These three toxic power moves kill meetings

Meetings are breeding grounds for three highly toxic power moves:

• AMPLIFICATION: The boss speaks, and suddenly it’s gospel. People start self-censoring, sugarcoating bad news, and swallowing their dissenting opinions.
• INCOMPETENCE: When a leader can’t run a meeting, it drains the room’s energy. People leave annoyed and wondering why they bothered to show up.
• JERK BEHAVIOR: Bullies, interrupters, and blowhards hijack the room. Collaboration isn’t just stifled—it’s publicly executed.

These power moves reduce meetings to lifeless, performative rituals where the people who hold the most power call the shots and everyone else plays defense.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Design your meetings to defang these power moves, and you’ll create a space where people speak up, push back, and bring bolder and better ideas to the table.

Amplification: When Power Overpowers

Jade Rubick, former VP of engineering at New Relic, remembers the exact moment he became “brilliant.” It wasn’t because of a sudden surge in IQ or creativity. It was his promotion to senior director, accompanied by a glowing speech in front of his peers.

Overnight, everything changed. In meetings, people went out of their way to praise his ideas. “Person after person would go out of their way to say why my suggestion was the ‘right approach,’ ” Rubick recalls. “All of a sudden, my ideas were BRILLIANT…All of a sudden, I was a different person, a Very Important Person.”

What Rubick experienced was a classic case of what Professor Adam Galinsky calls amplification: the invisible megaphone leaders inherit when they step into a position of power. A passing comment becomes a marching order. An offhand suggestion rockets to the top of the team’s priority list. A poorly timed yawn during your presentation plunges you into a spiral of self-doubt: “They hate this. They hate me.” Instead of focusing on the work, people start decoding every glance, sigh, or eyebrow twitch as part of a high-stakes game of corporate charades.

When amplification takes over meetings, people start filtering their ideas or stop sharing them altogether. They nod along like bobble-heads and, before long, the room turns into an echo chamber—parrots squawking back the leader’s words instead of expressing their own. Here’s how you can address it.

1. Dial down the talking

Research shows that high-performing teams share airtime more equally. In a perfect world, leaders would recognize that and adjust accordingly. But self-awareness isn’t always their strong suit. And the more power they hold, the less likely anyone is to tell them they’re hogging the mic.

If you’re dealing with a leader who can’t stop steamrolling the room, there are ways to take back the room. At one organization, team members came up with a creative solution: a miniature stuffed horse. “If someone is too long-winded, anyone can toss the horse in front of that person as a signal to ‘stop beating a dead horse,’” one team member explained.

Now, chucking stuffed animals at your coworkers—especially the powerful ones—is probably a career-limiting move. But the spirit of the idea is sound: Find a way to flag the airtime hogs.

Fortunately, technology offers a safer option. Today, tools like Fireflies.AI and Equal track metrics like talk-to-listen ratios and flag monologues. Some even analyze gender dynamics, surfacing when women and nonbinary participants are getting drowned out.

Another way to stop people from hijacking the conversation is to get them to speak last. At Pixar, cofounder Ed Catmull understood the risks of speaking first. In brainstorming meetings, he deliberately held back his input until the end so his team could explore ideas without the gravitational pull of his amplified words. Catmull understood what many leaders overlook: New ideas are fragile. As he put it, they need “protection” from getting pancaked by heavy-handed forces like a leader’s amplification.

That’s also why Catmull struck a deal with Steve Jobs when Jobs was CEO of Pixar. They agreed that Jobs would sit out of Pixar’s legendary Braintrust meeting, where senior creatives critiqued early-stage films. As Catmull put it, Jobs’s “bigger-than-life presence would make it harder to be candid.”

2. Don’t amplify ambiguity

We’ve all been there: Your boss drops a cryptic meeting invite on your calendar and your brain immediately spirals. Am I in trouble? Is this about that thing I said in Slack? Am I getting fired? Amplification kicks in, and that vague invite snowballs into employees’ worst-case scenarios.

This kind of ambiguity is the second type of communication that Adam Galinsky, a social psychologist and Columbia business school professor, says is prone to amplification. When leaders say or do something vague, employees fill in the blanks—often with their own worst fears.

Galinsky’s advice for leaders prone to amplification is simple: Be transparent. A quick message like “Hey, I need to see you later—it’s nothing to worry about” can save your team from hours of anxiety.

And if your calendar is public, don’t leave room for speculation. Trust me, your team is watching your calendar if it’s public, and they’re overanalyzing every entry, especially the vague ones. Don’t give their imaginations room to fill in the blanks. Because they’ll assume they’re the blanks.

