Fix the Meetings That Are Draining Your Team 

Most leaders know which meetings aren’t working. There’s the standing weekly that could be an email, the decision-making session where nothing actually gets decided, and the all-hands where half the room has checked out before anyone even reaches the first agenda item.

The problem isn’t that higher education leaders don’t care about running good meetings. It’s that there’s rarely time or space to step back and think critically about them. Poorly structured meetings don’t just waste time — they erode trust, fragment team culture, and signal to people that their time isn’t valued. In environments where faculty and staff are already stretched, that signal lands hard.

This is a good use of Sophia. Watch the video below for more on how to log in and use Sophia.

How the Activity Works

Sophia is your AI leadership coach inside My Path. She’s built to think through real leadership challenges with you, not to offer generic advice — and meeting design is exactly the kind of applied, context-specific problem she handles well.

Here’s how to approach it:

1. 1
   Identify your meeting pain point. Look at the categories below and pick the one that most honestly describes a meeting you’re currently responsible for.
2. 2
   Choose a specific meeting. The more concrete you can be with Sophia, the more useful her guidance will be. For example, “My weekly department check-in” works better than “My meetings.” Be clear about your role as well.
3. 3
   Start the conversation with one of the prompts below. You can copy it directly or adapt the language to fit your situation.

Find Your Starting Point

Once You Have a Plan, Push It Further

After Sophia helps you to redesign a meeting, use these prompts to pressure-test what you’ve built:

If you’ve completed the Five Paths to Leadership® Self-Assessment, you can bring that context directly into the conversation:

Open Sophia in My Path and pick one meeting worth improving. That’s enough to start.