Hi everyone

I’ve just started a new job and one of my responsibilities is to organise the team better and help us deliver on our objectives effectively.

Every Wednesday we have a 1 hour team meeting with the leadership team. They are all more senior than I am but I report into the MD so I join those sessions. The MD told me this is my meeting to own and run. For the last 3 weeks since I’ve joined I’ve been observing. I find the meeting a huge waste of time with no tangible outcomes. One thing I hate is we spend the first 10-15 minutes of the meeting sitting in silence while everyone in the team writes on a document their top 3 things they did last week and 3 focus areas for this week. During this time I think people read what others have written and then use the rest of the meeting to discuss where they need to align (there is lots of siloed working in this team). But not every area is covered or every team member gets the chance to speak.

I suggested a new approach which is we start the meetings with a review of our actions & urgent topics, then we each have 3-5 minutes to speak on what our focus areas are for the week, then the last 5 minutes is the MD updating us on any key messages. The team came back to say they don’t want to do this as it’ll be a talking shop and they like the current approach of writing things down.

I am autistic so often have clashes with people at work because my brain is extremely efficient and is very outcome driven. I think sitting in silence for the first 10-15 minutes is a huge waste of time. Can someone explain this to me, is it normal? How do I get the team (who are all very well paid directors or head ofs) to see that those meetings need to be about decisions and driving the team forward, not documenting and sitting in silence. Do I just give up and go with it even though it’s a colossal waste of time and expertise? What have I missed here in why people are so resistant to change? Why do these people like doing this exercise? For one of the leadership team they’ve been very critical of all aspects of my work since I joined. This is a team with a lot of financial and technical expertise so they are generally a bit more detail orientated and less quick with the pace of delivery than my commercial and operations background