Of course we can! After a little brainstorming, we came up with the next great idea: assign your team members to attend meetings on your behalf, but make sure you don’t give them any authority to speak on your behalf or any preparation for them to be able to represent you!

It’s a win-win! Not only will your team members hate the meeting (or series of meetings) but over time they’ll resent you as the manager. They’re already thinking less of you as a leader.

Picture it: Your team member sits quietly in a meeting that they have no control over, no effective input into and no desire to be in. The meeting drags on and on, for them, because they have 30 other things they could be doing instead and this meeting isn’t adding value because of how you’ve assigned people to it.

But there’s more! The meeting organizer invited you because they either expected input from you or decisions by you. By providing neither, you’ve managed to waste...