Communicating and leading, one lesson a day

Imagine you are the librarian at a large public high school. For months you have attended a weekly athletics scheduling meeting because the gym renovation forced teams to use the library courtyard for equipment pickup. The renovation is finished. At the end of Monday's staff huddle, the athletic director says the meeting can return to coaches and facilities staff. You are welcome when a topic affects the library, but you no longer need to spend forty-five minutes there every Thursday.

The rational response is relief. The first emotional response may be something else. Were you pushed out? Will decisions now be made around you? Does this mean your contribution mattered less than you thought?

Today's lesson is about separating a change in meeting attendance from a change in standing, then making sure the new arrangement keeps you informed where it actually matters.

Steven Rogelberg has spent years studying meetings, and his advice on the invitation list is blunt: keep the meeting small and do not over-invite. Meetings often become too large because hosts do not want anyone to feel excluded and invitees do not want to look disengaged. Everyone protects a feeling, and the organization pays with hours.

Leslie Perlow and her colleagues surveyed senior managers about meetings. Sixty-five percent said meetings kept them from finishing their own work, and seventy-one percent called their meetings unproductive. These were not people with no control over the calendar. They were often the people creating it.

In the school example, the purpose changed. During construction, the librarian held information the group needed. After construction, most of the agenda concerns practice times, bus departures, and equipment storage in the gym. Leaving the librarian on the invite would be socially easy and operationally wasteful. A smaller list is not automatically a verdict on the person who leaves. It may be evidence that the meeting owner is finally designing around the work.

The difficult part happens quickly in your head. Being removed from a recurring group can feel like being moved to the edge. Cognitive reappraisal, studied extensively by James Gross, works best before that story hardens. Reappraisal is not forced optimism. It is a fact check.

Ask: What is the meeting for now? Which decisions still affect my work? How is my contribution actually measured? What evidence says my standing changed, beyond the invitation itself? In this case, the librarian's work is measured by services to students, access to space, teaching support, and a functioning collection. A seat in a sports logistics meeting is not the score.

Optional attendance is not a passive condition, though. Rogelberg's advice is that not attending should not mean not being informed. Priya Parker makes a related point in The Art of Gathering: the guest list is a design choice, and useful boundaries make gatherings stronger. The person leaving can help by naming the conditions that would make their presence useful again.

The response can be three sentences. Thanks for returning the time. Bring me in when a decision changes student access to the courtyard or library. Please send the short decision note afterward if anything creates work on my side.

That reply does three things. It accepts the smaller meeting without drama. It defines the trigger for returning. It asks for the output needed to prevent surprises. It does not argue for a ceremonial seat, and it does not disappear.

The request for a decision note matters. An optional person can become an invisible person if information stops moving. That does not mean you need a transcript. Ask for the smallest useful artifact: decisions, owners, and anything that affects your area. If two meetings pass and a change reaches you indirectly, address the process. Say, I heard the pickup plan now uses the courtyard again. Please tag me when that kind of decision is made so I can check student access. That is a process correction, not an accusation about your status.

There is another benefit. Every meeting you leave creates time for the work only you can do. Forty-five minutes can become a student research workshop, a catalog problem solved, or preparation for a teacher who needs help. Attendance has an obvious signal: people can see you in the room. Useful work often has a quieter signal. Do not confuse visibility with value.

One caution: do not reject every meeting merely because part of it is irrelevant. Some gatherings build relationships or allow fast coordination that a note cannot replace. The right question is not, will every minute be about me? It is, does this group repeatedly need my judgment in real time? If yes, stay. If no, define when you should return and let the routine meeting get smaller.

Here is the practice. Think of one recurring meeting where your role has faded or the purpose has changed. Ask the owner what the gathering would lose if you stopped attending for a month. If the answer is little or nothing, propose a trial: remove the recurring invitation, name the topics that should pull you back in, and agree on the short update you will receive.

Then use the recovered time deliberately. Put one piece of real work in the space before something else claims it. This matters because an empty calendar slot feels like a loss; a completed piece of work feels like evidence.

If someone else offers to give you time back, do the fact check before you defend the chair. Ask what changed in the meeting, what still needs you, and how the output will reach you. Keep the connection to decisions, not the attachment to attendance.

Sources today: Steven Rogelberg, The Surprising Science of Meetings. Leslie Perlow and colleagues, “Stop the Meeting Madness,” Harvard Business Review, two thousand seventeen. James Gross on cognitive reappraisal. Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering.

That is lesson twenty one. Leave rooms that no longer need you, define the doorway back in, and make sure the decisions still travel.