End meetings with an unanswerable question instead of just confirming next steps. It forces people to keep thinking about the problem afterward, which builds deeper ownership and understanding across your team.
End with one more question. It's very common, like at the end of meetings, to say, "Everybody know what they're doing?" Everyone says, "Yeah!" I say, "Okay, let's go!" And that's fine for the next 5 minutes. But if your objective is to have a meeting that's going to take someone beyond like the immediate horizon of the next couple of hours or what have you, you want to end it not with an agreement that everybody knows what's immediately next, but you're really looking for understanding that they are thinking about the decisions, that the whys of this have been imprinted in the brain of your people. This is actually a kind of conversation that's far more important to be having when you are an executive talking to managers than even when you're talking— a manager talking to ICs, although it's useful in both contexts. The technique that I encourage is the asking one more question. I see this also show up in some books, is to end it with a question. To end it with a question that people don't quite have the answer to. Because if they leave turning over a question in their heads, they're much more likely to be engaging their brains on the problem.
