The Missed Meeting: What One Conversation Reveals About Everything Else - Paperback

Most one-on-one meetings are a waste of time. Yours might be telling you something worse.

When a direct report gives you one-word answers, shows up unprepared, or seems checked out, that is not an attitude problem. That is a signal. And most managers miss it entirely.

The Missed Meeting reveals what your one-on-ones are really communicating about your team's engagement, trust, and performance and delivers a science-backed framework to fix it.

Drawing on four decades of research in Self-Determination Theory by Deci & Ryan, the same framework cited by Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review, organizational psychologist Pete Ketchum gives you:

- The real reason your best people eventually go quiet (and the 5-minute diagnostic to catch it early)

- The Sustain-Improve Framework for transforming status updates into conversations that drive performance

- The single question that changes the dynamic in any 1:1 immediately

- The ARC Self-Assessment to identify exactly where your leadership is creating friction

Ketchum did not learn this in a classroom. Before becoming an organizational psychologist, he was an Army-trained interrogator and a crisis intervention officer in environments where reading people was not optional. He brings that same precision to a meeting most leaders sleepwalk through.

If your one-on-ones feel like calendar obligations, this book will show you what you are missing and what it is costing you.