Show Notes
How to run a meeting your team will actually be honest in is the skill nobody trains. You run the meeting, you ask if there are any questions, you get silence, and you walk out thinking it went well.
Ninety seconds later, the real meeting starts. Two people in a hallway. A group text. Somebody's truck in the parking lot. That is where your team decides what they are actually going to do about what you just said, and you are not in that room.
Here is the part most managers get wrong. The second meeting is not disloyalty. It is normal, every team does it, and you did it too before you had a title. The problem is not that it happens. The problem is the distance between the two meetings. If the parking lot conversation is a completely different conversation than the one you ran, your meeting could not hold the truth, and every decision you make from here gets quietly renegotiated somewhere you cannot hear it.
In this episode I walk through The Second Meeting, three moves that shrink that distance:
ONE. FIND OUT WHO HOSTS IT. Every team has one person whose read everybody waits for. To find them, watch eyes and not mouths. Then talk to that person before the meeting instead of after, and hear the parking lot conversation while the plan can still change. Two warnings included, because done wrong this becomes a spy or a favorite.
TWO. MAKE THE ROOM ABLE TO HOLD IT. "Any questions" is not a question, it is a closing ritual. Replace it with something specific and small enough to answer. Then stay quiet for ten full seconds. And know that what you do with the first objection decides whether you ever get a second one.
THREE. FOLLOW THE DECISION, NOT THE MEETING. Forty-eight hours later, ask two or three people what the read is out there. Then come back to the group with one thing that changed and say where it came from. That is how the parking lot gets a route back into the room.
Plus how it maps to the LEAD Framework: Listen, Envision, Align, Drive. And the quietest meetings of my career, which I mistook for alignment until somebody good put in their notice. ------------------------------ Get my coaching frameworks behind the scenes. One idea and one small shift to your inbox every week. Start here: https://www.thejohnespinosa.com/start-here
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