EP#09🌿Why Team Meetings Can Kill Teamwork & Employee Engagement

Being good at meetings isn't about better agendas. It's about recognising the room you're standing in front of every week as the single best, cheapest, most repeatable opportunity you have to lead, connect and develop the team.

In this episode I own several of my own meeting mistakes, walk through two real "meetings gone wrong" stories and what they cost the business, and share three moments that reveal what meetings can build when they are run with people and engagement in mind.

I close with a simple shape-structure for a meeting people actually want to be in and explain why more meetings aren’t the enemy, more time spent in meetings isn’t the enemy. Bad meetings are the enemy.

EP#09 - Listen Now

(20 minutes)

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On with the episode...

Do you dread your own team meetings - or suspect your team quietly does?

Is your team just getting through the agenda, or actually feeling closer to you and each other by the end?

Are your meetings something you run at your team, or something you've actually designed with them?

Welcome back.

Continuing on from the previous episode, today I'm fired up about meetings.

The perfect time to be in front of your team, a captive audience. Why aren't they used in that way instead of falling flat and feel like a waste of time? How do we get around the mindset that meetings are a downtime liability rather than the best way to drive culture. I can't wait to give you some reasons to get fired up about being in front of your people.

Checking in. Last two episodes I discussed the impact of predictability and stability on your team. How did you go reflecting on those environmental conditions? Did you decide to look into change? I would love to hear how you went.

I've so far discussed in previous episodes safety, trust, dealing with mistakes, predictability and stability.

And from my point of view, it's a perfect time to look at the impact of meetings before we dive into communication and leadership in upcoming episodes. There is so much information out there already about what you should cover in a team meeting, technically or operationally, and that's not why I wanted to single out meetings today. As a leader, I'm sure you already know what's important to cover for the operational side of your team.

Meetings for me are just such a magical opportunity to engage and connect. Research backs a solid cadence of ongoing engagement, so weekly team meetings for everyone, fortnightly senior meetings, monthly planning meetings with key members, and quarterly one on ones across the board.

In senior meetings, I used to use a little bit of time in one of the fortnightly ones as a chance to learn about leadership together. If your business doesn't have a budget for ongoing development, there's nothing stopping you from getting curious about it with your seniors and yourself. It creates a real buzz and the rest of the team see the investment in the people for all the right reasons.

So that's a research backed best practice. I believe any opportunity you get to be in front of your people to show that you care and you're invested in them is awesome. regardless of how often that happens. I'm not talking about constant massive check ins, that's just not practical. But I think there's a perception that one on one time has to fit neatly inside a block, squeeze between things sometimes.

And that's not a human way to sit in front of someone and care about them. Sometimes things come up you just can't avoid and giving someone the extra ten or fifteen minutes to let a conversation finish naturally leaves a longer, more positive impact than cutting it off on time.

We all know when we're being a bit squeezed in meetings, handled badly, the signal you send is that this person isn't important enough for you and that's exactly how a disengagement starts.

The enemy for me isn't more meetings or more time spent with someone. The enemy is bad meetings.

Before I move on much further, a quick note I'm talking through the rest of this episode about weekly team meetings. I know plenty of organisations run daily toolbox meetings as well, which are narrower, quicker, generally tied to that specific day, like on a construction site, for example. I'll also look into hybrid teams in another episode. I understand there are different dynamics there.

Traditionally, meetings have been the most efficient way to get information across the whole team so you're not repeating yourself and everyone hears the same message. It's still true obviously, but some of us miss the opportunity sitting right there, a captive audience, a chance to drive who you are as a leader, to connect, to be relevant, to design the meeting with your team rather than just running it at them.

Have you ever asked your team what they'd like covered?

Reframing what a meeting can mean.

I call meetings family meetings. Apparently controversial, but I lean into it because in my experience the family you have the opportunity to build at work can be more functional, caring and supportive than the one you go home to. I'm backed up here by what I believe might be the best work culture in the world. Bob Chapman*, who sadly passed away recently, transformed Barry-Weh-Miller into a multi billion dollar global enterprise by treating leadership as stewardship and measuring success by the way they touch the lives of their people, not just the bottom line.

I'll link a brilliant conversation between him and Simon Sinek in the show notes. We'll come back to Bob and Simon properly in an upcoming leadership episodes. Bob's work and legacy is incredible.

I remember watching people's faces the first time I called a meeting a family meeting. I think I said it as a joke, but instead of eye rolls people got a bit giggly, grabbed their notebooks so were prepared and more open.

There's a real difference between being managed and being led. I don't know anyone who has a problem with being led when we trust the person leading, but there's almost always a slight resistance to being managed. Apparently it comes from experience of being overmanaged, or even just watching someone else go through that. And a sense that the manager sees themselves as superior. And that comes through in how they treat people.

