You are what you meet

Hi there

I’m in Dubai this week - a place I’ve never really visited beyond the airport. I’m here working with a leadership team for the second time, and while preparing for tomorrow’s session, an expression I’ve used before came back to me:

You are what you meet.

We often say "you are what you eat". But when it comes to teams, especially leadership teams, I’m convinced that what really shapes you is the way you meet.

You can have the best intentions about the kind of team you want to be. You can talk about purpose, clarity, impact, behaviours. But if most of your time together is spent in reactive, transactional meetings — because that's what you're in the habit of doing — that’s what will define you in practice.

When we worked together a few months ago, this team developed real clarity about how they wanted to operate. How they wanted to show up for each other and for the business. The strategic questions they wanted to wrestle with. They left energised. There was a genuine sense of renewal.

And then habit crept back in.

They already had established rhythms and standing agenda. The easiest thing to do was to continue the patterns they knew so well. And so, despite the clarity, they found themselves back in status updates, slide decks and information sharing that didn’t really reflect the team they said they wanted to be.

It wasn’t a lack of commitment. It was a lack of redesign.

There’s a quiet ease around regular meetings. All you really need to do is show up and fill the time. Keep things moving. Unless you deliberately interrupt that pattern — and that takes real effort — the mechanics of your meetings will quietly kill your aspirations.

If you want to be more strategic, create space for strategic conversation. If you want more candour, design for candour. If you want shared ownership, don’t have one person driving every agenda and every slide.

Looking at the way your team meets, which patterns do you need to interrupt and redesign for the year ahead?

Until next time,
Simon