Leveraging Leadership

Listener Question: How to Help Your Boss Listen Up in Meetings

• Emily Sander • Season 1 • Episode 182

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A Chief of Staff named Angela asks how to stop her boss from dominating high-stakes planning meetings, despite her boss’s goal to empower others. The episode offers practical tips, like giving the boss a “What did you learn?” prompt before and during the meeting, using breakout groups where the boss can’t take over, and having other team members lead parts of the meeting so everyone is heard.


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Who Am I?

If we haven’t yet before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want. 

 

Time Stamps:

00:40 Understanding the Leadership Challenge
01:37 Setting the Tone for Effective Meetings
02:50 During the Event: Keeping the Focus
04:02 Post-Event Recap and Coaching
05:24 Tactical Tips for Structuring Meetings
09:54 Conclusion and Listener Engagement

emily-sander_1_04-17-2025_142840:

All right. It is listener question day, which is becoming my favorite days. So here is the listener question. We just got in from Angela and she says, hi Emily. Big fan of the show. I have a question about navigating leadership dynamics in high stakes meetings. My boss is incredibly smart and genuinely believes in empowering others. She talks a lot about wanting people to step up, make decisions, and own their work. But when we get into big planning meetings, especially the onsite ones, she tends to hijack the room. She'll kick things off and then keep going. And before you know it, no one else has said much. We've talked about it. She knows she does this in all caps and she really, in all caps, does want to change, but when she senses things aren't moving fast enough or going her way, she slides right back into it. We've got some big onsite planning meetings coming up this year, and I wanna make sure people feel heard and feel confident speaking up. How do I set the tone or structure the meeting so it doesn't get Dominated? And people don't check out just because she's in the room. I. Okay. And then, Angela signs off here, Angela, chief of staff at mid-size company that's scaling pretty fast. Love it. Okay, so Angela, great question. I got you. The theme you wanna convey to your boss is that of listening. You want her to listen and that is her primary focus for this onsite. And there's kind of three phases of how you're gonna convey this to her. Before the event, during the event, and after the event. So before the event, it's. basically front running this conversation. And it sounds like you're gonna be able to tag on to an ongoing conversation about this in general. She knows this, this is going on, she knows she does this and she really does wanna get better, which is fantastic, which is great and so going into it, you might give her a prompt, and the prompt could be something like, what did you learn? What did you learn in this session? What did you learn after day one? After the whole thing is done, I'm gonna ask you, what did you learn? And that's gonna be your prompt and your cue. To learn things, you have to listen. You have to ask good questions, and you have to be present and be engaging in all those things, but you have to listen. And so inherent in that prompt, in that question you give her is she's gonna have to spend a lot of time, or at least some of the time, listening during. The planning onsite, you're probably gonna have to remind her.'cause if she easily slides back into her old habits, there's gonna be moments where she's gonna get tempted to do that. So it might be little check-ins, you know, during breaks or during lunch or after day one. Where again, you remind her of the intention going in. And that could be things like, what did you hear the team say about. X, Y, and Z and you can pick a topic that you two agree upon ahead of time is really important for you both to get a handle on and to hear from people about, and we really wanna get a pulse on this thing, or we wanna to check in on how people are doing with this, this and this. This project, this personnel change, this announcement, all this stuff. What did you hear people say about that? Again, you have to listen. You can't do all the talking if you're gonna answer that question. So you might nudge her during the onsite with questions like that. Like, Hey, like what did you hear people say about X, Y, and Z? And just make it casual. You don't need to make it like, boom, boom, boom. Now we're checking in. Or if your principal responds well to that, have a pre-planned check-in at lunch or end of day, like, I'm gonna ask you these questions and so she knows they're coming. Afterwards I would, so it depends on how it goes, right? Let's say it goes. Swimmingly well, and everything's like, oh my gosh, like she sat back. She asked questions, and then she listened and she answered my questions and the prompts throughout. This was ama. This is like a watershed moment. Holy cow. That's the ideal situation, right? If that happens, then I would tie it back to what she wants, which is truly caring about empowering others. And wanting people to step up and take ownership and responsibility. And you can say something like, you know, so-and-so boss's name. That's what that looks like. That's what that looks like when people are allowed to step up. And you saw how they went back and forth and we came up as a team with that great idea and now we're gonna go action that. And everyone's excited and bought into this thing. That's what it looks like. You allowed that to happen. By listening and by asking those good questions and by motivating people and nudging people along the way on kind of the outskirts, but letting them do the main thing. You made that happen, and that's