The meeting isn't the problem. The listening is.
Updated: Nov 3
There's a line in a recent article on meeting science that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.
Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, an organisational psychologist at the University of Hamburg, has spent years studying what actually happens inside meetings. Her observation is simple, and a little uncomfortable:
"Often, leaders talk the most, which is also why they often think their meetings are pretty good."
I laughed when I read it. Then I stopped laughing, because I recognised myself in it. I have run meetings, sessions and classes where I talked the most, left feeling energised, and assumed everyone else felt the same.
They didn't. They just didn't say so.
Meeting science is really people science
The article, by Lesley Evans Ogden for Knowable Magazine, summarises a new review of more than thirty years of research on meetings, led by Liana Kreamer with Steven Rogelberg and Jon Gray. The numbers are what you'd expect. There are close to a billion meetings a day around the world. Chief executives spend nearly three-quarters of their working day in them. And most of us leave a fair share of them wondering why we were there.
What's interesting is what the research says makes the difference. It isn't the slides. It isn't the software. It's almost entirely human:
whether the people leading the meeting listen, or simply ask questions and wait for their turn;
whether there's a little small talk before the business begins;
whether quieter people have a way to contribute at all;
whether humour brings people together, or quietly shuts some of them out.
In other words, meetings succeed or fail on the same things every conversation does. Business is done by people. Meetings are just where we can watch it happening, in real time, with the clock running.
Questions only work if you're listening to the answer
One of Lehmann-Willenbrock's studies looked at leaders who asked their teams questions. You might expect that asking questions is always good. It wasn't.
Respectful, attentive questioning improved how teams performed. Asking questions without really listening to the answers did not.
That's worth sitting with. A question is not a technique. It's an offer of attention, and people can tell immediately whether the attention is real.
This is something I see constantly in coaching. Capable professionals, many of them working in English as a second or third language, arrive with a list of "good questions" ready to use. And then, in the meeting, they're so busy preparing their next sentence that they don't hear the answer to the last one. Their English isn't the problem. Their attention is somewhere else. (I wrote about that in the first issue of The Chapters, Speaking from the now.)
Presence over perfection. A slightly clumsy question, followed by real listening, will build more trust than a perfect question followed by a performance.
The five minutes before the meeting starts
Another finding: small talk before a meeting predicted how effective the meeting turned out to be. The effect was especially strong for introverted participants.
Many of the people I work with dread those five minutes more than the meeting itself. The agenda can be prepared. The chat about the weekend, the traffic or the football can't, and in a second language it can feel like the most exposed moment of the day.
But those minutes aren't a warm-up for the real thing. For a lot of people in the room, they are the real thing: the moment they decide whether you're someone they can trust, disagree with, or bring an idea to. Connection over correctness. Nobody remembers the preposition you got wrong while asking about their weekend. They remember that you asked.
Silence is a strategy, not a failure
My favourite finding in the article is the oldest one. A 2009 study found that groups who wrote their ideas down silently, at the same time, in a shared space, generated better results than groups who brainstormed out loud.
Think about who that helps. The person who needs a few seconds to find the right words. The introvert who won't fight for airtime. The professional thinking in one language and speaking in another. Spoken brainstorming quietly rewards whoever is fastest and loudest. Silent brainstorming rewards whoever has the best idea.
I've come to think of silence as one of the most generous things you can offer in a conversation: the space where nobody is performing, where the other person can actually hear what they think. Most meetings sell more talk. The research suggests that sometimes the better meeting has less of it.
Humour, and who gets to use it
The article also describes research on humour at a scientific conference. Well-timed jokes built connection, but joke-telling was much more common among senior, established speakers than among early-career researchers or scientists from under-represented groups. Lehmann-Willenbrock's work in German companies found something similar from another angle: humour boosted ideas and performance mostly when people already knew each other well.
Play matters. I'd go as far as to say that play is where real fluency lives, because it's the only state in which people stop monitoring every word they say. But play needs safety. If only the most senior people in the room feel free to be light, the meeting isn't playful. It's a stage.
Why staying quiet costs more than you think
One more finding, and it's the one I'd most like international professionals to read. A large study of more than 9,000 workers in Norway, led by the Harvard economist David Deming, found that people who spent more time in meetings went on to see stronger wage growth and more on-the-job learning, possibly because meetings put them in contact with more senior colleagues. The researchers are careful to say the study shows a link, not a cause. They describe meetings as "the broccoli of work": widely disliked, and probably good for us anyway.
If that link holds even partly, the meeting is where careers are quietly being shaped. And if you spend every meeting rehearsing what you might say, waiting for a perfect sentence, the room never gets to meet you.
What I'd suggest, if you lead or join meetings in English
None of this needs a new framework. It needs a little more attention to the human parts:
Arrive two minutes early, and start the conversation yourself. One question about the other person is enough.
When you ask a question, stay with the answer. Don't prepare your reply until they've finished.
If you run the meeting, notice how much you're talking. If it's most of the time, the meeting probably isn't as good as it feels.
Give silence a job. Ask people to write their ideas down for two minutes before anyone speaks.
Say one clear thing. Not the perfect thing. One clear thing, early, so your voice is in the room.
The English is rarely the real obstacle. It's the excuse we give ourselves for staying quiet. The voice is the work.
If this resonated: the free Executive Communication Diagnostic takes a few minutes and shows where clarity, presence and connection are costing you in real conversations, including the meeting where you'd like to say more than you do.
— Carl, speak be.
Sources: Lesley Evans Ogden, "Can science save meetings?", Knowable Magazine, 2026 (also republished by Popular Science). The research described above is summarised from that article, which draws on a 2026 Annual Review by Liana Kreamer, Steven Rogelberg and Jon Gray.
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