Have the Meeting Before the Meeting
When I coach leaders, I encourage them to implement the practice of meetings before the meeting. Before any large group meeting where a decision will be made or a hard conversation needs to happen, have a short one-on-one with everyone in that meeting. This isn’t to share updates. It’s to hear what's on their mind, what concerns they have, and what they'd need to feel ready to weigh in.
By the time the full group sits down together, no one’s hearing a decision, a concern, or a piece of feedback for the first time in the room. No surprises, a principle I keep coming back to with the leaders I coach, whether we're talking about performance conversations or, as I saw recently with a board chair I talked with, board meetings themselves. Before every board meeting, she and the staff at the organization hold one-on-ones with each board member. They get reactions in private, so the group conversation is where things get decided, not where they get discussed for the first time.
Big meetings are the wrong place to find things out.
If the first time someone hears your idea, your concern, or your pushback is in front of the whole group, you've put them in a tough spot. They either have to think out loud under pressure, or they stay quiet, and you never hear from them. Neither one gets you a good outcome. One communications leader described it well: too often, someone presents to a room of senior leaders and it's the first time anyone there is hearing what they're trying to convince the group to do. The fix isn't a better slide deck. It's a conversation that happens earlier.
The real decisions happen in the small conversation, not the big one.
A lot of leaders think of the big meeting as where the thinking happens. In practice, it rarely is. The big meeting is where thinking gets confirmed, or where it falls apart in public. One project manager put it simply: before a larger status meeting, a short one-on-one with each key person, maybe fifteen minutes, is enough to surface what's getting in their way and decide what's actually worth bringing to the full group. The pre-meeting is where the real work happens.
It shapes the outcome, and it helps people feel heard even when they disagree.
I coached a leader, let's call her Aisha, through this with her board. She wanted to change their recruitment process. A few board members were deeply committed to the old one. Instead of walking into the meeting ready to make her case, she met individually with each board member first. She heard their concerns and actually used them, adjusting her proposal based on what she learned. She also realized that most of the board already agreed with her.
At the meeting, the first few people to speak all supported the change. That's usually the moment where the person who disagrees either gets steamrolled or shuts down. But because Aisha had already talked to everyone individually, she could turn to one board member, we'll call him Jordan, and say, "I know you see this differently, and I'd really like you to share that." He felt heard, not because she agreed with him, but because she'd clearly done the work of understanding his viewpoint before that meeting. He ended up voting for the change.
Done well, this process can make decisions better and can also change how people experience disagreeing with you.
This isn't about controlling the outcome. It's about respecting people's time and thinking.
If you're using these conversations to pre-sell a decision you've already made and steamroll any objection, that won’t work. If you're using them to genuinely find out what someone thinks, and you're willing to let that change your proposal, that's just great facilitation.
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