What your meetings reveal
You can learn a lot about a leadership team by sitting in one meeting.
Not from the agenda. From what actually happens. Who speaks and who stays silent. Whether decisions are made or merely discussed. Whether people leave with commitments, or just with notes.
Most leadership meetings are updates in disguise. Each leader reports. Heads nod. Nothing is genuinely decided, because deciding might surface disagreement, and disagreement feels like friction to be avoided. The meeting ends on time, and the real work starts after the meeting in the corridors.
Three things your meetings reveal:
1. Whether you coordinate or just update.
Updating is informing. Coordinating is making commitments; it’s about clarity on who does what, by when, for whom. To meet to inform is the most inefficient use of time and most ineffective use of capability and capacity.
2. Whether truth is welcome.
Watch what happens when someone disagrees. Is it explored, or ignored? High-impact teams invite divergence of thinking; they accept that members see things differently. They invite multiple truths to be shared. They accept that no one is ever wrong, and there’s more than one way to be right.
3. Whether the room serves the whole.
Listen for who each person is speaking for. Are they advocating or protecting their function, or thinking for the organisation? Meetings are where leaders either protect their patch or take responsibility for the whole.
Meetings don’t waste time because they are too long. They waste time because they create the appearance of alignment without the substance of it.
INVITATION
After your next leadership team meeting, ask three questions:
What did we actually decide, and who is committed to what?
What truth went unspoken in the room?
Did we leave as a group of leaders, or as one leadership team?
High-impact, collaborative teams adhere to a 10:60:30 meeting rhythm; 10% of the time allocated to inform, 60% of the time to discuss, debate and disagree and 30% of the time to make decisions. To help you embed a 10:60:30 meeting rhythm, download the agenda template. See what happens to the impact of and value from your meetings.