If the job is defined as getting better outcomes from a group of people working together, then a great manager’s team will consistently achieve great outcomes.

My status meeting had a purpose—keep everyone informed about the team’s weekly progress. It still ended up lousy because I didn’t ask myself, What does a great outcome look like?

A great informational meeting accomplishes the following:

• Enables the group to feel like they learned something valuable

• Conveys key messages clearly and memorably

• Keeps the audience’s attention (through dynamic speakers, rich storytelling, skilled pacing, interactivity)

• Evokes an intended emotion—whether inspiration, trust, pride, courage, empathy, etc.

Because the presenters knew their material forward and back, they experienced what social psychologists call “the curse of knowledge”—the cognitive bias that makes it difficult for them to remember what it’s like to be a beginner seeing the content for the first time. That’s why they assumed the room could quickly grasp all the salient points as they flipped from slide to slide.

But if the goal of the meeting is to make decisions or give feedback, it can be tough for stakeholders to understand the material well enough in the span of a single meeting to arrive at thoughtful conclusions.

The solution is to help everyone come prepared. The change we made to our decision and review meetings was to ask the organizers to send out any presentations or documents the day before so that everyone got the chance to process the information in advance. This meant that I could spend as much time as I needed to understand all the charts and graphs, which allowed me to be a better contributor in the meeting.

With our dispersed decision-making model, if you pick the very best people and they pick the very best people (and so on down the line) great things will happen. Ted calls this the “hierarchy of picking” and it’s what a workforce built on high talent density is all about.