We’ve all been in that meeting. You know the one—where you glance at the clock and quietly wonder, Why are we here?
Many leadership team meetings suffer from this. The agenda is packed with reports in the hope that important information is being shared. Yet decades of research on effective communication suggest that meaning isn’t transferred from one person to another. It is constructed through interaction, dialogue, and trust.
Most leadership team meetings follow a routine, but lack a rhythm.
A rhythm is the recurring movement between immersion and reflection, between doing and undergoing, that keeps passion open, exercises our strengths, and makes creativity more available over time.
The good news is that cultivating a rhythm within an existing routine doesn’t require redesigning your meetings. It requires becoming more intentional about how people engage with one another.
Here are three places to begin:
- Lead with questions, not reports.
Every standing agenda item should invite exploration, not just information sharing.
Instead of ending a finance update with, “Does anyone have any questions?”—a question that often reinforces passivity—try asking:
“What do you see as our greatest opportunity to sustain earned revenue growth over the next 90 days?”
A well-crafted question invites the group to think together rather than simply receive information.
- Get people talking early.
The earlier people engage in dialogue, the more they understand that they are there to contribute, not just listen.
Long stretches of updates tend to shut down participation. A simple reflection at the beginning of the meeting—“What progress are you most encouraged by since we last met?”—creates engagement while also providing meaningful context for the work ahead.
- Create “meta-moments” to reflect while the meeting is happening.
Most teams save reflection for the final five minutes. By then, the meeting is already over.
Instead, build in opportunities for anyone to pause the conversation and name what they’re noticing or learning. These “meta-moments” may feel slightly disruptive at first, but they help the group recognize emerging patterns, challenge assumptions, and make meaning together while the work is unfolding.
Leadership teams don’t become more creative by happenstance. They become more creative when meetings develop a rhythm—moving intentionally between action and reflection, decisions and learning. Over time, that rhythm becomes one of the organization’s greatest strategic advantages.
Image: Synths_i_cannot_afford.jpg: stereogabderivative work: Clusternote, CC BY-SA 2.0
<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons