Greeting Everyone Opens Every Meeting
Give the opening of an Ecuadorian meeting the time it needs. When you walk into a room, greet each person individually rather than addressing the group — a handshake, a kiss on the cheek where the relationship allows, and their professional title, since ingeniero, doctor, licenciado and arquitecto are used in ordinary address and matter. Then expect several minutes of conversation about family, weekend, traffic or football before anyone touches the agenda. This is not small talk you can politely skip; it is the first working phase of the meeting, and it is where people register that you have seen them and where you pick up how things actually stand between the people in the room. If you cut it short to save time, the rest of the session will go worse, and you will be read as cold rather than efficient. Do the same round in reverse when you leave, and budget for it.
Meetings Start When Seniority Arrives
In Ecuador, a meeting effectively starts when the person whose authority it depends on walks in, not at the hour on the invitation. If you arrive on time you may well wait, and nobody in the room will treat that as a problem or apologise much for it. The obligation runs upward: a junior who keeps a senior waiting has made a mistake, while the reverse is unremarkable. Do not read this as an inability to keep time — the same colleagues are exactly punctual for flights, matches, classes and meetings in multinational environments, and will be punctual for yours if something clearly enforces it. The logic is that obligations run to people rather than to the clock, so someone who gets caught by another person on the way is not being careless. If the start time genuinely matters, say so explicitly, confirm the day before, and make sure the senior person’s own schedule is what you have booked around.
Rank Grants the Floor in Meetings
In Ecuadorian meetings the right to speak is given, not taken. The most senior person frames the topic and speaks longest, and others contribute when they are named — and when named, they speak about their own area rather than commenting on someone else’s, which would be mildly out of place. The consequence that costs foreign managers the most is this: silence does not mean agreement. A colleague who says nothing has usually not been invited to speak, so quiet in the room tells you nothing about whether people are on board. If you want input from someone junior, ask them directly and by name, tell them in advance what you will ask about, and give them room to answer at length. Expect to be addressed by title throughout, and use titles yourself. If you need honest reaction rather than compliance, get it one-to-one afterwards rather than by opening the floor.
Meetings Confirm Decisions Made Beforehand
If you want a decision out of an Ecuadorian meeting, make it before the meeting. The real work happens in a chain of one-to-one conversations — in the corridor, over lunch, on the phone, on WhatsApp — where each person who matters is squared individually and can say what they actually think without any audience. The meeting then surfaces and confirms what those conversations settled, and gives it collective visibility. Where that groundwork has been done, the session is quick and smooth on the point that counts. Where it has not, you will not get a decision; you will get a warm, agreeable ending — quedamos así, vamos viendo, lo revisamos — that sounds like a conclusion and commits nobody. Calling a group together to thrash something out among people you have not pre-aligned is the least productive move available here, and your colleagues know it. Put your effort in the week before, not the hour itself.
Disagreement in Meetings Arrives Indirectly
Objections in Ecuadorian meetings are real but coded, because contradicting someone in front of others takes their standing away and that damage outlasts the issue. Instead of “I disagree”, you will hear a clarifying question, praise followed by a qualification, or a practical difficulty raised hypothetically — sí, claro, lo que pasa es que… is a refusal, not a yes. The strongest objection of all is often complete silence followed by nothing happening. So when a proposal gets smooth agreement in the room and then stalls, the warning was there: someone asked a procedural-sounding question, or said it was a good idea but wondered about timing, or said nothing at all. Learn to hear these. If a decision matters, follow up privately with each person afterwards and ask what they would change; you will get a much more direct answer with no one else present. Never put someone in a position where they must contradict a senior colleague publicly.
Meeting Turns Are Prepared Presentations
When you give someone the floor in an Ecuadorian meeting — especially in front of senior or external people — expect a prepared, self-contained presentation rather than a quick conversational answer. This is learned through years of schooling, where the graded group presentation is the standard format: each person owns a section, delivers it standing and in formal register, and questions come at the end. So a request for a short update often produces slides and a formal delivery, and interrupting mid-flow to probe a point reads as a breach of order rather than as engagement — hold your questions to the end. The flip side matters more: putting someone on the spot to react to material they have not prepared exposes them in front of the group, and they will protect themselves with a general, non-committal answer. If you want substance from a colleague, tell them beforehand exactly what you will ask, and let them prepare.
Meeting Minutes Prove Attendance, Not Content
Do not rely on Ecuadorian meeting documentation to carry your commitments. The written artefact around a meeting is mainly proof that it happened with the right people present — attendance sheets, signatures, sometimes photographs, minutes listing who came and that a topic was treated — and that part is done carefully. What was actually agreed is recorded much more loosely, and many ordinary team meetings produce no record at all. There is one sharp exception: where a shared fund, a personal liability or an audit is involved, the record becomes exact, public and enforced by the same people who otherwise write nothing down. Because the document does not carry the commitment, a person has to. An action item in the minutes that nobody personally owns will not happen; an action a named individual has taken on, and that someone with standing asks them about afterwards, will. So end every meeting by naming who does what, and plan to follow up personally.
Meetings Do Not Own the Clock
An Ecuadorian meeting does not hold an exclusive claim on the time or attention of the people in it. The agenda, if there is one, is a list of topics rather than a contract about time — often circulated late or announced verbally at the start, departed from freely, and ending with an open slot for anything else. Sessions run past their stated finish, absorb unrelated matters brought in by someone at the door, and tolerate phone calls taken in the room and people stepping out and coming back. Nothing about this is felt as indiscipline; people’s obligations run to the various people who have a claim on them, not to the block of time they are inside. If you need a hard stop, create an external reason for it and say it at the start — colleagues run tightly bounded meetings without difficulty when something enforces the boundary. Otherwise, schedule generously and do not put anything critical last.
Community Assemblies Are Deliberative Meetings
If your work touches rural communities, cooperatives, water-user boards or producer associations in Ecuador, expect a different kind of meeting from the office one. In a functioning communal assembly, attendance is a genuine obligation — absence can bring a fine or extra collective work — and a register is kept. Sessions run for hours without an external clock. Many people speak, including members holding no office, and speaking at length is expected rather than tolerated; whoever presides moderates rather than allocates turns. Resolution comes from continuing until objections have been exhausted or accommodated rather than from a quick vote, and the decision genuinely binds those present, including the power to call out collective labour. Minutes matter here. Do not mistake this for a meeting among equals — leaders and people with standing still carry more weight — and do not assume every community works this way, since communal governance has weakened in many places. But plan for a long, participatory session, and never for a short presentation.
(Aspirational) Meetings Start on Time
This one describes an ideal Ecuadorians hold about themselves, not how meetings generally run — treat it as what the culture believes it should do. Ecuadorian professional and public discourse consistently affirms that meetings ought to begin at the stated hour, follow a circulated agenda, spread participation around, reach explicit decisions and produce minutes with tracked actions. The ideal is home-grown, not imported: a national anti-lateness campaign was mounted with public ceremony and widely quoted figures for the cost of lost time, education policy has pushed participatory discussion for years, and the wry label for elastic time is one Ecuadorians apply to themselves. It is also entirely performable — the same colleagues run punctual, agenda-driven, minuted meetings in multinational subsidiaries and certified quality systems. In ordinary domestic working life, though, the gap between the affirmation and the practice is wide. Expect the ideal to be sincerely endorsed, and expect it to be enacted where something enforces it.