Meetings are one of the best places to show your team you're different. Not your management, your leadership.

Owning my own mistakes.

This is purely so you can avoid the same ones I'm keen to hear if you've got others.

Sometimes I call meetings at a time that suited me, not the majority of the team. It's a rookie mistake. So heads up, find the time that actually works for everyone, not just you, if your team is new to you.

With one particular team, I rarely sent out an agenda in advance and following up with notes afterwards not consistent and that meant sometimes people who missed the meeting would miss the update as well. I did consciously keep notes aside to update particular staff that may be away if there were things that affected them.

In the beginning I think with this particular team it was fine. We were small and everyone kind of held on to things naturally. But as we grew, the projects grew, business grew, several new team members didn't feel that way. I should have been way more consistent with it from the start. Now I'd probably record meetings, have that transcribed and made available. I'd ask one of the team members or seniors to do this, take turns, share the love of the functionality, easy.

And I also wasn't conscious of my energy in front of the room. If I'd been working long hours, may my tiredness would show up, was rambling, mumbling, not present, not making sure ad hoc conversations went on too long, not answering questions well. I can only imagine how draining those meetings may have been to sit through.

And all of these are cringe moments.

When meetings go wrong.

I've heard some real stories over the years and been in rooms where I wanted to shrink away or run away because the meetings gone pear-shaped. I've no doubt you'll be the same. I've brought up a couple of ones where I felt I had negative impact and following a two examples of the most impactful ways meetings can take a dive.

Scenario one, the shutdown. Two business owners, full team in the room, the seniors wanted to raise a long standing issue about a part of their compensation on behalf of everyone. They hadn't flagged it beforehand and the owners received it as confrontational. The topic was shut down. They carried on with their own agenda and the meeting ended without it being addressed again. No real explanation was given. The seniors were confused.

Several team members started looking elsewhere for work that same day. They took the silence and the shutdown as their concerns not mattering. It was, I found out later, mostly a perception problem, but the damage was real. Engagement flattened. The gap widened, it took years and a lot of work to undo.

Scenario two no control or impact. People dilly dallying to this meeting knowing the manager was waiting, gossiping inappropriately about someone's misfortune and making many people uncomfortable while waiting for the meeting to start.

No heads up, no encouragement to raise anything. Content was distantly related, new things coming up that wouldn't really affect the team. And the manager couldn't answer questions raised about a serious incident that had affected the whole team the day before and unfortunately couldn't hide that they hadn't followed the issue up.

Three people running to answer the phone, not hiding they wanted an excuse to get out of the meeting. Two people chatting through different parts of the meeting, going back to a conversation like the meeting was the interruption.

It was a clanger.

I've sat through plenty of meetings that have drained the life out of everyone and no doubt guilty of poorly run meetings many times.

Meetings matter culturally.

We also know what it feels like when someone leading the room is open, human, funny, they don't even have to be funny, but when there's nothing to hide, there's no need to control the narrative, when the space is controlled in a good way. When there's inquiry instead of challenge.

Here's my beliefs on three things that show why meetings matter culturally.

One team member always had a habit of raising something slightly left field, a scenario nobody else had thought of. People would roll eyes and

The manager would semi-jokingly open the floor to them first. They'd be slightly ridiculed, just enough to be uncomfortable, when nine times out of ten what they raised was genuinely worth thinking about.

The manager had no idea the reaction was affecting that person. They thought they were lightening the mood. We ran personality testing across the whole team and found almost everyone, managers included, landed in the same type. This person was one of the few with a different trait, theirs was to question, where most of the others were wired to avoid the spotlight. So the things he raised were often issues other people had too, but didn't feel comfortable bringing up themselves.

Most people, when I asked him privately, agreed he'd done the right thing. They'd just gone along with the jokey culture, uncomfortable underneath it. To me, that difference was a gift, not a problem. Once we named it and reframed how valuable it actually was, something shifted. That person became the go to for planning and design. They went from the difficult one to genuinely being valued, and they later told me they'd quietly accepted being misunderstood for years.

They never said anything and felt sad about it underneath.

Reframing that changed how the whole team saw them.

An owner I knew once overheard that one of their best people, always doing extra, always covering for others, hadn't been able to mow their backyard in weeks worried their old mower wouldn't cope

And was hesitant to pay for someone else to do it. That night the team member found brand new lawn mower in the back of their ute.

The owner had gone and got them one, no fuss, no announcement, just done.

That's a big gesture and it's not one most of us have the budget or authority to make.

But you don't need a mower and a boot to move the dial on loyalty. You need a meeting.

