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Whether you work remotely or in an office (or a mix of both), meetings are an integral part of work, especially for knowledge workers. According to recent estimates, the average American professional will spend more than 14 years of their working lives in meetings.
As Steven Rogelberg highlighted in one of the best books on this topic (The Surprising Science of Meetings):
1. Only half of the enormous time organizations invest in meetings produces adequate returns, even according to the rather unreliable and probably optimistic self-ratings of those who actually have the meetings. In other words, one in two meetings are a waste of time.
2. The figure is even lower when we examine senior managers or leaders, with 71% of them describing meetings as unproductive and inefficient, 65% stating that meetings actually prevent them from completing important work, and 64% noting that meetings undermine deep thinking. Since many meetings are set by senior managers, the irony is hard to miss here.
3. The most poetic or romantic data point of all: 90% of workers report daydreaming in meetings, and 73% admit doing other work during them, which may suggest that meetings are an underrated conduit to enhancing productivity (just not in the manner we measure).
Whatever you think of meetings, they play an important social role in organizational life. In fact, few things reveal a company’s culture faster than joining one. Are people early or late, cameras on or off, prepared or improvising? Does everyone speak or just the boss? Is disagreement encouraged or carefully disguised? Do meetings end on time, or only when someone has another meeting?
Frequency is revealing too: Lots of meetings may indicate collaboration, but also bureaucracy, weak delegation, or analysis paralysis (aka “death by committee”). Above all, meetings may expose the invisible politics that lubricate interactions among people, including status. Who speaks, interrupts, gets challenged, or receives suspiciously enthusiastic laughter? In that sense, meetings don’t merely reflect organizational culture; they are also a micro-replica of it.
Universal features
Leaving aside company culture, there are some universal qualities of meetings that generalize across different organizations and approaches to management. Perhaps the most important one is that, just like in any other professional setting or work-related interaction among people (e.g., sports, arts, entertainment, and military combat), some people are clearly better at meetings than others. Indeed, it is undeniable that certain people simply manage to master the art of meetings with the same talent and skill level as a concert pianist or a Premier League soccer player displays.
And, what makes this topic particularly intriguing is that, as most people will probably accept, the talent or skill that helps individuals excel at meetings appears to be largely unrelated to the talent or skill (let alone motivation) that helps individuals become a valuable member of a team or organization. In other words, just because someone is good at meetings doesn’t mean they are a useful employee (or leader); and just because someone is bad at meetings doesn’t mean they are not a useful employee (or leader).
Key elements
Consider some of the critical elements that make people good at meetings:
(1) Empty talk: Research shows that how much people speak during meetings is a significant predictor of leadership emergence. In other words, regardless of what you say, the more you say, the more likely it is that you become a manager or leader. Needless to say, being a talkative person is not particularly helpful once you become a leader, especially if it stops you from listening, which tends to be the case: Time is finite, and if you monopolize it with your own words . . .
(2) Challenging or speaking up: Unsurprisingly, this is a good way to signal confidence, status, and courage, all of which can be important enablers of high-performance and leadership performance if they are coupled with actual competence, integrity, and a desire to improve the organization (rather than to stand out or, well, showcase status). Alas, it is not always easy to know why people are speaking up during meetings, though contextual cues such as narcissistic or Machiavellian orientations may help us figure it out.
(3) Looking engaged: Meetings create an unusual separation between being and seeming engaged. The latter is considerably easier, not least when everybody else is too busy faking their own engagement to pay attention to how you feel. Strategic nodding, enthusiastic eye contact, appropriate (albeit exaggerated) facial reactions, frequent agreement, and the well-timed “yes, exactly” can signal participation without requiring much engagement or interest at all, and even allowing for multitasking.
(4) Being funny: Perhaps because meetings are often boring, entertaining others during meetings will help you score valuable brownie points. Research shows that people who are able to engage in affiliative humor—humor that lubricates interpersonal ties and helps to forge connections at work—are likely to improve others’ satisfaction with the meeting, so skilled humor appears to pay off during meetings.
(5) Mastering the art of asking generic (but rogue) smart questions: As I recently argued, certain questions have the wonderful property of sounding intelligent in almost any meeting: “What does success look like?” “What does the data tell us?” “Are we solving the right problem?” or “What would change our minds?” Used appropriately, these can genuinely improve a discussion. Used indiscriminately, they provide something else: a low-cost method for signaling intelligence, curiosity, and strategic thinking without the inconvenience of having to demonstrate any of them.
Too much
To be sure, even if you manage to excel at the above, you must be careful not to overdo it, and to understand that positive or sought-after meeting behaviors can become self-detrimental (not to mention problematic for others) if overdone. So, for instance, talking enough to be noticed can easily turn into monopolizing the conversation; challenging others can become tiresome contrarianism; visible engagement can look theatrical; humor can become distracting or inappropriate; and asking too many smart-sounding questions will eventually raise the obvious question of whether you have any answers yourself.
Like most forms of impression management, the trick is not simply knowing which signals work, but calibrating them well enough that they don’t start looking like signals.
More important, there is a fundamental difference between displaying the behaviors associated with competence and actually being competent. The best meeting performers may genuinely be intelligent, curious, engaged, courageous, and funny. Others simply learn to reproduce the observable cues associated with these qualities. And since meetings are short, social, and generally poor at revealing what people actually accomplish when nobody is watching, distinguishing the two is harder than we think.
