Running the room so the meeting produces a decision instead of another meeting.
Facilitating a meeting is a job separate from participating in it. The facilitator owns whether the group reaches the outcome the meeting existed for — which means deciding beforehand what that outcome is, keeping the discussion pointed at it, noticing who hasn't spoken, cutting off the thread that belongs elsewhere, and making sure that what was decided leaves the room in a form someone can act on. Most bad meetings aren't bad because the people are bad at meetings. They're bad because nobody was doing this job, and a discussion with no one steering it drifts toward whatever is loudest or most comfortable.
Schedules eleven substantial items into a thirty-minute slot and regards this as ambitious rather than arithmetically impossible. Items one and two receive a thorough and genuinely valuable discussion. Items three through eleven are read aloud in the final ninety seconds and deferred. The same eleven items appear on next week's agenda, where items one and two, now resolved, are replaced by two new ones, preserving the total at eleven in perpetuity.
Believes fairness means everyone speaks on everything and goes around the table accordingly, including the four people with no stake in the item and nothing to add, who nonetheless produce ninety seconds each because they have been asked directly in front of colleagues. Equal airtime is achieved. Relevant airtime is whatever remains, which by then is not much. The two people who needed a real discussion get four minutes at the end.
Opens the meeting with a clear plan and surrenders it within four minutes to whoever is most confident about something else. Watches the discussion travel to a topic affecting two of the nine attendees and does not intervene, on the grounds that it does seem important and they are talking with such conviction. The meeting ends having thoroughly addressed a subject it was not for, and the seven attendees with nothing to contribute leave having contributed nothing, as arranged.
Presides over a genuinely excellent discussion in which real decisions are reached, and writes none of it down, trusting the shared understanding evident in the room. The shared understanding lasts about a day and a half. Three people later recall three different decisions, all sincerely, and the topic returns to a future agenda as though it had never been discussed, which for every practical purpose it had not.
Your weekly team meeting reliably runs over and reliably decides nothing. What would you do — shorten it, or start each item by naming the decision it needs to reach and who makes it?
Two attendees start a detailed technical debate relevant to only them. What would you do — let it run because it's clearly productive, or stop it, park it, and put the two of them in a separate slot?
A decision gets made and the meeting ends on time and everyone seems aligned. What would you do — trust the shared understanding, or spend the last two minutes writing down what was decided, by whom, and by when, and posting it where the absent people will see it?