watching two people who’ve already lost interest in the argument.
It is tiring and slow, and the people who could tell you the most usually say the least.
Meetings like these leave people dreading the monthly interrogation. Sorry, I meant meeting.
The Graveyard
In this room, it is safe to say nothing, so almost nothing is said. You will recognise it by:
– The same two voices doing most of the talking
– Items rolling forward from last month, and the month before
– Updates read aloud to people who could have read them
– Laptops open and half-attention everywhere
– Trivial matters and wishful thinking, in roughly equal measure
The Amphitheatre at least has a pulse. This one is deathly boring, and it is the room too many organisations are actually sitting in. Nobody is fighting, because nobody is engaged enough to bother, and the quiet gets mistaken for harmony.
The tell is simple. Nothing changes between one meeting and the next, and everybody agrees afterwards that it was useful.
The Engine Room
In this room, it is safe to say the unwelcome thing. You will recognise it by:
– Everybody knowing why they are there and what they need to achieve
– Somebody saying the difficult thing, and being thanked for it
– People building on each other’s ideas rather than defending their own
– Laughter that does not feel out of place
– Something genuinely decided
– An hour booked and forty minutes used
No one is a spectator in an engine room. Everyone is working, so people say what they actually think, and participants understand that professionalism doesn’t mean being deadly serious all the time.
These rooms are not rare because they are hard to run. They are rare because hardly anybody sits down and decides to build one. Every organisation would like to be in this group, and most believe they already are.
What the first two are costing you
It is tempting to treat all of this as atmosphere. A matter of style rather than substance, the sort of thing you’d like to sort out when you have time. It is neither.
An Amphitheatre costs you honesty, and honesty is your only early warning system. Nobody volunteers bad news in a room where bad news gets attached to the person who carried it, which means you will reliably be the last to hear about the thing half your team could see coming in March.
A Graveyard costs you time and talent. The capable person sitting through four hours a month of a meeting that decides nothing is doing the arithmetic on what that adds up to in a year. Some of them are doing it on a recruitment site.
Both of them cost you decisions, because a room that cannot disagree properly cannot choose properly either. That is why the same subject keeps reappearing on the agenda in a slightly different costume, and why so much of what matters ends up being settled in a corridor by whoever happened to be standing in it.
The part nobody says out loud
When did you last hear something in one of your own meetings that genuinely changed your mind?
If you cannot remember, your meetings are not working, and you are the biggest single reason why.
That sounds like bad news. It is the opposite. If the room takes its cue from you, then nothing in it is out of your hands. You don’t need a culture programme, a consultant, or anybody else’s agreement. You can change what happens in that room at the very next one, on your own, and nobody needs to be told you are doing it.
None of this is about better agendas. It is about making it easier for people to speak freely.
Five agreements that start with you
Most teams who want an engine room go away and agree on a list of principles together. The principles are fine. The trouble is that when everyone agrees to something, no one in particular has to do it, so it quietly fades by about the third meeting. These five need an owner, and it is you.
- Leave your ego at the door, and go first.
The most senior ego in the room sets the rate for everybody else’s. If yours stays on, theirs do too, and no amount of encouragement will persuade anybody otherwise.
- Listen more than you speak, which means speaking last.
The moment you state a view, the range of acceptable opinion closes quietly around it, and everything you hear afterwards is agreement rather than thinking. Ask, listen, and give your own position once everybody else has given theirs.
- Get to the point, starting with yours.
One sentence at the top saying what the hour is for. Not the agenda, which is a list of subjects, but the purpose. Most rambling in meetings is people working out what they are in.
- Contribute rather than compete.
People compete because winning an exchange gets noticed, and quiet contribution does not. Change what happens straight after somebody speaks: make the first response what is useful in the idea, not what is wrong with it. Do that consistently and people stop arriving with positions to defend, because there is nothing left to be won by holding one.
- Make room for the quiet ones.
This is the one that brings the other four to life. The people who speak most easily in meetings aren’t always the ones with the most valuable insights. Over time, a room can stop expecting contributions from quieter people, and they may stop expecting that of themselves, too. Instead of putting anyone on the spot, which can feel worse than being left out, notice when someone hasn’t spoken and make room for them before the meeting ends. The thing you most need to hear may well come from someone who decided it wasn’t worth interrupting.
The only test that matters
You don’t need an away day for this, and you don’t need anybody else to agree first. You need one meeting, run differently, by you.
Go first. Speak last. Say what the hour is for. Find what’s useful before what’s wrong. Make room for the quiet ones.
Then watch the corridor. If that conversation still happens without you, something in the room is still too expensive to say, and it is worth finding out what. If it stops happening, you will know, because the honest conversation and the meeting will have become the same thing.
That is not a better meeting. That is a different relationship with the people in it.
If you want help leading and presenting more effectively in meetings:
– Book yourself onto a powerful public speaking course.
– Invest in some really good one to one public speaking coaching.
– Get yourself some excellent presentation skills training.
If this was useful, pass it on to somebody who runs a meeting you have sat through that you think needs some work.
