The Meeting I Thought I Was Running

It was a targeting meeting, the kind we hold every week at Public Knowledge to focus in on what a person needs to move forward. Three of us on the call: an analyst I’ve worked with closely for a while, an up-and-coming project manager I’m in the process of bringing up to speed on the work, and me.

Targeting meetings are meant to be focused. Practical. A place to name what’s next and clear the path toward it.

I thought I was doing exactly that.

At the end of the meeting, I pivoted. The analyst has a long-standing professional goal. They know they need to reach, even if they haven’t exactly fallen in love with the pursuit of it. I’ve been nudging them toward it for a while. Sometimes thoughtfully. Sometimes like a pest. Sometimes with humor that probably landed better in my own head than it did across the screen.

On this particular day, I didn’t notice that they were not okay.

I don’t mean they were visibly falling apart. They weren’t. But something was off — the kind of off that you can feel in the pauses if you’re paying attention, in the flatness behind someone’s responses, in the way a person is holding themselves together by being very still. I wasn’t paying attention. I was running the meeting I had planned to run.

So I pressed. I made the case, again, for why they needed to be moving on this goal. For their career. For the firm. For the clients. I said the things I believed, from a place of genuine care, with the quiet confidence of someone who thought they were helping.

Then: “That’s really the least of my concerns right now.”

I heard it. I kept going anyway.

A few days later, the analyst reached out and apologized for not having the capacity to show up the way they wanted to in that meeting.

Gracious. More gracious than the situation required.

Because I was the one who needed to apologize. I hadn’t given them what they needed. I’d pressed someone publicly, in front of a colleague they were still building trust with, on a day when what they needed most was simply to be seen.

Leadership isn’t measured by what we want someone to need. It’s measured by what they actually need, in that moment, from us.

What the moment called for was simple. Close the loop with the new project manager. Thank the analyst, genuinely, for the work. End the meeting. And then, after, during a one-on-one: Where are you at? I know things have been heavy. What do you need right now?

That’s it. That was the whole job.

Leaders — and I include myself in this with no exemption — often operate from a kind of benevolent certainty. We know what someone needs. We’ve thought about it. We’ve watched them. We want good things for them. So we push. We remind. We circle back. We think that consistency is the same as support.

But support isn’t a monologue. It’s a read. It’s the ongoing, imperfect work of asking what this person, in this moment, actually needs from me — not what I’ve decided they need from a distance.

The analyst didn’t need a reminder that day. They needed to be seen, to be thanked, and to be quietly given a door to walk through if they needed space.

I missed that.

I’m better at this than I used to be. I’m also more aware, these days, of how much I still get it wrong. The gap between caring about someone and being useful to them in a given moment is wider than any of us like to admit. That gap is where the real leadership work lives.

If something here landed differently than you expected — I’m reachable by reply.