The meeting is the unit of leadership
Culture is not built at the offsite. It is built forty times a week, in rooms nobody thinks of as leadership moments.
Ask a leadership team where their culture comes from and you will hear about values, the all-hands, and the two-day retreat in the spring. Ask their people and you will hear about meetings — who talks, who gets interrupted, whether the decision made in the room survives contact with the corridor afterwards.
The retreat happens once. The meeting happens forty times a week. Whatever is true about how your organization treats people, it is being taught in those forty rooms, at scale, by everyone, whether or not anybody meant to teach it.
Three things a meeting teaches
- Who is allowed to be uncertain. If only the most senior person can say "I do not know yet", everybody else learns to perform certainty, and the organization stops hearing about problems while they are still small.
- What a decision is. A meeting that ends without a named owner and a date has not made a decision. It has scheduled another meeting, and taught everyone that talking is the deliverable.
- Whether disagreement is survivable. People watch what happens to the first person who pushes back. Once, in front of everyone, is enough to set the rule for a year.
You cannot fix in a workshop what you are teaching forty times a week.
What to change first
Not the meeting count. Start with the close: the last two minutes, where somebody says out loud what was decided, who owns it and when it is due. It takes no new process, it is free, and it exposes immediately how many of your meetings were not making decisions at all.
The second change is harder and matters more. The next time somebody disagrees with you in front of the group, thank them specifically and by name, and then engage the substance. People will remember it far longer than they will remember the values slide.
