When setting up a meeting there are many questions one can ask oneself about the way the meeting shall be run. It’s rarely sufficient to stop at who is invited and what is the agenda.

Naturally, one can also over-engineer a meeting by trying to define too many aspects of it. However, asking too few questions about the design makes it easy to keep meetings within a scope of a casual, almost informal conversation that addresses only tactical issues.

These meetings are mainly of the reactive kind, and yet, depending on the maturity of the team they can be very effective. They help the team learn to see and handle their work. Such meetings are owned by the work that needs to be done, more than the people participating in the meeting.

The same can happen when there is a need to see how the work contributes to the work being done by other teams or to the objective defined by the organization.

Something different happens whenever people ask themselves what it is, that they want to get out of the meeting beyond doing the work.

Coming together in a meeting creates the space to discuss the work, which can be an invitation to enable people to do their work. That is where leaders can choose how they enable people to do their work. Some choose to teach by explaining how it needs to be done, others choose to have their subordinates describe their challenges and the help they look for.

It’s a choice that determines the ownership of the meeting.

The choice results from the leader’s willingness to take risks, trust themselves and be curious about the subordinate’s abilities.