How do you run project meetings that people do not resent attending?

Every meeting needs a decision or a blocker to justify it. Publish an agenda naming the decisions, invite only the people who own them, timebox it, and end with owners and dates written down and circulated within the hour. Cancel a status meeting when a written update would do; that single habit buys more goodwill with delivery teams than anything else.

The bar I set is that a meeting needs a decision or a blocker, otherwise it should be a written update. So there is an agenda that says what we are deciding, only the people who own those decisions are in the room, it is timeboxed, and it ends with owners and dates that I send round within the hour. The follow up note is the actual output; the meeting is just how you produce it. I also cancel meetings out loud when there is nothing to decide, and that has bought me more credibility with engineers than anything else I have done. On one project we replaced a forty five minute weekly status call with a written update plus a fifteen minute call for blockers only, and both attendance and the quality of the information went up, because people read the update beforehand instead of half listening to it.