I’ve mentioned before that I’m reading the fantastic How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work : Seven Languages for Transformation by Robert Kegan & Lisa Laskow Lahey. It’s one of those books that make my long daily Metro commute a pleasure.

While I plan to devote some blog space to individual chapters in the next couple of weeks, something in the final pages caught my imagination that I just need to share. Kegan and Lahey end their work by focusing on that dreaded aspect of office life – the staff meeting. However, rather than dreading it (or worse, contemptuously calling it a time-waster), they advocate for something more spectacular. Take this in and savor it:

Of course, a meeting must deal with the pressing business at hand, no doubt about it. But a meeting actually is also an occasion of special opportunity. Here we all are together. Usually we are spread out, each engaged in his or her piece of the operation; but for this brief period here we are, all together…A gathering of the whole is an opportunity not merely to handle the momentary business of the day, but to re-mind (and re-spirit) ourselves as to what is most important to us collectively, what we care most about, what we stand for or are up to in the bigger sense. Not having at least a small portion of every meeting given over to this regenerative purpose is a terrible squandering of a leadership opportunity.

How many of our meetings are boring rehashes of the previous week, a rote presentation of activities, a gripe session about customers, vendors, you name it? Sometimes meetings are conducted like sprints (ever been to a meeting where everyone stands…the whole point is to keep it brief). Why? The authors point to an increasingly lost art of hospitality that goes beyond a warm smile, but a conscious effort to direct a group’s collective attention to a purpose or person we care deeply about. It reminds me of one of Rosa’s management values, ho’okipa, where there is "complete generosity and those who aspire to the best practice of this value are highly empathetic, and very perceptive in anticipating the needs of others."

As leaders, what if we start practicing ho’okipa in our offices? What if we used our meetings as powerful opportunities to actually create a meaningful shared space filled with a common experience? Where might we be able to take our organizations?