Leadership is a quality rather than a job. We are all leaders and followers at different points in our lives. Many aspects of this book should be useful to those looking to grow as leaders as well as managers, and great managers should cultivate leadership not just in themselves but also within their teams.

This is an important distinction because while the role of a manager can be given to someone (or taken away), leadership is not something that can be bestowed. It must be earned. People must want to follow you.

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 decision-making meeting does the following:

• Gets a decision made (obviously)

• Includes the people most directly affected by the decision as well as a clearly designated decision-maker

• Presents all credible options objectively and with relevant background information, and includes the team’s recommendation if there is one

• Gives equal airtime to dissenting opinions and makes people feel that they were heard

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.

It’s not always comfortable to interrupt others and manage the flow of conversation in this manner, but it sends a strong signal that you believe better outcomes come from hearing a diversity of perspectives.