5 characters likely to derail your meeting – and how to manage them

If you want to run an effective meeting you’ll know how important it is to make productive use of the collective time. It’s a real art form. Meetings have to be beneficial and productive or they become very costly.

Meetings can easily get derailed, go off at tangents and have unfinished agendas. Sometimes you feel like you spend the whole meeting receiving a recap from the last meeting. It can be hard to keep things on track.

We wrote this blog to help you avoid all of this. You’ll learn how to identify the derailers, deal with them and make your meetings all the more productive.

The meeting derailers

There are some behaviours that are commonly seen in meetings that are both disruptive and can crush psychological safety, so it’s important to understand them. We’ve profiled five, there are almost certainly more. One organisation we work with calculated they wasted over 1000 man hours in unproductive meetings last year – you can achieve a lot with that.

So, let’s meet them, see what drives their agenda – and manage them.

The know it all

A know it all has an inflated perception of their own knowledge and they are determined to let you know about it. Having someone with this behaviour in a meeting throws it off because often they are loudest on topics that they do not actually know much about but have a strong opinion on. They will state their opinions as facts, with a lot of confidence and certainty. Other people (often those with the actual expertise) withdraw and don’t come forward. This behaviour both diminishes psychological safety but also frequently leads to bad decision making because the appropriate voices are not being heard.

How to deal with them:

1. Ask them ‘how do you know that?’. It will surface whether they have legitimate knowledge or whether they are just blustering
2. Bring in any actual experts you have in the room and explicitly ask them for their perspective
3. Offer some counter views or different perspectives to the wider group

The phone addict

People being surgically attached to their phones (or laptops) when you are trying to engage people in a meeting is both frustrating and can derail a meeting in many ways. Often they think they are multitasking but actually are out of rapport with you and the rest of the group. They can come across as rude and, on a more practical note, they are not paying attention so will probably miss important details.

How to deal with them:

1. Ask at the beginning of the meeting if anyone has a legitimate reason to be using their tech during the meeting. If it’s called out upfront it is less likely to affect the group dynamics.
2. If you are coming up to something you know this person needs to listen to, name check them before the section starts. Something like ‘Joe, I know you’ll have something to say on this next topic’. It will kick them out of their scrolling phone trance.
3. You could have sections of the meeting where you ask everyone to put their tech away, particularly if it is common practice.

The mismatcher

A mismatcher is someone who will take your meeting all over the place by contradicting and arguing with everything everyone says. They will avoid consensus and agreement at all costs, pointing out irrelevant nuances or some detail that hasn’t been discussed or argue that ‘we are not solving the right problem anyway’. Some people actually do this for fun, but it’s not fun if you are trying to get through an agenda or make an important decision.

How to deal with them:

1. Firstly you need to establish whether they have a legitimate point. Mismatchers are often overruled because they challenge the group thinking, but listening to them may be beneficial. If you know someone well, you will know whether they mismatch on everything (and therefore it’s a pattern) or whether this point needs some careful consideration.
2. Throw it out to the group – does anyone else share this perspective?
3. Explicitly note their point as an action to follow up after the meeting (where you can speak to them one on one about it rather than have the meeting derailed).

The information junkie

The information junkie will keep asking for more and more data, numbers, figures, facts. They cannot know enough on this topic! This is particularly derailing when the meeting is supposed to be high level, providing an overview or a summary of something. This behaviour can also feel challenging to others, who may feel threatened if they don’t have the detail to hand.

How to deal with it –

1. Ask them why this is needed and why now? Checking the relevancy of their enquiry will help you (and the group) separate a legitimate challenge from a casual enquiry.
2. Defer it by inviting them to talk directly to the expert on this topic – outside of the meeting.
3. If you have a lot of people in this category (this is common in technical organisations) then ask the relevant experts to prepare a pre read or pre watch so that the people who need it can get all the information before the meeting.

The gossiper

Gossipers are usually good storytellers and sometimes you don’t realise you’ve been derailed until it’s too late. People in this category derail a meeting by finding a hook to someone to tell everyone a story about them, or throw in an intriguing comment about someone that others fixate on. This behaviour can waste a lot of time but it is also unprofessional and can turn meetings into nothing more than the local bar.

How to deal with it –

1. Light humour can be a useful way to deflect this behaviour without shaming people. ‘Well that sounds very intriguing but I’m not sure it helps us with the project plan’.
2. Address the whole room (as it’s common for the group to get sucked in). ‘Look folks, now is not the time to be discussing x’s meeting with y, let’s move on shall we?’
3. If someone is a serial gossiper, it could be useful to give them feedback outside of the meeting. Many people gossip not out of malice, but to try and become popular by sharing information so privately explaining that you would rather they didn’t do this in the meeting will more likely appeal to them without shaming them.

In conclusion

For all their evils, meetings have a critical role to play in organisations, bringing people together to have meaningful discussion or make important decisions. They also have the side benefit of strengthening relationships and team building – if they are run well and everyone can participate.

Running good meetings takes courage and emotional regulation, if disruptive behaviours trigger you, you will be controlled by them. Most people aren’t disruptive intentionally, they just have habits and coping strategies that lead to behaviours that feel disruptive in these situations. Remember your role is not to change their behaviour entirely, it’s just to stop it derailing your meeting.