As a middle manager with that background, I would think the lesson is that you should make a better effort to brief the engineers on what context they need for meetings rather than let them linger in the state of feeling like it's all pointless.
Agreed; I don't know the requestor's background, org structure, role, and why are they in those specific meetings in the first place. There are any number of activities that their manager can do and improve, but question as I interpreted it was "What can I do / what is wrong with me / how can I improve".
