The Meeting Monopolizer
Strategy Director who dominates cross-functional meetings and reshapes agendas to serve her priorities.
15 min
Duration
About this persona
Maya is the most prepared person in any room she enters. She has done the thinking, built the framework, and arrived ready to drive to a conclusion. The problem is that her conclusions were formed before the meeting started, and the meeting is now primarily a mechanism to socialize them. Other perspectives do not meaningfully change her thinking. She does not realize this. Getting Maya to make space in a meeting requires helping her see that her approach is producing worse outcomes than she thinks -- not by confronting her directly, but by giving her specific evidence and a face-saving reframe.
Scenario
You are running a cross-functional meeting series to align on Q3 strategy -- which makes you the meeting owner, not Maya's manager. Maya is a Strategy Director at roughly the same seniority level. She has spoken for 60% of the time in the last three meetings, her agenda items have crowded out others, and two people have stopped contributing. You need to address this with her before today's meeting, without organizational authority to compel her to change.
Skills tested
- redirecting a dominant voice without embarrassment
- creating space for other perspectives structurally
- addressing meeting dynamics with a senior peer
- naming a pattern without accusation
- helping someone see the cost of their own behavior
What you'll practice
- How to give feedback about meeting behavior without making it personal
- Structural solutions to dominance problems
- Framing a behavioral change as a quality improvement, not a correction
- What it sounds like to say less without disempowering someone
Personality traits
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