Today’s missive comes at you in the form of a Q&A. A friend asked me for insight on leading meetings, and it’s a common one, so I decided to share my response with you.
Do you have a question that you’d like me to answer in a future newsletter? Hit reply and let me know!
Without further ado, let’s get into it.
Question: “I started a new job in March and need help with confidence for running meetings. So maybe I need to improve my leadership? I’m all about self-improvement. Mostly I get really anxious and feel silly. It’s like I’m nervous to speak even though I know what to say.”
Answer: Ah yes! I know this feeling well. It’s a classic example of imposter syndrome at work.
For that reason, I want to answer this question in two parts.
Part 1: Strengthen your mindset.
Basically, I want you to get your mind right so you stop self-doubt from messing with your ability to show up in a way that showcases how skilled and helpful you actually are as a supervisor.
Really, this is all about practicing personal leadership. It’s about having your own back, hyping yourself up (on factual reality, not insincere flattery), and giving yourself credit for the good things about yourself instead of fixating on the less-than-perfect.
Here are some concrete ways you can strengthen your mindset in advance of a meeting.
Remember why you are leading this meeting in the first place.
Presumably, someone somewhere decided that it would be a good idea for you to get up in front of other people and share what you know or get everyone’s feedback on shared and individual projects. You have skills and experience that led you to this moment. It didn’t just drop into your lap out of nowhere.
Even if you’re new to the role of leading meetings or leading this particular group in meetings, you can boost your sense of competence to root into your strengths and the experience that you may otherwise take for granted. You don’t have to know how to do everything to be competent and qualified enough to do it for the first time.
Remind yourself of your actual responsibilities inside your current role.
You are responsible for offering them the best of your ability to support their needs and concerns, but it is not your job to try to take away their agency or responsibility for their own self-care and personal management. In other words, you’re there to be a respectful and reliable partner who assumes the best of others and takes people at face value when they respond with questions, agreements, or doubts.
Get clear what’s making you feel anxious and silly.
What are you worried about happening? What do you secretly want to prevent or avoid?
The answer to this last question is usually something like “I don’t want people to contradict me”, “I don’t want to sound like an idiot”, “I don’t want to confuse people”, or “I don’t want people to know that I don’t know what I’m doing”.
Most people walk on eggshells or get nervous speaking in front of employees or colleagues because they are trying to avoid discomfort.
The discomfort already exists inside of you – you want to avoid feeling it acutely during a meeting.
So what’s the actual problem here? What’s really making you uncomfortable?
This is either about YOU or about someone else.
- Do you think a certain coworker is better than you in some way?
- Are you expecting a sort of unpleasant reaction from someone and hoping to avoid it?
- Are you doubting your own ability to inspire change, answer questions, or deliver the kind of support people need to get their work done?
From there, you can get firm with yourself and practice standing up for yourself against the voice of self-doubt. Decide what stories and self-talk you will and will not allow.
It won’t do you any good to project assumptions onto other people about their future behavior or responses to your ideas.
If you’re going to imagine a future, you might as well imagine one where everything goes right. Otherwise, in your efforts to avoid the unpleasant scenarios that happen in your head, you may accidentally engender them.
You also need to decide in advance that you will not criticize yourself or latch onto any negative feedback you may receive (real or imagined) as valid proof of your incompetence. In both of these cases, you’ve essentially decided that you ARE incompetent, which is why you’re so anxious about having someone else point it out.
Notice how you are being your own worst enemy here, and nip that nasty self-talk in the bud. Practice gentle self-acceptance or an affirmation like “I am who I am and that is enough.”
In addition to getting your mind right, you can take some tactical steps to support yourself leading meetings.
Hence part 2: Strategize a successful outcome.
My philosophy when it comes to meetings, workshops, and any group gathering is that it’s important to understand the purpose. Why are we all there, and what is the end goal of that meeting? If you have something you want people to do or something you want people to know, then it’s helpful if you’re clear on that ahead of time and respectful of their time if you get to that point without much delay.
