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The Useless Meeting Wack Jobs
$$$$$exyGal writes "Have you ever attended a useless meeting? Are you the wack job who always ask the same (or random) question during an all hands with the hope that simply by asking, you're going to change something? Rands in Repose points out the difference between an informational meeting and a conflict resolution meeting."
i think everyone hates meetings, but are too busy (attempting to)entainertain themselves to close their mouth and end the meeting. sorry to sound bitter. i am
...for instance, I've worked at companies that have them, and companies that don't. At the ones that don't, rumours and gossip often take the place of what little real information you would get at a meeting, and that can do a lot to foment discontent among the workers.
;)
At the very least, at companies that have meetings, you have the opportunity to see people you might not otherwise see, maybe get some halfway useful information, and get some free donuts.
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Meetings, in my experience, are "look at me!" sessions, or senior management telling you about the cool bill of goods some sales guy sold them that we have to now implement.
Pessimists.net - as if life wasn't depressing enough.
All the time at Slashdot...
The good kinds of meeting:
1. For active projects, once per week to review status and plan work. Without face to face meetings, projects derail rapidly.
2. To solve problems, get the people or individuals out of their context, face-to-face for half an hour, give them attention, fix whatever's wrong.
3. To explain emergency situations: get the whole team to stop and sit down, listen, and work together on the next steps.
4. To sell an idea or plan: face to face with the customer, no presentations or power point, discuss the issues and use a flip board if you need to draw something.
And the useless kinds:
1. Anything with powerpoint.
2. Any meeting that is not for a specific project or problem.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Easy.
Step 1, qualify all meetings before attending - do I *really* need to be there? Do I *really* need to be there for the whole meeting?
Step 2, if a meeting is drifting into uselessness - say something - eg "Are we finished dealing with (important things X,Y and Z)" people either agree we are and the meeting ends, or not and the meeting gets back on track.
Step 3, the ultimate sanction. If your presence at a meeting is doing neither you nor anyone else any good - don't be afraid to leave. You know, say you have some stuff to do, get up, and walk out.
And finally, never, ever bitch about useless meetings - people just remember you as a whiner - doesn't matter if you're right or not.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
My old boss was fired I believe solely on the basis that the engineering meetings we were having were useless. It was actually quit sad. He had the meetings mostly to just keep up with the progress of our assorted projects. The fact is all the projects were so distant from each other that most of us just sat around listing to
reports that had nothing to do with us for over an hour. If you manage well meetings can be kept to a minimum. Also their are so many project software packages out there (MS Project 2004 "shudder") that meetings are becoming more extraneous.
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. - Adam Smith (1723-90)
Even better are foreign trips, which are the same, but you get an all expenses paid holiday to boot. And all this while earning a salary. It almost makes me want to become a manager.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
My favorite meetings are the ones where the boss tells us "Okay, you guys get together and figure out how to do this." He then shows up to the meeting and proceeds to tell us what we're going to do. When we try to explain that there may be better options, he pulls out the "I've got 31 years of experience" card, and ends the meeting...
:)
We just wait until he leaves the room and then get back to work
..could be used for something a 100% more productive. As a developer i get summoned to all kinds of meetings. I am one of the architects behind a rather large application that we sell to our customers. The most unproductive kind of meetings i am called to are the ones involving our sales people. About 20% of my time goes to sitting in meetings with our sales staff and prospects selling the solution. These are not prestudies, they are pure sales-meetings where a short demo is run, and some fancy acronyms get passed around. When confronted by the fact that i could spend my time far more productively doing my actual job, most of them stated that they dont feel comfortable on their own with our product (its moderatly complex). So this past week i spent a couple of afternoons teaching our sales-reps the system from the ground up, in the hope that they will be able to do things on their own from now on.
The other meeting time-sink are the weekly department meetings. Specifically the part where everyone has to tell everyone else what they have been doing the last week. This consists of 1-2 hours (we are 5 employees) of mind-numbingly boring monologues from people who like to hear their own voice. Please send help.
I used to contract to a Fortune 500 company (though I didn't make anywhere near the money you'd expect from that), and we had these great weekly team meetings where our manager basically asked "Are you on target?" and we all just said "Yup, on target" (though we each had to phrase it differently to suit our individual personalities).
