I’ve been thinking about something small that keeps happening in meetings, and the more I notice it, the harder it is to ignore.
It isn’t dramatic, no one raises their voice and no one shuts anyone down. In fact, most of these meetings would be described as productive if you looked at the minutes afterwards, with decisions made, actions assigned, and everyone back at their desks within the hour.
But there’s a moment, sometimes just a flicker of one, where someone is halfway through explaining something and the room starts leaning forward as if to help them get there faster. You can almost feel the collective impatience, even when it’s polite.
I recognise that impatience because I’ve been the one generating it.
When you’re leading a team and carrying responsibility for results, it’s hard not to listen with a solution already forming in your head. Someone begins outlining a risk, or an idea that isn’t quite shaped yet, and you can see where it’s going before they do, or at least you think you can. So you step in, tidy it up, and summarise what they “really” mean because it feels efficient and feels like you’re helping.
The first few times I did this I didn’t think twice about it, and the meeting moved on while the project stayed on schedule and nothing broke.
What I didn’t see, and this took longer than I’d like to admit, was how the same people began to speak differently in later meetings. They hesitated more at the beginning, or arrived with their thoughts already tightened and almost rehearsed, with less wandering, less circling, and less thinking out loud.
At the time I thought that meant they were getting clearer, although now I’m not so sure.
There’s something about unfinished thinking that makes leaders uncomfortable because it takes time, doesn’t respect the agenda, wanders, and sometimes even contradicts itself halfway through. In a workplace that measures output in deadlines and deliverables, that wandering can feel indulgent.
I’ve also seen what happens when that wandering is cut short too often.
A few years ago, during a planning session, one of the team kept returning to what sounded like a minor operational issue. He wasn’t articulating it cleanly and would start, pause, change direction, and then try again from a slightly different angle. I remember glancing at the clock because we were already behind, and eventually I stepped in and reframed his concern into something neater that fit more comfortably into the broader strategy.
Everyone agreed with my version of what he meant.
Two months later we were dealing with a problem that had been sitting inside his original, messier explanation. It wasn’t catastrophic, but it cost us more time than we would have spent if we had let him finish properly the first time, and I don’t think anyone consciously blamed the meeting because we simply absorbed the consequence and moved on.
That’s often how it works in organisations.
Listening at work isn’t usually about dramatic failures but about these small compressions, moments where a thought could have stretched a little further but didn’t.
Over time leaders train their rooms, not intentionally but through habit. If you answer quickly people learn to shorten themselves, and if you ask and genuinely wait, even when it’s uncomfortable, people learn they don’t have to rush.
The shift from telling to asking sounds almost too simple when written down, because “Here’s the result we need, how do you think we should approach it?” doesn’t feel revolutionary. What’s difficult is resisting the urge to steer the response before it unfolds, because it’s harder than it looks to let someone else think in front of you without intervening.
Silence is part of it as well, and I still struggle with this because when a question lands in a meeting and no one speaks immediately, it feels exposed as though something has gone wrong. The instinct to fill that space is strong, and sometimes I still do it, although other times I manage to wait and someone usually steps into that space with something more considered than a quick answer would have been.
None of this turns leadership upside down because deadlines still matter and decisions still have to be made, and sometimes you do need to cut through a discussion and call it rather than prolong it unnecessarily. The point isn’t to romanticise endless dialogue but to recognise that the quality of thinking in a team is shaped quietly and repeatedly by how much unfinished thought the leader can tolerate.
I’m still working that out, and some days I’m better at it than others.
