How do I stop dysfunctional behavior in team meetings?

Getting the Team to Decide How It Wants to Work Together

A group of people are sitting at a long table with laptops.

It would be great if you could put together a group of individuals, call it a “team,” and have it function in a cohesive and productive manner. This actually happens occasionally, but much more often, the different backgrounds, work styles, and variations in social competence lead to less happy results.

Almost always, team members have different histories and different types of business backgrounds ranging from long experience at one company, to no experience at all. Often, they’ve come from several different companies, which gives them diverse models of what is the best way to do things. These result in differing expectations and can lead to friction and conflict. If you don’t consciously and intentionally establish norms of behavior, what evolves will unfold unconsciously, and team behavior may turn into an out-of-control weed rather than a beautiful bonsai tree!

Establish rules of the road.

Often what’s lacking is a set of rules of engagement – a clear agreement among team members about what is acceptable behavior. These are agreements about how they want to communicate with each other and work together to boost efficiency and team effectiveness.

Rules of engagement may include: how to conduct meetings (setting agendas, arriving on time etc.), who should attend, how the team makes decisions, being fully present and attentive, coordinating hand-offs, reviewing work products, resolving conflicts, sharing information, honoring confidential conversations, having open and honest dialogue, following up on commitments and so on. Without clear parameters to serve as a framework, what generally happens is that meetings may or may not start on time and end on time, and are undisciplined, with some people dominating, lots of interrupting, unproductive arguments and some members withdrawing and not participating. If participants don’t take meeting protocol and meeting times seriously, do they also have a loose attitude about deadlines and launch dates? This is why it is important for the leader to strive to develop a culture of discipline.

Let the team decide .

To accomplish this, it’s very useful to have the team discuss and clarify how they want to work together and reach agreement on the behaviors that will guide how they interact and how they will make decisions. Defining a team’s norms, rules of engagement and core values should not be the sole product of the entrepreneur or a few co-founders, which is then mandated to the team, but rather it should be a team process.

Here are some suggestions to kickstart that discussion.

The following guidelines refer to communication in general, but apply particularly to meetings:

Create a specific agenda for the meeting and distribute it to everyone involved.
Reduce the potential for distractions – agree to shut off cell phones, etc.
Work collaboratively to solve problems. Actively support and cooperate with all team members. Share what you know. Be available for teammates when they need help, and if you see someone needs help, offer support without being asked. When you need support, a listening ear to run ideas by, or help with a problem you’re struggling with, ask for it.
Seek to understand before being understood.
Don’t dominate meetings just because you can. Actively seek out the views and ideas of all team members.
Provide timely feedback and accept all feedback as valid for consideration.
Try to be aware of the needs, motivations, feelings and skills of other team members.
Your team members have a wealth of experience, expertise, and insight. That’s why you recruited them. Listen carefully and be open to their ideas.. Avoid interrupting. Let one person speak at a time. Share the airtime equably. Discourage side conversations.
Encourage team members to speak up when the conversation gets off-track or goes in circles; otherwise the leader should bring the discussion back to the topic at hand.
Separate issues from people and focus on problems and solutions rather than personalities.
Speak honestly and openly.
Give your teammates positive reinforcement. Express appreciation for what people have accomplished. Celebrate achievements and milestones.
Make critical decisions by following a disciplined and systematic process to reduce bias and reactivity. Make the environment safe enough that hidden assumptions can be surfaced and challenged, and biases uncovered.
Everyone has permission to call out violations of these rules.

Team members have a responsibility to hold each other accountable. For example, establish deadlines and timeframes for actions or deliverables – and stick to them. Visionary Evangelists like to talk about ideas; Relationship Builders want us to be nice to each other and share our feelings. Managers of Execution excel at allocating tasks and responsibilities. They will push for closure on deadlines and deliverables.

The “Ideal Team” Exercise

This is a helpful and enjoyable exercise. It not only helps teams operate more effectively, but it also helps team members get to know each other better, and thus builds bonds and strengthens group coherence.

Ask each team member to bring to mind the best team they’ve ever been on and make a list of the characteristics that made that team special.
Then have each person report to the group their #1 point – for example that the people on the team genuinely cared about each other, listened to what everyone had to say, or trusted each other and describe what it meant to them personally, telling a brief anecdote illustrating how that showed up.
When everyone has had a chance to present their top point, continue sharing the other characteristics of their ideal team. Soon you will begin to see repeats, and this will be an indication that it’s time to finalize the list.
At this point, you can compile a master list of positive characteristics that would comprise an ideal team. (Most teams generate between 12 and 20 characteristics.)
Then ask them to rate their current team on those characteristics. The gap between the ideal and the actual immediately makes it clear where the team is not functioning well, and what needs to be changed. That leads naturally to a discussion about how the team members want to behave together.
This can help your team waste less time, have better meetings, and be more effective.
We worked through this process many years ago at Hagberg Consulting Group, drew up a list of principles, and created a large chart that we posted on the wall of our conference room. Members of the team were empowered to call out – live, during meetings – anyone who was not living up to one of the guidelines.

