4 meeting mistakes that kill accountability
Stop running your own meetings
Hey Team,
I started this newsletter 3 years ago to share all the messy parts of my leadership journey, in the hope it would help just one other person. I haven’t skipped a single Tuesday morning since. And we just hit 28 THOUSAND subscribers (what the hell). So just a huge, huge thank you for being here.
This week I'm running an online workshop on the topic you've been asking me about more than anything else: 1:1s. Seats are limited and it's this Thursday, you do not want to leave this one until later. Register here.
Most managers are exhausted by meetings
We prep the agenda, block the time and show up ready. And yet somehow, it feels like we’re the only one in the room who actually cares??
Nobody’s engaged or driving anything forward. Then somehow, next week, we’ll all do it again.
I felt this way for years, and since building Fresh Leadership World, I’ve sat with hundreds of managers who feel exactly this way too. Good, brilliant, smart managers who are genuinely trying. But something just isn’t sticking when it comes to our meetings.
And just like I did, we often default to blaming it on the team or the company culture. And don’t get me wrong those things play a part. But when I moved into a Director position, I quickly realised I couldn’t blame others for the lack of accountability in my team any longer. So I started looking inward at my own behaviour inside meetings, and how I might be unintentionally damaging accountability in the team.
And here’s what I found. 4 mistakes I was making repeatedly that were killing accountability from the inside.
So let’s unpack them all, including how I turned every single one of them around:
1. I was running the meeting myself, every time
I thought it was my job. So I’d set the agenda, talk through the updates, fill the silences, come up with the solutions. I was the one holding it all together every time and it felt like that was what good leadership looked like.
But what I actually felt was exhausted. I was doing all the work in the room while everyone else sat back and received. And no matter how much energy I brought into it, I’d leave feeling like nothing had really landed.
So I tried something new… I appointed someone on my team to run the meeting instead. I gave them the chair, the agenda, and the responsibility of keeping the group on track and making sure we all left with clarity on next steps. Then I rotated it every week, someone new took the wheel.
The energy in the room changed immediately. When people know they’re going to have to run it at some point, they show up differently to every session. They start paying attention to how the meeting flows, what works, what doesn’t. They develop empathy for how difficult it actually is to run a good meeting, and that made them better contributors even when it wasn’t their turn.
It also just became a bit more fun. People were building real skills like presenting, chairing, holding a room, and you could see them grow into it week by week.
2. I was bringing the data instead of letting my team bring it
For a long time, I thought being prepared meant I should be the one with all the numbers. I’d pull the data together in the spreadsheet, then walk the room through the metrics, explain where things stood etc.
But what I didn’t realise was that I was doing my team’s accountability work for them every single week.
Because the moment I imputted that data, I was taking ownership of it. I was the one who’d looked at the numbers, interpreted them, decided what they meant. By the time I presented them to the room, my team weren’t accountable for those results. I was.
The process of finding the data, understanding it, and then having to explain it to a room of people is where ownership actually gets built. When someone has to stand up (in person or virtually) and tell the group where a number is and why it’s there, something shifts in them. They stop being someone who works on a thing, and instead become someone who is responsible for a thing. That’s the difference between task completion and genuine accountability.
Now it works like this: Tisha, our Social Media Executive, is responsible for our social performance, so each week, she pulls the data and reports on it to the team in our 10am meeting. Levi, our Ops Manager, does the same for lead generation and workflows. I’m not telling them what the numbers say, they’re telling me. And because they know they’re going to have to explain it, they think harder about the why behind it before they even enter the room.
Every update, every metric, every status should come from them, not you.
3. I was answering my own questions
My job as a leader in the meetings is to ask the questions nobody else was asking:
Why are the numbers there?
What are we doing about it?
What’s the risk if we don’t act?
Who owns this? By when?
But I’d ask the question, feel the silence when nobody had an immediate answer, and then fill it myself because I felt awkward. Every time. The second nobody answered immediately I’d jump straight in with my own answer.
I told myself I was being helpful and that I didn’t want anyone to feel put on the spot. But what I was actually doing was taking the accountability straight back.
The answer to your question isn’t yours to give. It belongs to your team, and the only way they find it is if you stay quiet long enough for them to get there. That silence feels slightly uncomfortable (I know, I’ve sat in it many times stood on stages doing Q&As), but that discomfort is the feeling of accountability being built in real time.
Ask the question. Then stop talking. Give them space to think and own.
4. I was always the ideas person
For a long time, I thought one of my greatest strengths as a leader was being the ideas person in the room.
Someone would raise a problem and I’d already be halfway to the solution before they’d even finished speaking. I could move fast, unblock things, and keep momentum high.
But eventually, I noticed that the more I over-functioned in meetings, the more my team under-functioned.
The faster I answered, the less they thought.
The quicker I solved, the less ownership they took.
The more I rescued the room, the more the room relied on being rescued.
And eventually, I realised I hadn’t built a highly accountable team. I’d built a highly dependent one.
Leadership researcher Liz Wiseman talks about this in her work on Multipliers. Intelligent, capable leaders can accidentally diminish the people around them by becoming the constant source of answers, ideas, and direction.
If someone consistently jumps in with the answer, eventually the group learns:
“Wait for Heather.”
Now, when somebody raises a challenge in a meeting, I try incredibly hard not to be the first person to fill the silence.
Instead, I ask:
“What do you think we should do?”
“What options have we got here?”
Because leadership should never be about trying to prove you are the smartest person in the room, but instead, building a room full of smart people.
Want to go deeper?
Meetings set the direction, but 1:1s are where accountability lives or dies.
If your 1:1s keep getting cancelled, or they happen but they feel awkward and surface-level, or you’re saving the real conversations for the annual appraisal and wondering why things keep slipping, that’s exactly what I’m tackling in our next live workshop.
I’m going to walk you through the exact 1:1 system I’ve refined over years of managing teams and coaching leaders.
See you there,
H
P.S. If you want a system that helps you actually follow through on all of this, we're building something inside Custard right now that I think you're going to love. A brand new 1:1 module that takes everything I've talked about today and puts it directly in the hands of your managers. It's coming very soon. Join the Custard waitlist here.