You will be able to keep a meeting on purpose, include every participant and close each item with a decision.
You've sent a good agenda. Now it's 3pm, five people are in the room, three are on Teams, and someone opens with a story about the last campaign that has nothing to do with item one. Ten minutes later two senior people are debating, one colleague online has said nothing, and you're wondering how to get back to the decision you came for.
Chairing is mostly about four moves: opening with purpose, bringing people in, parking what doesn't belong, and running the room and the screen as one meeting. None of them needs seniority. They need you to say a few sentences that most chairs leave out.
The first minute sets the meeting's direction. Don't open with "Okay, shall we start?" and then go straight into item one. Restate why everyone is there, what you need by the end, and who makes the call if people disagree.
Here's how Shu Fen, the marketing executive from lesson 6.2, Write an agenda people can prepare for, might open her Q4 meeting:
"Thanks for coming. We're here to decide two things: the budget split between events and digital, and which two November events we run. By 3.50 I'd like both settled. If we can't agree on the events, Michelle has the final say as budget owner. Let's start with the split."
That took about twenty seconds. Everyone now knows what done looks like, and nobody will be surprised later when Michelle makes the call. Naming the decider up front matters most when people are likely to disagree. It turns a debate that could go on forever into input for someone's decision.
If you aren't the decider, agree this with them before the meeting. "If the group splits on the events, would you like to decide on the spot or take it away?" is a reasonable question to ask your boss.
"Does anyone have any thoughts?" is the most common question in meetings and one of the least useful. The people who already speak will speak again. The quiet ones, the junior ones and the people on screen will usually stay silent, for all the reasons lesson 5.1, Why staying quiet costs more than speaking imperfectly, described.
Invite people by name, with a specific question:
"Arun, you ran the October roadshow. Do the November numbers look realistic to you?"
"Grace, you're on Teams. Anything on the vendor before we decide?"
Use names especially for the people on screen. It's easy for a chair sitting in the room to forget them, and easy for them to assume they can't get in. Bringing them in early in each item, not as an afterthought at the end, shows they count.
Give people warning where you can. "Arun, I'll come to you next on the roadshow numbers" gives a quieter colleague ten seconds to think, which often produces a better answer than a cold call. In teams where people are reluctant to contradict a senior person in public, ask for risks directly: "What could go wrong with this?" makes concerns feel like help, not a challenge. Lesson 8.2, Hierarchy, face and hearing an indirect no, goes further into this.
Every meeting attracts topics that matter but aren't on the agenda. If you follow each one, you run out of time for the decisions. If you shut them down, people feel dismissed.
The middle way is a parking lot: a visible list of off-topic issues that you promise to deal with later. Write it on the whiteboard, or in a section at the bottom of the shared notes so people online can see it too.
"That's a fair point about the website refresh. It's not on today's agenda, so I'll put it in the parking lot and we'll decide at the end who follows it up."
The person feels heard, the meeting stays on track, and the issue doesn't vanish. The parking lot only works if you come back to it. In the last five minutes, go through each item and give it an owner, a slot in a future meeting, or a clear "we're dropping this".
Hybrid meetings often become two meetings: a lively one in the room and a quieter one on screen that can barely hear the first. The chair's job is to merge them.
Put everyone on the same shared document. If the agenda, notes and options are on a shared screen or in a document everyone has open, people online see exactly what people in the room see. Avoid pointing at a whiteboard the camera can't read.
Treat the chat as part of the discussion. Remote people often type a point rather than interrupt. Watch the chat, or ask a colleague in the room to watch it for you, and read comments aloud: "Grace says in the chat that the vendor's price went up 10 percent. Let's factor that in." A comment nobody reads out might as well not have been made.
Some teams go further and ask everyone to join from their own laptop, even in the room, so faces are the same size and the chat is shared by all. Try it if your room's audio is poor.
Think about the next meeting you'll chair. Before it starts, write your opening lines on a sticky note: the purpose, the outcomes and who decides. Then look at the attendee list and mark the people, in the room or online, who are least likely to speak unless asked. Those are the names you'll want ready.
Chair your next team meeting with a purpose statement at the start and name-based invitations, then ask one attendee for honest feedback.
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