Senior people need to strike a balance between providing enough structure to ensure there is control and stability of day-to-day activities, while giving their team members room to make improvement suggestions, grow and expand their capabilities. One place where a leader can send a strong message  regarding this balance is during meetings with their team.

When people don’t feel comfortable, they tend to hold back. They give you what they feel they need to give you, but they don’t extend beyond that. Uncomfortable people will not raise important questions, make you aware of potential problems or bring up valuable improvements. People don’t feel comfortable when senior people are aggressive, highly opinionated or don’t give other ideas much thought. In such cases people will only offer safe and uninspiring ideas and solutions.

In a typical team meeting there is time set aside for reporting the status of current activities, for discussing problems and solutions and for planning future activities. Some leaders feel the need to drive the conversation. They state the issue that will be discussed, then, they proceed to give their own version of what should happen. Once they are done, the senior person then asks for the opinions of others in descending order or seniority.

The further down the ‘food chain’ that a person in the meeting is, the more uncomfortable they are with sharing any views that diverge from the senior people’s views. What can a leader do to remove or reduce this level of discomfort?

First, the senior person can limit the amount of time they consume during the meeting. An idea I read in the book “Multipliers” was to think about having five poker chips in your possession. One chip is worth 3 minutes, three chips are worth 1.5 minutes and the fifth chip is worth 30 seconds. This concept helps the senior person to think about if they truly need to interrupt the flow of the discussion.

Second, have another person run the meeting. The senior most person is then free to listen to the flow of the discussion and ideas. Make sure the important points are discussed, and that reasonable decisions are made, but don’t drive the discussion or decisions. It’s appropriate to make sure everyone knows the scope, available resources, timeliness and any other constraints. Other than that, let the team engage in discussion and come up with the solutions.

Third, when getting report outs from the team, start with the lowest level team members. Let the line employees give their input before the supervisors. Supervisors provide their input before managers and so forth. Why? In a public forum there are few things more empowering than having everyone know you’ve given an opinion or feedback. Not filtered, not given by someone else who takes the credit for a good idea. Peers and the people senior to you all know it was your thought. The other thing this does is allows you to check on the alignment of the team. When junior people act or recommend actions aligned with the senior person’s objectives and goals it validates that the message has penetrated down through the organization.