I never, ever, asked why... since it was easier to ask: 'ah, why not?'
"And that solves the mystery of the missing ring" - Bender
Meetings are always going to be inefficient because language is hard.
As clearly demonstrated by the writing in this article.
This Rands person has some very good points. Still (and feel free to mod me down for saying so), it's hard to take advice on organizational makeup from someone who gets "here" and "hear" mixed up. (That being said, I think I'll carefully check my grammar and spelling before I post this...)
I guess you couldn't possibly work with someone like me.
;)
I've got Asperger's (and a little bit of a chip on my shoulder), which is a form of mild autism that inclines me to do everything on your list except manage.
You might suggest to your coworker that he get tested for Aspergers, and get perscriptions to help. I know mine help me a great deal. Of course, you're going to get an icy glare.
From personal experience, I'd guess that in person he goes O/T with every third sentence, even if you change topics with him every second sentence. He probably doesn't have much empathy skill (Mine aren't natural...I had to learn them from a therapist. She was overjoyed when I pointed out she looked preoccupied.).
If he does have empathy skill, or if he is attempting to improve himself, I can pretty much gaurantee he feels like shit every time he makes a mistake like the ones you mention. (It's generally a, "DAMNIT! I can't seem to do anything right!" internal reaction.) Give him a break. Offer him help. He needs it, even if he doesn't want to admit it. His self-esteem is artificially inflated, at best, and he feels it.
Hell, give him my email address. I'll talk with him.
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My previous boss loved meetings because she never wanted to have to do any real work. A meeting was a place for her to gossip, chat, eat and waste other people's time. Anyone she didn't like would get chewed out or have crappy assignments piled-on during meetings. :)
It is my belief that most meetings really are time-wasters, existing only to reinforce the self-importance of those in charge.
When my boss was told to start rotating the chair for the Employee-of-the-Month selection committee between us supervisors, I ran them with an iron fist when it was my turn. Since I was also expected to complete all of my usual duties as well(salaried means no overtime), I interrupted anyone who got off-topic and brought them back to what we were doing. I may not have made friends that way, but I cut 3 two-hour donut-fests a month down to two separate 30 minute meetings per month.
When her boss found out from another department head who sat in on the meetings how I had taken charge, he decided he liked my methods and promoted me to another department. He apparently also told my now old boss to cut out all non-essential meetings and keep any meeting she had down to a half hour. Was she PISSED.
Flash is the Herpes of the Internet.
your.opinion >
...as a meeting. If you want entertaining cynical hummor about how to suffer meetinghood, read the "Meetings" chapter in The Dilbert Principle. This article is a crude imitator's windy first draft by comparison.
And yes, 90% of the time is wasted if you take a narrow "information transfer" point of view. It isn't. Steven Pinker said it best in The Language Instinct:
(We might add superstitious, egocentric, paranoid, deluded, projecting, as the case may be.)
On the other hand, serving lots of liquids and having a "no bathroom break" policy can help cut meetings short...
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
No meeting should ever last more than an hour. THe individual calling the meeting is responsible for defining the agenda, which defines the information and the problems to be solved. Everyone needs to know why they are there and what to expect. If neccessary discussion is moved off line once the stake holders are identified.
THese rules are so simple I can't understand why supposedly educated and experienced managers can't get it right. It is a simple organiizational task.
Sometimes an hour is too short and it dribbles over to 1 hour and 15 minutes. I don't think I have had a 2 hour meeting I was running in years.
If you are not the person calling the meeting demand an explicit written agenda, tell the person calling that you have some important tasks to do right after the meeting and if it is going poorly push to have the discussions taken off line of from sub-committess.
Simple organizational principals which work over 90% of the time.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Parent is dead on, and I'd take it one step further: don't attend meetings that have no agenda if you can at all avoid it. There are some "crisis" meetings that cannot be avoided, but if you get called to a meeting ALWAYS email the meeting organizer and ask for an agenda -- "Reply to all" can be you friend here, because it puts the "public eye" on the meeting caller.
