“All real living is meeting,” wrote the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. But we know all too well that not all meetings are living. Many are boring, draining, and some even create the feeling of something wilting inside of you. Some meetings are dying. Does that overstate the point? Perhaps. It depends on what kind of meetings you’ve been in.

Buber’s thesis was that the essence of life is encounter and therefore personal—a meeting of persons. Yet so many of our meetings miss this and thereby miss the humanity that makes all of the mess but also all of the meaning. When we miss the personal for the transactional; we miss each other.

Most of work is meetings. Yet very few of us would say that meetings are the best part. We can do better.

a meeting is a group conversation. This means they are moments to be elevated, nurtured, and designed — not merely endured.

I’d like to explore something that I think is both obvious and often overlooked: a meeting is a group conversation. This means they are moments to be elevated, nurtured, and designed — not merely endured. This calls for intention and imagination, and even the smallest acts of hospitality.

Regardless of your industry, organization or team, there is so much potential to be found here. Good meetings help people build relationships, align on purpose, and get things done.

What might be possible if your meetings were a bit more living, a bit more human? And how might we make them so?‍

By the numbers

Consider the amount of work time we spend talking with other people. Some estimates figure that the average person spends about five hours in work meetings each week. For managers, that number rises to 12 hours. In the public sector, it’s 14 hours. This infographic on the cost of meetings, shows how most people report their meetings as ineffective and their number one time waster. What a loss. (The study estimates the financial loss at as much as $ 37 billion.)

For you, any idea on your average amount of meetings in a week? And if you were to rate your typical meetings out of 10 (1 being low value, 10 being extremely high value) where are most of your meetings?

For the amount of time we spend in meetings (ahem, group conversations), it’s good to get curious about this thing we’re always doing, and to ask questions like:

• What do we believe makes a good conversation?
• Is this a conversation or are we all just waiting our turn to talk at the other person?
• Why are we generating ideas and evaluating  them at the same time?
• Why are these the options before us? Who chose them?
• Where’s the equity in the process we’re in? How is power being distributed in this conversation?
• Why is this conversation happening on email? Or with everyone staring at a screen? And why powerpoint? And could this conversation not have been 50% shorter? Or happened on a walk outside?

When we begin to question all the givens and norms for our work conversations, we realize decisions are always being made about these conversations.

Meetings happen by default or by design. We all get to be meeting designers.

Meetings happen by default or by design. We all get to be meeting designers. Rather than inheriting outworn templates, stale questions, inequitable structures, we can make change by changing the conversation.

Conversational intelligence

In many ways, our lives have been shaped by the story of our conversations.

Recall some of  the significant change moments that have occurred over the course of your life — the ending of a project or a relationship, the launching of a new opportunity, a moment of learning or real connection — I’m guessing many of these happened inside a conversation.

This past week as I was prepping, attending, and hosting meetings, I was reminded of the work of Judith Glaser on conversational intelligence (I highly recommend this book).

The central premise in Glaser’s work is this: “To get to the next level of greatness depends on the quality of our culture, which depends on the quality of our relationships, which depends on the quality of our conversations. Everything happens through conversations!”

Glaser trains people on navigating the three levels of conversations in order for orgs to raise what she calls, their Conversational Intelligence:

Level 1: Transactional (how to exchange data and information)

Level 2: Positional (how to work with power and influence)

Level 3: Transformational (how to co-create the future for mutual success)

With this quick overview of Glaser’s framework, consider the nature of your conversations. What level do you tend to spend the most time interacting? Where do you see your work conversations? What level do you think our public discourse is at?

How the future is made

Conversations matter. And what is an organization but the constellation of 1000 conversations at a given moment? There are conversations happening all the time, between team members, with stakeholders, in cross-functional teams, and also within you! So much of work life is about navigating the inter-personal and intra-personal conversational dynamics that make up our working relationships.

An organization, in both its present and its future, is defined by the conversations it can and cannot have.

An organization, in both its present and its future, is defined by the conversations it can and cannot have. Stop for a moment to consider that idea — that the future is determined by the conversations that you can and cannot have - or perhaps, will or will not have. It’s important then to begin to recognize where all of these conversations are happening (or not happening). To do that, there’s an exercise called “Drawing Conversations” (created by Dave Gray, author of Liminal Thinking). Here’s the exercise: 

Rather than an org chart, try drawing your organization as a web of conversations. Then consider:

• What are the conversations that aren’t happening? 
• Which ones are the easy ones? 
• Which ones have lots of lines of connection? 
• Which ones appear off on their own? 
• Where are these conversations happening?
• Whose in this conversation but not that one? 
• Why might this conversation be a no-go area?

