The Missed Meeting: What One Conversation Reveals About Everything Else

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's not an attitude problem. That's 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 didn't learn this in a classroom. Before becoming an organizational psychologist, he was an Army-trained interrogator, a state corrections officer, and a state trooper-environments where reading people wasn't optional. He brings that same precision to a meeting most leaders slepwalk through. If your one-on-ones feel like calendar obligations, this book will show you what you're missing and what it's costing you.