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This week, the monthly meeting agenda has five items. 45-minutes into the meeting and you are still on item one. Is the agenda 1 complicated? No.. Then what’s complicated? Well, it’s Vikram and he is present in the meeting. Vikram is super enthusiastic, knowledgeable and genuinely invested in the outcome. He also believes that any question directed at the group is for him to answer with complete tangents, historical context and at least one reference to how things were done at his previous company. By the time he finishes, the original question has been forgotten, three people have lost the will to contribute and the meeting has recalibrated around Vikram’s experience from his previous company. The agenda items that did not get covered will be rescheduled, again!
Meet The Meeting Hijacker.
It will be easy to call ‘The Meeting Hijacker’ as one of the most disruptive forces in a team but in reality, they are often the one with less self-awareness. Unlike the person who is deliberately difficult, the Meeting Hijacker almost never intends to dominate. They come with their high-energy, highly verbal capabilities and genuine engagement. They believe of themselves as contributors. In their own experience of a meeting, they are helping.
Let’s spot them in your workplace:
Why Dominance Often Hides Insecurity
It would be easy to read the Meeting Hijacker as simply arrogant. Someone who believes their voice matters more than anyone else's. In some cases, that is partly true. But in most cases, the behaviour is more complicated and more human than that.
For many Meeting Hijackers, speaking is a self-regulation strategy. When the meeting environment is full of implicit judgements, status dynamics and it’s potential for being proven wrong in front of people; it is actually quite stressful. For the meeting hijacker, talking fills that stress. They believe that as long as they are speaking, they are not being evaluated. When they speak, they are evaluating and it feels safer.
This dynamic becomes clearer when we look at someone like Deepak. A senior manager who dominates every cross-functional meeting he attends. Outside of meetings, he is thoughtful, measured and a good listener. Inside them, he talks faster, covers more details and finds it almost impossible to stop. He has described it himself, in a rare moment of candour, as feeling like 'if I stop talking, someone will ask me something I don't know the answer to.' The talking is not confidence. It is cover.
The Meeting Hijacker has often been rewarded, somewhere in their professional history, for verbal dominance. The extroverted team member who spoke most got the title of 'a strong presence.' The one who filled every silence was seen as 'engaged.' These rewards shape behaviour over time. If speaking up has been the visible currency of professional worth, it makes complete sense that they keep spending it, even when the room does not need it.
This is exactly what happened with Sameer. He grew up in a workplace where the loudest voice in the room was always the most respected one. His first manager used to say, openly, that silent people made him nervous. Sameer learnt this quickly. He became more vocal, assertive and present in every conversation. He was promoted twice in 3 years. Nobody ever told him that the skill that got him here might need to be recalibrated as he went further. So, he kept doing what had always worked with a genuine belief that this is what good contribution looks like.
Meeting Hijackers are often so focused on the content of what is being discussed and how are they going to contribute; that the social dynamics of the room simply do not register, e.g., Who has been waiting to speak or who has already disengaged, these are things they are genuinely not tracking. This kind of behaviour is often mistaken for indifference, but it is frequently a consequence of where someone's attention is directed.
Rajan, for example, is someone who always aims to get things right. In meetings, he is fully focused on the problem. He looks at the problem statement from different angles and builds on whatever information he gets. He is so absorbed in the thinking that he genuinely does not notice that Aisha has been leaning forward for the last eight minutes, waiting for an opportunity to share her thoughts. After the meeting, a colleague mentions it, which makes Rajan visibly surprised. He had no idea. He would have made space, had he noticed it.
Beneath the volume, there is often a quieter fear that if they do not make themselves heard, they will be forgotten or overlooked or even considered irrelevant. Sunita has been in her industry for 18 years. She has more experience than most of her peers. But she has watched younger and louder colleagues get credit and visibility that she feels she has earned. So, she takes up space now, making her point of view louder, more frequent and sometimes at the expense of others. Because staying quiet and waiting for her turn, has cost her before.
Understanding this does not excuse the impact. But it changes how you approach it.
Something Worth Knowing
Meeting Hijackers are rarely the most confident people in the group. They are often the most anxious ones and talking is how that anxiety is managed by them. It is important to know that the is not to silence them. It is to change the conditions that make their anxiety necessary.
The Subtle Signs of a Meeting-Hijacker in Making
Where some hijacking looks very obvious. Some of it is subtle enough that the meeting is half over before anyone could find out what has happened. Here are the patterns to watch for:
The meeting starts on topic and few people share their thoughts. Then the Meeting Hijacker builds on it, which is fine; but then extends, redirects and gradually takes it somewhere else entirely. The group follows and 10 minutes later, nobody can recall how they got here and/or how to get back.
Before the problem has been fully shared or understood, the Meeting Hijacker is already proposing a solution. Well, their own solution! This somehow closes down the exploration and discussion phase and moves the group into evaluation mode of the Hijacker’s idea. Other perspectives that might have shaped a better solution never comes up.
It sounds like, 'Sorry, just to jump in quickly...' and then it is not quick at all. The interruption is framed as brief but it redirects the conversation entirely. The person who was speaking loses their flow of thoughts (and chance to speak) while the hijacker continues.
At the end of a discussion, the Meeting Hijacker offers a summary. The summary that accurately reflects “their own” perspective and simply omits or reshapes the contributions of others. Here, the decisions get really attributed and them credit goes to our hijacker. The group is already tired with so much brainstorming and ready to move on. They accept the summary without any pushback.
A note for first-time managers:
If you are leading a meeting and you notice any of these patterns in others or in yourself, the first instinct is to let it run and address it later. Honestly, you must resist that instinct.
A meeting that self-corrects in the moment is far more effective than one that ends and gets debriefed privately. You do not have to be confrontational. You just need to be the one who names what is happening and bring the meeting back with care.
What and How To Do?
The most common mistake people make when dealing with a Meeting Hijacker is either saying nothing or overcorrecting and shutting them down in a way that creates tension. The truth is none of the options works.
What works is having a language ready that is calm, clear and structurally redirecting rather than personally critical.
Here are some boundary-setting phrases that do not escalate or create conflict. These phrases are particularly chosen because they address the meeting dynamics and not the person. They are non-accusatory in nature. They give the hijacker a way to step back without losing face.
To Interrupt the Interruption
To Redirect the Discussion
If you are a leader using these phrases, use them consistently and not just when one person dominates. If they become part of how you run every meeting, they stop feeling like a correction and start feeling like culture.
For Our Hijacker - If You Recognize Yourself in This
This section is written with genuine respect for the Meeting Hijacker because recognizing this pattern in yourself requires a level of honesty that is genuinely uncomfortable. Here are some questions worth sitting with before your next meeting:
A simple practice: before your next meeting, set one internal rule. It might be 'I will not speak in the first ten minutes.' Or 'I will ask a question before I make a statement.' Or simply 'I will count to five after someone finishes before I respond.' These are small disciplines but their impact is not small.
If you are the most talkative person in most meetings, the problem is rarely that everyone else has nothing to say. It is more likely that the environment, including your presence in it, has made it harder for them to say it. That is worth sitting with, not as a criticism but as an invitation to lead differently.
How to Design Meetings That Self-Correct
By now, we know that the best defence against meeting hijacking is not a confrontation. It is a structure that makes hijacking difficult. When a meeting is well-designed, dominance has fewer places to take hold as the format does not give any single voice unchecked space.
Now, here’s a prompt to sit with. Think about the last meeting you were in.
Who spoke the most? Who spoke the least? And what do you think the least-heard person in that room was thinking but did not say?
Ishita Mukherjee
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