Teams meeting - side chats and smirking

[SarkyMummy]

Advice please. In a teams meeting today two of my ‘subordinates’ appeared to be messaging each other on the side - both were laughing/smirking at the same time whilst I was speaking, whilst looking at their screens. I have concerns about the performance of one of them and whilst the second is performing well, they are resistant to taking direction from me. We’re working on a tough project and I don’t feel great about my leadership of it recently so this happening has made me feel really paranoid. How do I address the apparent behaviour professionally? I do feel like I need to nip it in the bud. Very grateful for any thoughts!

I think that trawling people's messages is the nuclear option. All trust will be lost and your relationship with the team will never recover. And as your manager I would question your priorities if you chose to spend time trawling messages for signs of distraction.
As other people have said, work on ways of keeping your meetings engaging and to the point. Ask targeted questions to anyone who appears distracted "what do you think Jane?" "So Jack, how will that impact you?”.
Work on the performance issues separately.
You can only do your job with the support and cooperation of the majority of your team. Lose that cooperation and it is likely to be career-limiting for you.

The smirking and possible side bar conversations are the symptoms not the cause.

The root cause is they don't respect OP as a manager, that's either because they are unpleasant people or OP isn't doing her job effectively, or probably a mixture of both.

Regular 121s, sorting out any issues quickly, taking blame where it is appropriate and giving clear direction should sort it out. I've always made it clear to my team that we should support each other where we can and as the line manager I take the rap in public when things go wrong, but obviously deal with any performance things.

I always read work threads about awful colleagues to check they're not about me.

I don't think this one is about me, but it does show how having a silly side joke that isn't even anything to do with the meeting could be mis-construed. So, I'm going to shape up my behaviour 🙂.