Dig beneath the surface of your last three meetings, and you may find a remarkably accurate story about your leadership style. The question is: are you willing to excavate it?

Why Meetings Are X-Rays of Leadership

Meetings are not just operational checkpoints. They are artefacts of how we prioritise, process, and persuade. Harvard Business Review noted that executives spend an average of 23 hours per week in meetings - and yet many leaders fail to treat these hours as diagnostic tools. If we examine them carefully, they reveal:

• How we default under pressure (directive vs exploratory).
  
  
• Where our blind spots surface (who speaks, who doesn’t).
  
  
• The hidden rules we enforce without saying a word.
  
  

This matters because meetings don’t just reflect leadership; they shape it. Culture is not built in strategy decks, it is built in the daily cadence of conversations.

The Leadership Fossil Framework

We call this the Leadership Fossil Framework - a three-part excavation tool for understanding your patterns. Each part corresponds to a layer of sediment in your last three meetings.

1. The Invitation Layer - Who Gets in the Room

Every meeting begins long before the calendar alert. Your invite list reflects your judgement of whose voice counts.

• Did you invite the same inner circle, or expand the circle?
  
  
• Did you balance functional representation, or lean heavily on one team?
  
  

One enterprise CEO we coached discovered she had not invited a single front-line manager to a quarterly review for two years. The result: brilliant strategy with no operational traction.

Reflection prompt: Who have you unintentionally excluded from your last three meetings, and what ideas might have stayed buried because of it?

Micro-action: For your next meeting, add one “peripheral” voice who sees the system differently.

2. The Flow Layer - How Time Is Spent

The way minutes are distributed reveals your hidden priorities.

• Did you spend 70% of the time on updates and less than 10% on decisions?
  
  
• Did debates sprawl without closure?
  
  
• Did you allow airtime for dissent, or hurry towards consensus?
  
  

We once worked with a Mumbai fintech founder who discovered 45 minutes of every weekly meeting were consumed by operational firefighting. Once he shifted those to a separate “fix-it huddle,” his strategic meetings finally became future-focused.

Reflection prompt: If an anthropologist coded your last three agendas, what story would they tell about your time allocation?

Micro-action: Use a simple timer to check how much of your meeting is spent on forward-looking discussion vs status reporting.

3. The Closure Layer - How Decisions Land

The closing moments of meetings are where leadership fingerprints are clearest.

• Do you leave with action clarity or vague agreements?
  
  
• Do people walk out energised or drained?
  
  
• Do you own the decision, or distribute it?
  
  

We saw a division head at a multinational routinely end meetings with “Let’s think on it.” The team left uncertain and stalled. A small shift to “Here’s what we’ve decided, here’s who owns it, and here’s when we’ll revisit” transformed accountability.

Reflection prompt: What do your last three closures reveal about your appetite for risk, ownership, and follow-through?

Micro-action: Always close with the “3 Cs”: clear decision, clear owner, clear timeline.

From Fossil to Mirror: Turning Insight into Practice

Excavation is not the goal - transformation is. Here’s how to operationalise your findings:

1. Conduct a meeting dig. After your next three meetings, spend 10 minutes coding them against the three layers.
   
   
2. Spot your leadership fossils. Identify one recurring pattern that reflects your default leadership style.
   
   
3. Test a corrective move. For the next cycle, introduce one deliberate shift (a new voice, a tighter flow, a sharper close).
   
   

Pro Tip: Don’t overhaul everything at once. The most lasting cultural shifts often come from one consistent new behaviour, repeated until it rewires expectation.

Common Excavation Traps

In our coaching, we’ve seen leaders fall into four predictable traps:

• Mistaking efficiency for effectiveness. Running meetings fast but shallow leaves deeper issues untouched. Remedy: allocate 20% of every meeting to exploring unknowns.
  
  
• Confusing airtime with inclusion. Letting everyone speak does not equal hearing diverse views. Remedy: assign one person to play “voice detective” and ensure unseen perspectives surface.
  
  
• Ending without energy. Leaders underestimate the psychological close. Remedy: end with a sentence that signals confidence in the team’s ability.
  
  
• Delegating the dig. Asking HR or chiefs of staff to diagnose patterns for you misses the point. Remedy: do the excavation yourself - it is your leadership mirror.
  
  

Executive Reflection Corner

If your last three meetings were the only record of your leadership legacy, what story would future colleagues tell?

In five minutes, sketch a “Meeting Fossil” of one past meeting: invite list, time distribution, closing energy. What stands out that you didn’t see in the moment?

The Payoff of Meeting Archaeology

Leaders who practise meeting archaeology often discover benefits beyond the conference room:

• Sharper strategic decisions because meetings stop drowning in operational detail.
  
  
• Stronger cultural signals as inclusion moves from rhetoric to routine.
  
  
• Higher trust as people see clarity and follow-through consistently.
  
  

This is not about perfecting meeting etiquette. It is about using meetings as live data on how you think and lead.

Your Next Strategic Move

This week, excavate your last three meetings using the Leadership Fossil Framework. Circle one behaviour that you now see more clearly, and commit to shifting it in your next meeting. If you want to go further, download our Meeting Mind Map assessment tool to guide your analysis.

Your meetings are fossils. The question is not whether they reveal your leadership style - it is whether you are willing to look closely enough to change the imprint you leave behind.

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Team SHIFT