By going through this process of defining the ideal team characteristics and using this discussion to develop a list of rules of engagement, the team can police itself and members will feel empowered to point out when ineffective or sub-optimal behaviors are getting in the way of their performance, communication, problem solving, or decision making.

In other words, an effective team must monitor both its rational process and its interpersonal process in order to work most effectively together. The rational process involves, in a systematic and disciplined manner, defining problems, setting objectives, surfacing relevant facts, generating alternatives, and selecting the most viable actions. However, the interpersonal process, when team members don’t listen, interrupt each other, don’t support each other, get distracted by outside interruptions, etc., can offset the benefits of a clear rational process and have a damaging effect on team and meeting effectiveness. Establishing rules of engagement is simply a way of reducing the negative impact of some of the pitfalls and involving the entire team in working to improve its own performance. Discovering and defining the team’s norms can have a lasting positive impact on team culture and ultimately on results.

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Why smart leaders are the hardest to to work for.

Why Smart Leaders Struggle with People

By Rich Hagberg • March 30, 2026

Some of the smartest leaders you will ever meet are also some of the hardest people to work with. They are fast, perceptive, and unusually strong at solving hard problems. They see patterns others miss. They cut through ambiguity. They grasp systems, strategy, and complexity at a very high level. In many cases, those gifts are exactly why they became founders, technical leaders, or senior executives. And yet many of these same people leave a trail of strained relationships behind them. Their direct reports feel unseen or intimidated. Peers experience them as dismissive, impatient, or controlling. Their bosses admire their intellect but hesitate to trust them with broader leadership responsibility. At home, partners often feel emotionally alone. Over time, the leader becomes puzzled. They know they are smart, committed, and often right. So why do people keep pulling away, withholding the truth, or failing to fully follow them? The answer is that many high IQ leaders are working from an incomplete model of effectiveness. They assume that if they think clearly, argue logically, work hard, and produce results, the rest should take care of itself. That model can work for a long time in school, in technical roles, and in the early stages of a company. But eventually leadership becomes less about the quality of your own mind and more about your ability to work through the minds, emotions, motivations, and limitations of other people. That is where many smart leaders start to fail. The Core Problem Intelligence is not the problem. It is an asset. The problem is that intelligence often creates distortions. It can make a leader overestimate the power of logic, underestimate the importance of emotion, and develop habits that quietly damage trust. It can also create a subtle arrogance. Not always the loud kind, but the quieter assumption that if other people are slower, less rigorous, or more emotional, they must be the problem. Once a leader starts living inside that assumption, interpersonal trouble becomes almost inevitable. Five Common Patterns 1. Overreliance on reason Many bright leaders treat relationships as if they are mainly cognitive systems. If there is disagreement, they explain more. If someone is upset, they analyze the issue. If morale is low, they offer strategy. If a direct report feels discouraged, they give solutions. In their minds they are being helpful and efficient. But the other person often feels bypassed. Their emotional reality is treated as noise rather than information. Their need to be heard is mistaken for a need to be corrected. This is a major blind spot in analytical leaders. They often do not realize that understanding is not the same as persuasion, and problem solving is not the same as relationship building. A person can agree with your logic and still not trust you. They can accept your decision and still lose commitment because the relational cost was too high. 2. Impatience High horsepower people often process faster than the people around them. They see the answer early. They get bored by slower thinking, frustrated by repetition, and irritated when others need more context than they do. This can make them decisive and productive. It can also make them hard to work with. They interrupt. They jump ahead. They finish other people’s sentences. They push past concerns before others feel understood. They make those around them feel slow, clumsy, or not worth listening to. This teaches the organization something dangerous. It teaches people that the leader’s mind is the only one that really counts. The safest strategy becomes speaking briefly, deferring quickly, or waiting until the leader has already decided. Then the leader complains that the team is passive or not taking ownership. What they often do not see is that the culture has adapted to them. 3. Emotional underdevelopment hidden by cognitive strength Very bright people can use intellect as a defense against emotional discomfort. They can analyze instead of feel. They can explain instead of reflect. They can argue instead of absorb. They can move to abstraction when the deeper issue is shame, fear, insecurity, hurt, or loneliness. They are often unaware this is happening. They do not experience themselves as defended. They experience themselves as rational. But leadership requires emotional range. Not sentimentality. Not therapeutic language. Real range. The ability to notice your own reactions before they control your behavior. The ability to tolerate feeling wrong, uncertain, criticized, or less competent than you want to appear. The ability to stay present when another person is disappointed, anxious, or angry without immediately shutting it down, fixing it, or counterattacking. Leaders who cannot do this often become brittle. They look composed until challenged in just the wrong way. Then out comes defensiveness, coldness, contempt, withdrawal, or overcontrol. 