You can set the expectations for a meeting. Everyone in the room has to choose to honor them.
We have a lot of meetings at Sanctuary.
I would love to have fewer. I would also be hard-pressed to point to a recurring meeting we don’t need right now. Leadership meetings, one-on-ones, quarterly planning, business strategy, research and development. Each one has a purpose I can defend.
Still, I know the feeling of walking out of a meeting and wondering what we just accomplished.
We discussed the issue. Everybody had something to say. The conversation filled the hour we gave it. Then we left without a decision, without a next step, and without much reason to believe anything would be different the next time we sat down.
That hour is expensive. It is the time of the people who run the business, and while they sit in that room, client work waits and decisions stay open. Do that every week and you have quietly taken a real piece of your leadership team’s capacity off the table.
The easy fix is to start deleting meetings. Sometimes that is the right call. More often, I think we blame the meeting for how we showed up to it.
I’ve been on both sides of the table
I have walked into meetings I was not ready for.
Maybe I didn’t sleep well. Maybe something more pressing was coming at 2:00 and I was fighting the clock to get through this one so I could prepare for that one. Maybe I had a task open in another window and was answering an email while someone else was talking.
I was in the room. I wasn’t in the meeting.
I have also been on the other side. I’ve sat across from someone who clearly didn’t want to be there, who hadn’t prepared, and who was waiting for the hour to end. You can feel it. The energy drops, the conversation gets thinner, and the people who did show up start wondering why they bothered.
Neither seat is any fun. If you have spent any time in a business, you have probably sat in both, and you probably understand exactly why you did. The calendar is full, the timeline is real, and the next thing is always pulling at you.
Understandable still has a cost, though. That is where most meetings fall short.
What I bring into the room
Being distracted is the easy one to admit. The harder one is what I carry in with me.
Sometimes I have decided what someone means before they finish explaining it. I have a story in my head about what their point really is, and I start responding to the story instead of the person.
Sometimes I am attached to the answer I want. I may be asking for input, while part of me is already lining up the defense of what I prefer.
We call this “head trash” at Sanctuary. Mine can derail a conversation fast. Once I start defending my interpretation, the room has a new problem. People have to correct the assumption, explain themselves again, or decide whether pushing back is worth it. The original issue sits and waits.
I’d guess everyone who has been in a meeting at our company has felt defensive at some point. I certainly have. Expecting that feeling never to show up would be unrealistic. The standard is what we do when it does: let the person finish, hear the question without hearing a judgment, and get back to the business issue when we notice we’ve made it personal.
That standard applies to me. It also applies to everyone else at the table, and I think it is fair to say so.
Agreeing to the purpose
A meeting is a shared contract.
When we accept the invitation, we are agreeing to do a particular kind of work together. That includes showing up prepared, paying attention, and taking part in the conversation we came to have, not the one we would rather be having.
Different meetings ask for different work. A decision needs the tradeoffs on the table and a conclusion before we leave. An open issue needs us to stay with it long enough to figure out what happens next. A conversation about where the business could go needs enough patience to understand an idea before anyone weighs it.
People can disagree inside any of those. I want them to. Agreeing with the purpose of a meeting leaves plenty of room to disagree about the substance.
What breaks the contract is ignoring the purpose. If I use someone else’s issue as an opening for my own unrelated concern, I am asking the whole room to drop what we agreed to do and follow me. When that happens, a decision stays open, and so does the work that depends on it.
A leader can explain the purpose, build the agenda, and set the rules. Each person in the room still has to accept the responsibility that comes with being there.
You cannot install that mindset in another person.
What we’ve tried to do better
You can, however, make it a lot easier for people to show up well. These are the practices that have helped us most.
1. Someone manages the meeting. That person guards the pace and the agenda, and they need to stay neutral enough to protect the meeting’s purpose even when the conversation is drifting toward an outcome they like. Sometimes it takes a knock on the table, a small reminder that we have wandered off the discussion we agreed to have. That knock has to be available no matter who is talking.
2. There is a clear agenda. Everyone should know what we are discussing before they walk in, so preparing is possible.
3. Everyone understands the outcome. An agenda tells you the topics. It does not tell you what we need to leave with. Naming the outcome up front, whether that is a decision, a plan, or an owner for the next step, is what keeps a discussion from circling.
4. We set the outside noise down. The next meeting, the deadline, the email that just came in. All of it will still be there in an hour. The meeting only works if we agree to be in it while it is happening.
When a side issue comes up, restate the issue we are actually on. If the new concern is separate, give it a real place to go. Parking an issue should mean it gets its own conversation. Otherwise people learn that the only way to be heard is to force their concern into whatever meeting happens to be next.
We don’t have to solve everything before we leave. We do need something actionable. Maybe we need information we don’t have yet, or someone else’s input, or time to think through the options. That’s fine, as long as someone owns the work and the room knows when it comes back.
And when it comes back, it deserves attention. If someone agreed to do the work and didn’t, we talk about it. Quietly rolling the same unfinished item forward week after week teaches everyone that commitments are optional.
The responsibility has to be shared
My part is to make these expectations explicit instead of assuming everyone understands them the way I do. It is also to say something in the room when the meeting drifts, instead of letting it run and being frustrated about it later.
That is work I can do better.
There is a limit, though, to what better facilitation can fix. If the purpose is clear, the agenda is out ahead of time, and the meeting gives people a real way to contribute, and someone still won’t take part in what the meeting is for, the answer is a direct conversation with that person. Another round of agenda revisions gives the leader something comfortable to work on while the actual problem keeps showing up every week.
I still want fewer meetings. I also want the ones we keep to be worth the hour.
A meeting is a shared contract, and every person in the room signs it, me included. Before we leave, we should know what happens next and who owns it.