To lead is to create the conditions for transformative conversations to occur.

When we begin to see organizational life as a web of conversation, then leadership at its core is about creating the space for these conversations. This is why I believe leadership is essentially about conversation design. To lead is to create the conditions for transformative conversations to occur. 

Leadership as hospitality

It’s a lengthy quote, but no one articulates ‘leadership as hospitality’ like Margaret Wheatley:

“In fact, in this day and age, when problems are increasingly complex, and there simply are not simple answers, and there is no simple cause and effect any longer, I cannot imagine how stressful it is to be the leader and to pretend that you have the answer.

So, what I see in life-affirming leaders is that they are willing to say to people “I do not know the answer, but together we will figure it out.” So, they are also leaders who rely on other people’s intelligence.

And a life-affirming leader is one who knows how to rely on and use the intelligence that exists everywhere in the community, or the school or the organization. And so these leaders act as hosts, as stewards of other people’s creativity and other people’s intelligence.

And when I say host, I mean a leader these days needs to be one who convenes people, who convenes diversity, who convenes all viewpoints in processes where our intelligence can come forth.

So these kinds of leaders do not give us the answers, but they help gather us together so that together we can discover the answers.” —Margaret Wheatley

Imagine if this was true? If our working assumption was that what was needed was space for the collective intelligence of the group to come forth, what would this do to our meetings?

Co-founder of Pixar, Ed Catmull once said, “If there’s more truth in hallways than in meetings, you have a problem.”

Co-founder of Pixar, Ed Catmull once said, “If there’s more truth in hallways than in meetings, you have a problem.” It could also be said, if there’s more truth in the private Slack channels or text threads, there’s a problem.

It’s a problem because you can’t change what you can’t talk about. And you can’t talk without a conversational space to meet in. And how that space is designed will determine the quality of what happens within it.

The level of truth—all of what people have to offer, including the truth of their perspectives and ideas— is in direct correlation to the level of safety they experience. 

How might we create more spaces for people’s humanity to show up? What are the conditions needed for people to bring  their stunning creativity, fragility, authenticity, struggle and strength to the conversation?

Five practices for making more of meetings

1. Growing in conversation

For this, I offer three great book recommendations on conversation design:

To grow as a conversationalist: Every Conversation Counts: by Riaz Meghji

To grow in hosting conversation: Art of Gathering by Priya Parker

To grow in facilitating virtual meetings: Rituals for Virtual Meetings by Kursat Ozenc & Glenn Fajardo

2. Seeing the shape of a meeting

Meetings and conversations have shapes. Here’s a simple yet helpful one: Open—Explore—Close

Like a story, a meeting has a narrative arc of beginning, middle, end. Structuring your time with this simple framework of Open—Explore—Close will cause you to make thoughtful choices of where to slot in activities and agenda items. Which I guarantee is better than someone saying, “Well I guess we better get started…” and then launching into a monologue!

3. Attending to openings

Priya Parker has this to say about why the beginning of a meeting especially matters:

“In the first few moments of a gathering, we are all . . . reading cues and asking ourselves: What do I think of this gathering? Am I in good hands? Is the host nervous? Should I be? What’s going to happen here? Is this worth my time? Do I belong? Do I want to belong? The opening is, therefore, an important opportunity to establish the legitimacy of your gathering.”

One way to do this is to start your meetings with a check-in. This is an important practice all the more with virtual meetings and can help embed extra points of connection and care in a meeting. Additionally, the research shows that if people use their voice within the first few minutes of meeting, they are more likely to do so later on and to be more engaged throughout.

What might happen if you slowed down and created a bit of space to check-in with the other humans in this meeting, rather than diving right into the agenda?

4. More questions, fewer agenda items

This Harvard Business Review article on how good leadership is about asking good questions, is another reminder of the power of good question asking.

What might shift in your meetings if you took time to prepare the questions you wanted to ask as much as the points you wanted to make?

5. Hosting yourself

You are a conversation! Hospitality begins with hosting the conversations that are occurring within you. One way to extend hospitality is to extend empathy and inquiry — to even ask a simple check-in question: “I’m noticing this emotion/response/thinking is happening. I wonder what’s going on for me?” And then taking the time to listen for an answer in your body.

What’s one conversation that means a lot to you right now?  If you were to find the conversation, what’s the most important thing you would want to talk about that might make the greatest difference?

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Meetings are group conversations, a coming together of human persons (not merely data points, sales targets, or human shaped cogs). None of us are looking for more meetings. But I do think we’re looking to make more of them.Meetings have the potential to become moments we elevate, nurture, and design. To do this calls for hospitality — and even the smallest acts of hospitality can make a difference. Here’s to hosting well, friends.

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