How To Run Stakeholder Meetings (Where People Actually Do What They Agreed)
It's not a communication problem. It's a confirmation problem.
Everyone nods in your meeting.
And then nobody does what you agreed.
You walk through the brief. Outline the priorities. Data, user feedback, the lot.
Two weeks later, engineering says they didn’t understand the change, design is confused about scope, and you’re re-explaining everything you thought was settled.
This isn’t a communication skills problem. It’s a confirmation problem.
Here’s what actually fixes it:
Stop treating nods as agreement
Ask questions that force specifics
Pre-agree the room before the meeting
Write it down and set a deadline
Close the gap (before it opens)
Stop Treating Nods As Agreement
Nodding is social compliance. Not agreement.
Think about the last meeting you ran. Everyone made eye contact. A few heads bobbed. No questions. You walked out feeling good.
I’ve had that exact experience. Presented a feature to the team — data, user feedback, full rationale. Everyone nodded.
A fortnight later, neither team understood the change and the I lost two weeks restarting from scratch.
If no one pushed back, no one was engaged.
Ask Questions That Force Specifics
”Does this make sense?” is the worst question you can ask in a meeting.
Everyone says yes.
No one wants to look confused in front of the group.
Replace it with questions that actually test alignment:
“What changes for your team starting Monday?”
“Walk me through how this affects your current sprint.”
If they can’t answer, there’s no alignment.
That’s 30 extra seconds in a meeting. It saves you 2 weeks of rework.
Pre-Agree The Room
The highest-voted advice from a thread of 95 project managers on Reddit: don’t go into a meeting you’ve called without knowing the outcome first.
Float the idea to key stakeholders in 1:1s before the group session. Get their objections privately.
Developers often don’t speak up. They nod. They leave. They raise concerns with their own team. And you won’t hear about it until the damage is done. An open relationship with them is vital.
Small conversations get honest answers
Big meetings get polite nods.
Write It Down And Set A Deadline
From my 20 years of agency experience: “If you don’t write it down, it didn’t happen.”
After every meeting, send a follow-up the same day. And with AI summaries in every meeting tool, that’s now even faster.
Three things:
What was decided. (plain language)
Who owns what. (names, not teams)
By when. (dates, not “soon”)
End with: “If I don’t hear any thoughts by [date], I’ll carry on as stated.”
That one sentence shifts the responsibility to them.
Close The Gap Before It Opens
Two weeks between a decision and a check-in is too long.
That’s where your project break.
The best PMs don’t run better meetings. They run more frequent, shorter ones. Five minutes on a call. A quick Teams message. A 15-minute sync with the your development lead.
Say it in the meeting. Say it in the follow-up email. Say it in the status update. People need to hear a message up to 7 times before it sticks.
Over-communication isn’t overhead. It’s your job.
What You Can Do Today
Treat nods as acknowledgement, not agreement
Replace “Does this make sense?” with questions that force specifics
Pre-agree decisions in 1:1s before the group meeting
Send a follow-up the same day: what was decided, who owns it, by when (us AI tools)
Check alignment in 1-2 days, not 2 weeks
The Real Fix
Your team aren’t ignoring you. They’re forgetting. Or they never agreed in the first place.
The fix isn’t being a better speaker. It’s building a process that doesn’t rely on memory, politeness, or nodding.
Do it today. Not the next sprint. Today.
And, if this was useful, forward it to a PM who keeps re-explaining the same decisions.