The more you can plan what questions need to be answered and save room for people’s questions at the end, the more you can feel competent walking into a meeting and clear on your focus. It goes a long way to free up your confidence, especially when you’re new in a leadership position and don’t yet feel as authoritative on the inside as you perhaps want to come across on the outside.
Specifically, you can do a few things in advance, including deciding what you want the agenda to be.
Why are they here? What is the goal? What needs to be different at the end of your time together?
From there, you can decide who is responsible for managing what (project management/deadlines/follow-up).
What will get handled INSIDE the meeting? What needs to be handled AFTER the meeting? Who needs to handle it / who is responsible? Lastly, what deadlines should be put in place, and who will enforce them?
I think it’s important to get clear inside yourself and understand your role as someone tasked with leading a group of people to some shared outcome. You are, in my opinion, given the authority to communicate a goal, a message, and an intention, while also taking responsibility for the understanding of the people in the room, which means being willing to answer questions, deal with their discomforts, and help them find solutions so that they can move forward on this thing that presumably matters to all of you.
The last thing I want to mention is that you may get the sense that someone or many people disagree with what you’re saying, whether you’re just checking in for the week and the goals ahead. You get the sense that something is wrong, or you’re implementing a new initiative or goal of some kind at the organizational level. You sense that people aren’t buying in the way you want them to, and I think it’s worthwhile to address that directly from a place of humility and curiosity.
This will depend on how you perceive this apparent discomfort. If someone says something that opens the doorway to a conversation while in a group meeting, I think it’s appropriate to bring it up. But if it’s a gut sense that you have, I think it makes much more sense to approach someone individually and in private after the fact to double-check with them whether you picked up on something valid.
You’re not necessarily right when you have a gut instinct about other people, but you’re not necessarily wrong, especially when it comes to sharing information or prompting action steps and behavior change that may be contentious or challenging for people.
Suppose your job is to support the forward momentum of new projects and initiatives and to support your colleagues, team members, and employees. In that case, it is incumbent upon you to make sure there are no hidden obstacles to everyone moving forward in a way that works well for them and the organization.
But having said that, I’m also aware that each one of us is susceptible to misunderstandings and projections, where we assume something is true about another person, especially an unspoken something, and then we rush in an attempt to fix what may not even be broken.
It’s always good to have a private conversation where you fact-check your gut instinct. It can be as simple as asking a question like, “Hey, I got the sense that maybe something about that didn’t sit well with you. Am I making that up, or does that feel accurate to you?”
If there’s something I can do to answer questions or make this feel better, I’m here and available for that. This is not about bludgeoning other people to get on board, and it’s not about forcing people to do what you say just because you’re the boss, or you’re at the head of the room. It’s about seeking to understand another person’s point of view and respect their individuality and personal agency, while offering whatever support or help you can reasonably offer to advance projects and goals.
In other words, do you want to be respectful? Do you want to be reliable? Do you want to be a human being, connecting with other human beings, and believing them when they tell you how they feel?
Those are my key tools for prepping yourself to host a meeting from a place of confidence and self-assurance.
Decide in advance how you will show up. Make it part of your effective meetings strategy. Coupled with a mindset grounded in your strengths, you’ll find those jitters aren’t quite as intense. As with all tasks related to confidence and self-esteem, you’ll find it gets easier and easier to lead meetings over time.
Want to go deeper into the topic of planning for meetings and various forms of communication, so that they are as effective and clear as possible?
Check out a podcast episode I recorded, called “How to Communicate More Effectively with Team Members, Colleagues, and Loved Ones”. If you don’t like listening to audio recordings, there’s also a transcript here. In that episode, I lay out, a three-part framework for getting in the right mindset to effectively communicate with others, especially in professional, contentious, potentially contentious, or challenging conversations.
Was this useful to you? Do you have any challenges around leading meetings or feeling confident in yourself while you do so? As always, I’d love to hear from you. I wish you a fruitful and productive day. Until next time!
