Snakes and Flutes for Managers

leadershipmanagementcommunicationteammeetings

Snakes and flutes

Snakes don’t hear the flute — they react to the handler’s movement.
In meetings, people do the same: they dance to the manager’s tune, half-asleep and agreeable.

The fix is to reverse the sound: the manager listens, the team talks.

Why this works

  • Harder to fake. Posturing collapses when you must think.
  • Reality surfaces. You hear facts, not wishful narratives.
  • Solutions emerge inside. Ownership grows with ideas.

Meeting design for listening

Structure (30–45 min):

  1. Frame (3 min): goal, metric, constraints.
  2. Manager’s questions (15 min): only questions, no mini-lectures.
  3. Options (15 min): 3–5 solutions, owners, first step.
  4. Commit (5 min): who does what, by when, how we’ll check.

Facilitation rules:

  • Manager withholds solutions until options are listed.
  • Doers speak first.
  • Each option = owner, date, metric.

Open questions that move work

  • What is actually happening? Which facts prove it?
  • Where is the current bottleneck?
  • What one step yields the biggest 7-day impact?
  • What will we stop doing to make room for this?
  • How will we know it worked? Which metric moves first?

Weekly cadence

  • Mon: set the weekly goal and one key metric.
  • Wed: 15-min midweek check, adjust.
  • Fri: retro on facts — keep/kill/scale and learnings.

Tracking progress

  • % of meeting time spoken by the team > 60%.
  • Count of decisions with owner and review date.
  • Time from talk to first action ≤ 48h.
  • Number of initiatives paused for lack of evidence.

Bottom line

Stop performing. Start listening.
Ask open questions that force out-loud thinking.
The system will begin to correct itself — you’ll steer.