what that looks like. That's what we get when that happens. Something like that. If it went the other way, then you have a different conversation, but I would have kind of a, a recap moment and a check in with her after the onsite. And this is a coaching moment for your principal as well, All right, so we've got the main theme of listening, and we're gonna convey that to her before, during, and after the onsite. Here are some tactical and practical things that might apply to you. You might try out here, I'm not exactly sure how you're structuring your onsite. There's dozens of ways to do that, but You might structure some of the sessions in a way where she's not really allowed to take over. And what I mean by that is, let's say there is a session that you are leading. Let's say that you're facilitating, so you're teeing up the main topic or the discussion points or how this thing is gonna run. Oftentimes there's little breakout groups, so you have a big, kind of big larger group team discussion, and maybe you're up at the board doing whiteboarding or you're showing some slides, or you're explaining this and facilitating this, and then you say, okay, let's get in groups of like three to four. You guys over here, you guys over there, and you guys are gonna be the third group over here. Talk about this topic amongst yourselves. Answer these three questions. Take you know, 10 minutes to do that amongst your little groups. And then have one person. Do a quick recap and summary for your group. So even if your boss is the one who is the messenger and is the person recapping for that little breakout group? She's only one of three. And you might even assign the person who's going to do the recap where it's not her. So she, she can discuss it in a little group and that's fine and that's good, but she's not the one speaking to the larger group. So the exercise and that session is just set up in a way where she can't easily dominate that conversation. A second one I've seen might be if someone is standing up there and they're taking point on this part of the conversation and you make it clear, like let's say it's Joe, like a, an executive on the team, like Joe is gonna take us through this part of the onsite and we're gonna talk about. This topic, we need a decision on by the group. And it's Joe's call. Joe is the head of the team that has to do the bulk of the work on this or deliver on this, or it just makes sense for Joe to be the decision maker so everyone can provide input. But at the end of the day, Joe is gonna make it. And part of why we're doing this is so we're all together. We're all in person. We're not doing this by emails and back and forth. We're all together. We're all hearing the same things. We're all able to provide input, but look, at the end of the day, it's Joe's call. And so we want Joe to be transparent about how and why he's making this decision, but it's Joe's call. And then have your boss be one of the people who might provide input to that and their perspective. But. Everyone provides input and then it's Joe's call and getting the team, and Joe and your boss used to the fact that boss might provide input, but the ultimate decision is someone else's. And so framing it up and structuring it that way can help people get into the, oh, like, oh, I guess she's okay. I guess she's saying something and I'm gonna say something, but Joe is making the call, so you can do it that way. There's little tiny things you can play around with, with like the order that you ask people if you're doing a round robin for people's, you know, yay, nay, or like, give your two, kind of two minute response to this question. The order in which you. Call on people, for lack of better phrase, can go into it. So maybe starting with the boss and saying like, two minutes max. Everyone's gonna go around the table. But having her not have the last say Having it for a certain distinct amount of time for everyone can help that as well. So if it's so bad that you have to get her out of the room physically, there are ways to structure that and do that. Hopefully it's not that bad. It sounds like she wants to get better at this, and so she's gonna be at least attuned to trying to get better. Hopefully you can tee this up to, as this is a huge opportunity for you, this is a huge practice session for you. This is where you get to showcase how you truly, you truly mean what you say. When you tell the team, I'm all about empowering you, when you tell the team I need you and want you to step up And I'm actually gonna need you to do that so I can lift out to other things. this could be the catalyst moment for you where people go, oh my gosh. Like ever since that one onsite, that planning meeting, she actually started to change. Like she's actually letting go of the reigns a little bit. If that's the message, if that's the takeaway people have coming out of that onsite. Wouldn't that be a positive thing? Wouldn't that be something to go after? Let's make that happen. So that might be in like the front run conversation and then checking in throughout, and then afterward doing the recap. So anyway, you've got the thematic. Listen, listen, listen. What did you learn? what did you hear people say about X, Y, and Z? And then some of these tactical and practical pieces in there as well. All right. And with that, Angela, I hope that some of this has been helpful for you and I hope that you have a very successful onsite planning meeting. Thank you so much for listening, and thank you so much for sending in a listener question. And if any other listeners want to send in a question then please feel free to email me at Emily at Next Level Coach, and I would be happy to answer your question as best I can in an upcoming episode. Otherwise, I will catch you next week on leveraging leadership.