Bad Is Stronger Than Good: What Makes Meetings Work

Based on Kauffeld & Lehmann-Willenbrock (2012), Meetings Matter: Effects of Team Meetings on Team and Organizational Success

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If you’ve ever sat through a meeting that felt like a time-eating black hole, you’re not alone. Despite living in meetings, most of us still rely on hunches and folklore about what makes them work. Fortunately, there’s actual science on the subject.

In their landmark study, Simone Kauffeld and Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock videotaped and analysed 92 real team meetings. Not staged, not simulated — real meetings with real teams doing real work. They coded communication at the micro-level: every interruption, every complaint, every cross-linking insight.

And what they found is this: The tiniest communication behaviours inside a meeting reliably predict how teams perform — immediately and even years later.

Their headline message? In meetings, bad behaviour does far more damage than good behaviour does good.

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1. The Big Finding: Dysfunctional Behaviour Hits Harder Than Constructive Behaviour Helps

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One of psychology’s most consistent findings — negativity bias — shows up in full force in the conference room. The study found that negative behaviours have a disproportionately strong effect on meeting outcomes.

These included:

• Complaining without proposing change
  
  
• Showing no interest in solutions
  
  
• Derailing conversations with irrelevant details
  
  
• Personal criticism — the conversational equivalent of kicking over a coffee spill and calling it teamwork
  
  

Critically, the negative correlation between these behaviours and meeting satisfaction was much stronger than the positive correlation between constructive behaviours and satisfaction. In other words:

You can’t simply “add positivity” to fix a meeting contaminated by negativity.
Removing destructive behaviour is the first, most powerful lever.

As the authors write:

^{“Bad impressions, bad feedback, bad emotions and bad interactions affect us more than those that are good.”}

The simplest way to improve your next meeting?
Subtract the bad before you add the good.

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2. When “Supportive” Behaviour Isn’t Actually Helpful

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Here’s one of the study’s most counter-intuitive findings: the catch-all category of positive socioemotional behaviours — things like empathy, agreement, encouragement — was negatively associated with meeting satisfaction overall.

Why? Because the researchers saw a pattern they call compliant support — the reflexive “yes, I agree” nodding that unintentionally prolongs unproductive conversations. It keeps complaining cycles alive and encourages detours that drain time and energy.

This doesn’t mean support is bad. It means indiscriminate support is counterproductive.

There’s a difference between:

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Compliant support

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Support that validates anything, including spirals, rants and dead-ends.

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Constructive support

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Support that reinforces progress and nudges the group toward solutions:

• “Good point — what’s one step we could take this month to address it?”
  
  
• “This matters. What’s the quickest experiment we can run?”
  
  

The researchers identified only one behaviour that was consistently harmful across all meetings: personal criticism. Attack the idea, not the person. Everything else is negotiable; that one is not.

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3. What High-Performing Teams Do Differently: They Connect Ideas

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Another standout finding: the best teams don’t just discuss problems; they interrelate them. The study calls this cross-linking — the act of explicitly connecting ideas, causes, consequences and solutions.

Cross-linking sounds like:

• “This issue with customer complaints connects to the onboarding problem we raised earlier — how do they relate?”
  
  
• “If we choose this solution, what are the downstream effects for operations?”
  
  
• “Is this symptom or cause? What’s underneath it?”
  
  

This matters because it helps teams build a shared mental model — a richer, more accurate map of the issue.

And the correlations were striking. Cross-linking behaviours predicted:

• Higher meeting satisfaction
  
  
• Better team productivity
  
  
• Better organisational performance 2.5 years later
  
  

Quantity of ideas doesn’t make meetings effective.
Quality — and connection — does.

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4. The Most Rare and Most Impactful Behaviour: Action Planning (Just 0.24%)

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Now for the statistic that should make every manager wince.

Across the 92 meetings, the researchers measured 822 “sense units” per hour — tiny coded units of speech.
Out of those 822, only two on average were action planning.

That’s 0.24%.

In plain English:
Meetings are almost entirely talk and almost no decision.

Despite this scarcity, action planning was one of the strongest predictors of both meeting satisfaction and objective team productivity.

Action planning includes:

• Taking responsibility (“I’ll handle the first draft”)
  
  
• Proposing concrete commitments (“Let’s test this for two weeks and review”)
  
  
• Clarifying next steps (“So who does what by when?”)
  
  

It’s the move that transforms a meeting from discussion to momentum.

The study shows what most of us already feel:
A meeting without next steps is not a meeting. It’s a group monologue.

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5. Why Your Next Meeting Matters More Than You Think

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Across 92 real meetings, recorded minute by minute, the conclusion is clear:
Small communication habits compound into big cultural outcomes.

Better meetings require:

• Removing destructive behaviour (complaining, derailing, personal criticism)
  
  
• Using supportive behaviour wisely (support progress, not spirals)
  
  
• Connecting ideas (build a shared mental model, not a pile of comments)
  
  
• Ending with action (make the 0.24% the most important part)

Meetings aren’t neutral calendar blocks.
They are where your team builds alignment, trust, momentum — or quietly erodes all three.

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