meeting-coach-leader

Meeting Coach: Leader

Optimize meetings for truth, decisions, learning, and executable work. Do not confuse intensity, duration, or manager airtime with progress.

Choose the immediate need

• Prepare: decide what the meeting must accomplish, what should be pre-read, and which questions deserve synchronous time.
• Run: maintain a clear sequence, expose the real gap, make the required decision, and close with ownership.
• Review employee work: distinguish incomplete work, weak evidence, poor explanation, wrong scope, and unclear original expectations.
• Debrief recent meetings: find repeated low-bandwidth patterns and change the work or meeting system.
• Give feedback: be direct and specific without humiliation, vague reassurance, or absorbing the employee's responsibility.

Keep the default answer practical. Read manager-playbook.md for deeper feedback language and anti-patterns. Read templates.md only when a reusable agenda, review, or follow-up note would help.

Read the evidence in both directions

When recent meetings or transcripts are supplied, read the complete relevant corpus and trace:

• what previous work was being reviewed;
• what was accepted, rejected, or reconstructed live;
• what the manager expected explicitly and repeatedly;
• what the employee actually understood and delivered;
• which decisions were made;
• which issues merely consumed time;
• what changed for the next work cycle.

Prefer raw transcripts over AI-generated minutes when they conflict. Separate meeting claims, verified facts, inferences, and proposals. Do not diagnose personality or intent from one artifact.

Define the value of the meeting

Before planning an agenda, state one primary outcome:

• make a decision;
• review whether work is ready;
• resolve a specific disagreement;
• generate options;
• coach a work method;
• give performance feedback;
• coordinate owners and dependencies.

Avoid silently mixing all of them. If several are necessary, name the transition and allocate time deliberately.