Meetings are one of the best, cheapest, most repeatable platforms you have to broadcast wins. Someone got glowing customer feedback. Say it out loud in front of A project's going well, hand the floor to whoever's been driving it and let them tell the team themselves.

You can't always buy someone a mower, but you can always make sure that team hears from you consistently that someone did something worth noticing.

Do that often enough and it adds up to the same thing the mower did. People feeling like they're seen, valued and appreciated.

Story three Last One. A manager I worked under early in my career, in a heavily monitored sales environment, everything was tracked. Call times, sales numbers, customer feedback.

Meetings were a strict twenty minutes, one-on-one's fifteen. It's not her style, just how the business ran, and the business was nationally very successful.

But she went further than she had to. She bought snacks, she paid for herself, she found extra promotional opportunities for us. She got ridiculed a bit by other managers for being soft. Under her, though, myself and three others became top performers fast. One of us top in the country. She'd built whatever connection she could inside a structure that didn't naturally allow for much of it.

I never forgot what she did with what she had. And I reflect that we noticed she went above and beyond and responded back for her in the same way.

Team meetings that are welcomed.

Developing the skill of reading a room and using the time you've got with intention is one of the best qualities of leadership you can cultivate. Confidence, preparation, good energy. You're shaping something whether you mean to or not. So why not make it awesome?

Two basic suggestions if you haven't done this already. Set ground rules so time gets used well and ask your team directly what they'd like covered.

Ongoing, my best response to meetings follow this format.

Open with the human stuff first, acknowledge people back from leave or anything special going on for them. Get the functional stuff out of the way quickly and make space for what's actually relevant to the team. Share what's coming up for the team in regard to leave planning, changes or challenges so people aren't blindsided. Be as honest as possible.

About constraints and open the floor to ideas and problem solving. Get personal, celebrate those wins, people's hobbies, charity updates for the business. I once found out after the fact that a team member had shown off a vintage car they restored at a show. Several of us would have loved to go and support them if we'd known. Encourage people to bring that stuff to the table.

One more thing, add development.

For almost a year I'd bring up something tied to a dysfunction we were aware of in the team. For example, we weren't confident having conversations with each other about things someone had done wrong. So I addressed it as a learning topic, nothing heavy. For example, I'd give ideas and model safe ways to approach people. When we retested areas there was improvement.

I think if I'd been more intentional about that, the results would have been even better. I'd bring them up randomly whenever something occurred to me, so there was no pattern. And looking back that probably made it land as a surprise pop quiz rather than something the team could trust was coming.

So running meetings again, I'd make team development an actual standing item. Maybe not every meeting, but be more intentional about what I was doing.

I brought up another area of concern in the same way, which was gossiping. I talked with the team about the difference between someone needing a hand and someone just offloading and encouraged people to move concerns up rather than around.

It takes time, I think, for those types of habitual things to land. But over time I got knocks on my door, someone coming in to tell me another person was struggling before got nothing. So those little discussions do make a difference. If I had an example where someone had tapped me on the shoulder, I would get permission to share that caring if it was appropriate.

If you don't do it, there's never a difference.

End of our episode your reflection question for today is what's your honest perception of your team meetings? Are they productive operationally and for your culture? Do they bring you and your team closer together or quietly widen the gap?

If you haven't already, head to the olivetreemethod.com and complete the leadership self-assessment to see how you and your team are tracking right now across twenty-six areas of teamwork.

Only takes a few minutes and it'll give you a sense of where support might be needed in your team the most.

I'm a huge believer in knowing the conditions around your team, so if you think the team's not quite right, I'd really encourage you to look further at the olive tree method itself, the framework that reveals what's happening around your team.

All the leadership techniques in the world can't fix what you don't know is broken.

Next episode we look at communication. Something I reckon we're always hoping to do better. I want to explore what doesn't get said. Things people hold back because they're not confident enough to raise them, or not sure they'll be heard well if they do. That silence can quietly remove safety and trust from your team and most of the time we just don't notice.

Be the difference. Be blessed and I wish you the best workday. Ciao.

Resource Links:

05.35 Simon Sinek (Youtube) - Remembering Bob Chapman: The Mentor Who Changed My Life https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7kQaeP-3I8&t=1s 

* Bob Chapman (1945-2026) - Transformer & Chairman Barry-WehMiller ($4 billion global enterprise), Author of Everything Matters❤️ Teacher and passionate advocate that Leadership is Stewardship & Pioneer of Truly Human Leadership.

Next Episode...

Communication Flow - Two episodes to reveal how good or bad communication flow shows up, things that don't get said and how to improve.

EP#10 & 11 - Broadcast pending

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