4. Low interpersonal curiosity Smart leaders are often highly curious about ideas, products, markets, and strategy, but not necessarily about people. They know how to interrogate problems, but not always how to explore another person’s inner world. They ask what happened, but not what it felt like. They want the conclusion, not the hesitation. They want the output, not the psychology. People do not trust leaders simply because they are competent. They trust leaders who show that they are trying to understand them. Interpersonal curiosity communicates respect. A leader does not have to agree with someone to make that person feel seen. But when the leader skips that step, people feel reduced to functions rather than treated as human beings. 5. Weak awareness of impact Many smart leaders are genuinely surprised by how strongly people react to them. They tell themselves, “I was just being direct,” or “I was only asking a question.” In their own minds, intent carries most of the moral weight. If they did not mean harm, then the reaction seems excessive. But leadership does not work that way. Impact matters because power magnifies everything. A passing comment from a founder can ruin a weekend. A skeptical look from a senior executive can silence a room. A blunt critique can stick in someone’s head for months. High IQ leaders often underestimate this because they evaluate themselves from the inside while everyone else experiences them from the outside. That gap sits at the center of many 360 feedback problems. The Identity Trap There is another layer here. Some smart leaders have been rewarded for being exceptional for so long that they quietly build their identity around being the smartest person in the room. They may not say it out loud. They may even dislike arrogance in others. But inside, being quick, insightful, and right has become central to their sense of worth. Once that happens, other people’s competence can feel threatening. Feedback becomes harder to absorb. Collaboration becomes more performative than real. The leader listens selectively, especially when they believe the other person is less capable. They become invested in remaining the mental center of gravity. That is a dangerous place to lead from. It turns intelligence into status defense. It makes humility feel like loss. It makes genuine curiosity harder. And it makes the leader lonelier than they realize, because very few people feel close to someone who always has to occupy the top intellectual position. The Shift That Matters The good news is that these problems are workable. In fact, smart leaders often improve quickly once they see the pattern clearly. Their intelligence then becomes an ally rather than a shield. But improvement requires a shift in model. Leadership is not just about being right. It is about creating enough trust, clarity, and psychological safety that the best thinking of the group can emerge. Your job is not merely to contribute your intelligence. It is to increase the total intelligence of the system. That means treating emotions as information rather than interference. It means becoming curious about your own interpersonal signature. What happens to people in your presence when you are under pressure. Do they get more open or more cautious. More honest or more political. More energized or more tense. Those are not soft questions. They are the real scorecard of leadership impact. It also means slowing down your certainty just enough to make room for other minds. Ask one more question before concluding. Stay with the other person’s frame a little longer. Notice when you are moving to solution because you are uncomfortable with uncertainty or emotion. Let people finish. Reflect before rebutting. And it means understanding that warmth and strength are not opposites. Many analytical leaders fear that becoming more emotionally intelligent will make them softer or less respected. The opposite is usually true. Leaders become more effective when people experience them as both rigorous and fair, both clear and human, both demanding and safe enough to tell the truth to. Practical Experiments A few simple practices can help. In your next one on one, spend more time understanding than advising. In your next disagreement, summarize the other person’s view in a way they agree is accurate before stating your own. In your next leadership meeting, track how often you interrupt, redirect, or signal impatience. After a difficult conversation, ask yourself not only whether your point was valid, but what emotional residue you likely left behind. Ask two trusted people what it feels like to disagree with you, and listen without defending. Final Thought Human beings are not engineering problems. They are not solved by superior reasoning alone. They need respect, steadiness, dignity, trust, and emotional attunement. That is why so many smart leaders struggle. Not because they are too intelligent, but because they have leaned on the wrong part of themselves for too long. At a certain point in leadership, your mind stops being the main differentiator. Plenty of people are smart. What becomes rarer is the ability to combine intelligence with self awareness, candor with sensitivity, high standards with trust, and authority with emotional maturity. That is when a smart leader becomes someone people actually want to follow.