This is why the most useful test of meeting performance probably happens outside the meeting itself. In particular, do the people who sounded insightful produce useful work? Do their clever questions lead to better decisions? Do their challenges improve things? Do they follow through on what they volunteered to do, rather than merely volunteering other people? And, perhaps most important, would the team notice their contribution if meetings suddenly disappeared?
A degree of performance
Ultimately, there is nothing wrong with learning how to look good in meetings. Work has always involved some degree of performance, and communicating your competence is part of being competent (in ways that may also be beneficial to enhancing leadership performance and effectiveness, but the desire to do so needs to be there, too).
The problem begins when the performance becomes the actual work, particularly in organizations where visibility is easier to measure than value, which is arguably every organization. In such places, those who master meetings may end up with an important advantage over those who merely master their jobs.
And the biggest problem may not be the rise of those who are good at faking competence, for this may continue to make their actual talents (or lack thereof) invisible to others, but rather the non-emergence of those who are likely to provide the highest value to the organization but are wrongly dismissed as invaluable simply because they aren’t bothered to engage in the performative dark arts of mastering meetings.
This is ultimately a much bigger problem than meetings. Organizations have always struggled to distinguish style from substance, confidence from competence, and the ability to look like a leader from the ability to actually lead. Meetings merely provide a particularly efficient stage on which these mistakes can occur.
When we reward people for talking rather than listening, projecting confidence rather than exercising judgment, asking impressive questions rather than producing useful answers, or simply being more visible than valuable, we should hardly be surprised when the people who get ahead are not always those who help the organization get ahead.
The answer is not to eliminate performance or impression management, which would be both unrealistic and probably undesirable, but to remember that they are signals rather than outcomes. Otherwise, we risk promoting the people who are best at looking like they are working, while overlooking those who are actually doing the work.
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High-performing employees are valued by organizational leaders for good reason. They’re reliable, adaptable, and willing to step in when something needs to get done. When responsibilities are unclear or processes break down, they figure it out. When a team is stretched thin, they pick up the slack. And because they consistently deliver, leaders learn that they can give them more.
However, Lauren Cohen, JD, founder of Cohen Leadership Group, a boutique leadership advisory firm that helps fast-growing companies build scalable leadership systems, says herein lies a paradox: These capable employees can also mask organizational weaknesses. As the most reliable people take on more and more work, they allow companies to keep operating despite underdeveloped leadership systems. What initially looks like an individual strength can therefore become an organizational liability and, over time, a recipe for burnout. I spoke to Cohen about the idea.
JW: Why do the most capable people often end up carrying the burden of organizational dysfunction?
LC: Because they can, and they do, and people continue to put that burden on their shoulders.
My practice used to be focused entirely on individuals who came to me for executive coaching. Something I learned very quickly was that you can help one person, but when they’re trying to solve problems created by the system they’re working in—and then they return to that same system—your impact is pretty limited.
A lot of times, capable people take on the burden of insufficient or underdeveloped leadership systems. And those capable people can actually mask underdeveloped systems for a long time. The cracks go unnoticed because people just keep piling that work onto their own shoulders.
Being capable is valuable for a long time in your career, but as you elevate into leadership, it becomes much more about building capacity around you. At some point, capability can become a liability—not only because that person becomes overloaded and burned out, but because the system never develops in a way that supports organizational health.
JW: And organizations themselves can reinforce that dynamic. What needs to change?
LC: Competence is often a hiding place for organizational dysfunction. We leave it to the individual to solve burnout, but then they come back into the exact same working environment and the same system, which just reinforces it.
I don’t think this is an HR problem. I think it’s a leadership problem. Organizations need to ask: How are we overburdening capable people? How are our leadership systems underdeveloped in ways that disproportionately impact those people?
I talk a lot about “leadership debt,” which is basically the gap between a growing organization and the leadership systems that exist to support that growth. When an organization is small, you can mask some of that for quite a while. But as it grows and becomes increasingly complex, individuals become more and more burdened if the system doesn’t develop along with it.
The incentives matter, too. If you say you care about reducing burnout, but your compensation, performance reviews, and feedback celebrate the person who works 24/7 and never takes a vacation, those things are misaligned. We need to think about leadership systems as a critical business system, not an HR program.
JW: What if you’re the burned-out employee inside one of these organizations and don’t have much power to change the system?
LC: I think about it in terms of three things: What can you control? What can you let go of? And what can you influence?
Starting with yourself is important because it helps you regain a sense of personal control. But there’s also that bucket of influence, which I think we sometimes forget about. We often have more influence than we think we do.
Think about where you sit in the organization, what relationships you have, and what conversations you might start. Maybe it’s with a peer. Maybe it’s with your leader. Maybe that inspires someone to have another conversation with a leader at a higher level who has more control over the system. I always urge people to lean into that bucket of “What can I influence?” because there’s typically more there than we tend to think.
JW: Can an employee actually recover from burnout while remaining in the system that produced it?
LC: Maybe. I think maybe. But if the system itself is contributing to the burnout, something about the system—or your relationship to it—ultimately has to change. If you’re going to stay in a system that is producing burnout, you have to define what healthy looks like for you in relation to your work and what unhealthy looks like, and then set some very clear boundaries and parameters around that.
Where people get tripped up is that they set the boundary, but they’re not willing to enforce it. When you’re in a system that is used to you showing up a certain way, people typically don’t react very well when you set a new boundary.
The easy part is actually setting the boundary. The harder part is reinforcing it as people keep asking more and more of you while they learn your new habits. And in some organizations that are truly toxic, that boundary may not be acceptable. You have to be willing to navigate that and decide if and when you’re going to hold those boundaries firmly.
