Business Meeting Etiquette

Alexandra Roberts on executive presence and social protocol

Most advice about business meeting etiquette is written as though the meeting begins when the agenda does. Be on time, silence the phone, let people finish their sentences, send the notes. All of it is correct. A good deal of what the other side decides about you happens outside that window, though, in the few minutes in the lobby before anyone sits down and on the walk back to the elevator afterward.

I watched those minutes for years from the other side of a counter, first running the front office at The Lowell on the Upper East Side and later at the host stand at Four Seasons San Francisco. Lobbies are where people wait for the person they came to meet. You could usually tell how a meeting would go before it started. The visitor left standing by the door for fifteen minutes, by a host who never sent anyone down, walked into that meeting already owed something.

They were rarely repaid.

Arrive early, and wait somewhere else

Every guide tells you to be punctual, by which they mean early. Early to the building is right. Early to the room is a small imposition, because if you appear in a client’s conference room twelve minutes before the hour, someone has to stop what they are doing to sit with you, or leave you alone with the whiteboard from their last meeting, which is worse for both of you. Reach the building ten minutes ahead. Check in at reception at five. Be in the doorway on the hour.

Inside your own company the standard slips, and in some offices drifting in at three minutes past is so common that nobody seems to see it. The most senior person in the room always sees it.

If you are hosting, the meeting starts at reception

The published advice leaves this out almost entirely, and it is the first thing I would change in most of the companies I work with. When a visitor arrives, someone should come down for them, ideally you. If you cannot, send a person who knows their name and can say it properly, and who will walk them to the room. Nobody should be told to take the elevator to four and look for the room with the plant. Offer water once, before they sit, and make sure it actually arrives. Take their coat if there is anywhere to hang it.

Then the chair. Give your visitor the seat with the view, or the one facing the door, and take the one with your back to it yourself. Where everyone else sits depends on what you want the meeting to accomplish, which I go into in the three-seat rule.

Names before slides

Everyone at the table should know who everyone else is before the first slide goes up. The host does this, briefly, with a name and one sentence about why that person is in the room today. “Priya runs our data platform and would be the one building whatever we agree to” tells your visitor exactly where to look when the questions turn technical. The order follows the same logic as at a reception, so the client is named first, ahead of your own chief executive, and the reasoning is in how to introduce two people.

The phone

A phone lying face down on a conference table is still on the table, and everyone else in the room spends the meeting waiting to see whether you will turn it over.

Say less than you prepared

Not interrupting is the rule every guide repeats, and it is true as far as it goes. The more common failure with senior people is quieter. Someone who has prepared thoroughly wants the preparation to be seen, so they fill every pause with it, and the client who came with one question leaves having heard the answers to eleven. I have written about how over-preparation reads as insecurity, and it never reads more plainly than in a forty-minute meeting where one person spoke for thirty. Say the thing you came to say. Then ask a question you genuinely want answered, and listen to the whole answer, including the part after the pause.

Take notes by hand. An open laptop puts a screen between you and the other side, and they cannot tell whether you are writing down what they said or answering an email. A notebook settles it.

Say your hard stop in the first minute

Meetings run long, and the first person to notice is usually the most junior, who has another meeting. If you have to leave at a fixed time, say so at the start: “I need to go at a quarter to four, so let’s make sure we reach pricing.” Said at the beginning, it organizes the hour. Said at 3:44 while reaching for your bag, it ends the meeting on your terms and nobody else’s.

As host, finish on time even when things are going well. Close by saying what happens next and who is doing it. Five minutes returned is remembered far longer than five extra minutes of good conversation.

Walk them out

Walk your visitor back to the elevator, or to the front door if the building is small, and stay with them until the doors close. It takes two minutes. It is also the only stretch of the meeting with no agenda, and people say things on that walk they did not say at the table, such as what their board is actually worried about, or that the decision will need a sign-off from someone who was never in the room. In a well-run hotel nobody points a departing guest toward the exit. Someone walks them there. Offices could learn this for free.

I would cut ten minutes from the meeting before I would cut the walk.

The same afternoon

Send the follow-up before the end of the day, while it still sounds like a continuation of the meeting. Keep it short: what was agreed and who is doing each part of it, with dates. If a client or someone senior gave you an hour, add two lines of thanks in your own words above the summary, and if the meeting really mattered, follow the rules for a business thank-you note and send one by hand as well.

Executives who come to me to work on executive presence usually want to talk about how they sound in meetings, and we do. What I end up changing first, more often than they expect, is the lobby. A visitor will forget most of your slides by Friday. They will remember, for a long time, whether you came down to get them and whether you walked them back out, and both of those cost nothing at all.