Real leaders and meetings: how effectively do you bring out the leadership in the people who work for you?

• Author: Wiesner, Pat
• Position: On Management

WANT TO KNOW IF YOU'RE PART OF A GROUP that has a good leader? Next time you are in a group meeting, watch what happens when somebody besides the boss says something like, "I've got an idea! Let's ..."

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Note the reaction. If everyone in the room, including the speaker, hesitates or sort of glances at the boss as if waiting for permission to continue, this group could use better leadership. When this doesn't happen, you know that the management is good because the people trust themselves.

Meetings are a great place to check out ourselves (or other managers) and our ability to bring out the best qualities in others. The group dynamics and individual performances will tell us much about the leadership present.

Meetings can also be a forum for self-aggrandizement by weak managers: "Enough about me, now lets talk about my ideas!"

If this sounds like your manager (or worse, if it sounds like you) at your meetings, you need new leadership--assuming that one of the main goals of leadership is to develop new leadership and grow people.

Here's what successful managers have told me:

Use meetings to groom as well as to "do." Every meeting has a main purpose. Make sure that you remind yourself before every meeting that this is a great opportunity to help someone grow and become closer to the person he or she wants to become. This should be the secondary purpose of the meeting. Use the meeting to help get someone ready to do your job.

It's the public-ness of a meeting that makes it so powerful. Positive individual results in a meeting are multiplied by the number of people in the meeting. If you make me feel good about myself in a group of 10 people, I will feel 10 times more reinforced than if it were just the two of us.

More importantly, negative individual results are multiplied by 100 times the number of people in the group. If you make me feel like a jerk in a group of five people, it is 500 times more destructive to me than if it were just the two of us.

So if you have something bad to tell me, do so in private. In public, ask for my...