Incompetence: The Accidental Power Move

Some of the most destructive power moves aren’t malicious. They’re the result of sheer incompetence, which is amplified by a leader’s position of power. It’s like handing a megaphone to someone who doesn’t know how to use it. They shout into the wrong end, and the whole room winces at the ear-splitting feedback.

Leaders who don’t know how to effectively design and deploy meetings end up scheduling them for every problem, real or imagined. According to Neil Vyner, VP of growth and go-to-market at Worklytics, just 5% of employees schedule 60% of all meetings. These serial schedulers tend to be the most powerful people in the company (or their assistants acting on their behalf).

New managers are some of the worst offenders. They’re promoted because they excelled in their previous roles, not because they know how to facilitate productive discussions, navigate hairy decisions, or avoid letting their new dinosaur tail knock over their team’s ideas. They’re handed a packed calendar of high-stakes meetings and a megaphone, but no user manual.

Meanwhile, their employees watch their boss bumble through bad meetings and assume, “Well, I guess this is how it’s done.” Inefficiency gets institutionalized, and before long, the entire team is trapped in a cycle of toxic meeting mediocrity. Or worse, full-blown dysfunction. 

1. One-on-ones aren’t for you, boss

Incompetent managers often treat one-on-ones as their meeting—a chance to download updates, deliver monologues, or check a box. But that’s not how they should be treated. As Ben Horowitz puts it, “The key to a good one-on-one meeting is the understanding that it is the employee’s meeting rather than the manager’s meeting.” A leader’s job is to create space for whatever employees need to move their work forward, whether it’s advice, a pitch, or just a chance to vent.

According to research by Gallup, just one meaningful one-on-one meeting each week does more to build high-performance relationships than any other leadership activity—and meetings as short as 15 minutes are enough to make a difference.

2. Stop hosting meetings just to spoon-feed the boss

One of the most common—and costly—signs of incompetence is the boss briefing: a meeting held not to collaborate or solve problems, but to spoon-feed status updates to a leader who can’t be bothered to check the project tracker.

If you just need updates from your team, don’t drag them into a hostage situation. Ask for a written summary or a short video update instead.

The same goes for updates that you’re pushing out to your team. Skip the meeting and record a quick video instead. Film it from a real-life backdrop: a home office with kids barging in, or post-run and still dripping with sweat. That kind of raw, unfiltered communication hits differently. It satisfies the TikTok generation’s appetite for authenticity and transparency.

Jerk Behavior: When the Boss Is the Bully

Unlike amplification or incompetence, jerk behavior isn’t an accidental or inevitable side effect of holding a position of power. It’s a deliberate abuse of it. And unfortunately, it’s disturbingly common. Research by Simon Croom, a professor at the University of San Diego, found that 12 percent of corporate senior leaders exhibit psychopathic traits, up to twelve times the rate found in the general population. Yikes.

Jerk behavior—interrupting, nitpicking, steamrolling, humiliating, or straight-up bullying—sucks the oxygen out of the meeting. And the damage doesn’t stay neatly contained at the top. It spreads. Employees who can’t push back against a jerk boss don’t just absorb the blow, they pass it along to the next person in line. Sure enough, supervisors who report to abusive bosses are more likely to engage in abusive behavior themselves.

1.Shine a light on jerk behavior

Sometimes, the fastest way to shut down jerk behavior is to bring it into the light. Set up an anonymous feedback form so employees can report toxic behavior without fearing retaliation. But that’s just step one. Don’t let feedback languish in a forgotten Google Doc. Act on it. Prove you’re serious about creating a jerk-free culture. Because doing nothing is worse than not asking for feedback in the first place. It sends a clear message: “We’re going to pretend that your voice matters, but it really doesn’t.”

And that’s just another form of jerk behavior.

2. When all else fails, protect yourself

Some jerks are beyond redemption. If you’re stuck with one of these un-fixable types, your best move is self-preservation. Don’t let their toxicity take up space in your head. Or on your calendar.

Start by limiting your exposure to them. Avoid meetings with them if you can. If that’s not an option, move the conversation to email or chat to contain their toxicity behind a digital firewall. This will also generate a handy digital paper trail if you need to file a formal report with HR.

And whatever you do, don’t feed the beast. Jerks thrive on attention, so starve them of yours. Keep your responses short, flat, and factual. The less entertaining you are as a target, the faster they’ll lose interest. Your goal isn’t to win them over. It’s to bore them into submission.

Excerpted from Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done. Copyright © 2026, Rebecca Hinds. Reproduced by permission of Simon Element, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved

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