Worth Reading – Reading the Meeting Room
This is definitely something we don’t put enough thought into:
Before deciding how to lead in a meeting, good leaders diagnose what the meeting situation calls for.
https://admiredleadership.substack.com/p/reading-the-meeting-room
The article above talks about body language and eye contact, which is a little harder in virtual meetings, but not impossible. For virtual meetings, I try to notice who’s multitasking, who’s not paying attention, and also who isn’t speaking up.
Sometimes that means recognizing that someone isn’t speaking up because others never shut up, and, as a leader, running a meeting where that doesn’t happen.
The bigger issue, however, is meetings where little thought has gone into how they’re run. Especially the regularly scheduled meetings, like weekly project updates. It’s easy for those meetings to become such a routine task that we don’t think much about them beforehand, and then we just go through the motions, following the agenda without considering where the team is or what they need. We’ve all been guilty of this. I’m no different.
It’s almost as if the meeting is for us as leaders, and not the rest of the team, which I don’t think is a good way to run a meeting.
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