The Meeting That Was Really a Ritual
David T. Norman | Supercharge Leadership and Culture
Published on Leadership Perspectives | davidtnorman.com
Here's what I've observed after five decades of walking into other people's organizations. The meeting on the calendar and the meeting that happens are often two different events. One is scheduled to make a decision. The other exists to perform the appearance of one.
You know the second kind. The agenda is thorough. The slides are clean. Everyone nods at the right moment. And nothing changes, because nothing was ever meant to. The gathering was a ritual, not a decision. It gave people the feeling of leadership without the substance of it.
How Culture Learns to Perform
Culture is not the poster in the lobby. Culture is what people learn to expect from the room. When your meetings reward attendance over honesty, and polish over disagreement, people learn the lesson quickly. They stop bringing the hard question. They bring the safe one instead.
This is the quiet cost of ritual leadership. It does not fail loudly. It fails by slow erosion. The talented people notice first, because they are the ones who came to build something and found a performance instead.
Timothy R. Clark's work on psychological safety describes what real teams need: the freedom to challenge the status quo without fear of punishment. A ritual meeting offers the opposite. It offers safety only to those who agree.
Turning the Ritual Back Into a Decision
The fix is not another framework. It is a shift in what the room is for. Try three moves in your next real meeting:
Name the decision out loud. State what will be decided today and who owns the call. If nothing will be decided, ask why the meeting exists.
Ask for the disagreement first. Instead of asking who agrees, ask what worries people. Learning language opens the room; evaluation language closes it.
Leave with one owned commitment, not five assigned tasks. Ownership travels further than instruction.
None of this is complicated. It is simply uncomfortable, because it trades the comfort of the ritual for the friction of the real thing. That trade is your responsibility as a leader. The room becomes a place where thinking happens together, not a stage where compliance performs.
Community is built in these moments. Not in the values statement, but in the ordinary meeting where someone finally says the true thing and the room holds steady. That is where trust starts. That is where culture actually lives. A leader who protects that steadiness earns something no agenda can manufacture: people who tell the truth on purpose.
A Note From David
If this resonated, you'll find the full argument in my new book, The Eunuch Theory of Leadership: The Field Guide to Bureaucracy Pretending to Be Leadership. It's the field guide for anyone tired of watching process stand in for real leadership. Available now on Amazon.
Disclosure: AI tools were used in the research, outlining, or editing of this work. All arguments, insights, and final content reflect the author's own judgment and responsibility.