If they reply with something vague or don't reply at all, you're off the hook. If someone asks why you weren't at the meeting, you can just say that that you were busy with X and that the agenda had nothing to do with your projects.
There's no escaping some meetings (called by bosses, crises, etc), and sometimes a meeting without an agenda gets called specifically to submarine people who won't attend an agendaless meeting ("We met yesterday and discussed your project..."), but not participating unless an agenda is prepared can definitely help prevent yak sessions where nothing gets done.
I've found that an effective technique to keep meetings under an hour is to schedule them right. Scheduling a meeting for 4pm doesn't work as people don't seem to mind sticking around late. But schedule a meeting for 11am and everyone wants to get out to lunch. Works like a charm.
The important thing with some meeting callers is not to ask, "Do I need to come?" but rather, "I may have a conflict, so how much does this pertain to me?" The conflict here is that you don't want to sit bored in a meeting when you could be getting ahead (or catching up) on a more important project.
I'm not a doctor, nor that knowledgeable about medicine. Still, I've read a little bit about autism. IMHO what you describe seems to me more like a severe attention deficit problem, than anything autism-related.
But, again, I'm not a medic. If anyone knows more about this, I'd be grateful if he/she shared the knowledge.
And, well, I'd also expect that even without taking a hint from empathy, a simple understanding that "not _everything_ must be solved in _this_ meeting" can go a long way.
E.g., in the case of asking for irrelevant details, you don't need to see if the co-workers are annoyed by the question. You need a little common sense, to ask yourself "do I _need_ to know the font size at this point? does _everyone_ _else_ need to debate the font size right now?" If not, please don't waste everyone's time with the question. That's all.
Plus, from someone who works in this line of job I'd wouldn't expect much empathy, but I would expect them to have abstraction skills. If you don't _need_ a detail for the problem at hand, you should actually exclude it from the model.
E.g., let's take a simple problem like "two trains leave in opposite directions from the same railway station, one doing 80 mph, one doing 60 mph. How far apart will they be after one hour."
A legitimate question might be "ok, so are they going in a straight line and with no stops during that hour?"
However _if_ you start asking stuff like "what colour are the trains?" or "do tickets to the 80mph train cost more?" then you're not lacking empathy, you're lacking abstraction skills. Those details are just not needed at all to solve the problem.
I.e., all I'm asking is that everyone first spends 10 seconds asking themselves if they really need the answer, before asking the question. That's all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Let's not put too much blame on the guy asking the out of place question.. though I know we all focus our blame on him at hte time. If his question is out of place, it should not be answered at that time.. rather, the person with the answer should say "We don't need to do that in this meeting, come see me after" or whatever.
Wonderful parent post, though I'm going to argue for a different alternative to the big hopeless meeting.
Sure, you could argue that we could have cleared the same question by email instead of having a two-hour meeting, but still.
It depends on who you're working with, obviously, but I've found that often a meeting is a MUCH faster way to resolve something than email. An remotely complicated issue can be better figured out face to face.
People often don't realize their faulty assumptions, and will write out a whole email based on that one flawed idea -- and once they've spent that much time working out a solution, it's damned hard to rewind them all the way back to the beginning, ESPECIALLY in an email where you have to walk on eggshells to avoid insulting people (and you're going *nowhere* after that happens).
My usual answer is the "unofficial" meeting, where no invitations are sent and max 3 people are involved. Then as soon as the invalid assumptions get trotted out, I can offer up the confused-but-trusting look and tactfully sort that out before we go on. And I can MOVE ON as soon as I see that we're all on the same page again, which is also impossible via email.
I'm with you all about larger meetings... most meetings with more than 4-5 people are doomed unless the format is really locked down and there's someone running the thing who's really on-track and not afraid to shut down the jokers, the random-question-generators, the class-participators, the eternally-befogged, the story-tellers, the tangent-surfers, the argument-incitors, the pickers-of-nits, and all the other highly-valued team members that can't be left out because they're, well, on the team. Unfortunately, that's a rare occurance indeed.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
did they know there was this discount with Dell?
Prolly not. So, why do you have to dis them when they offer what looks like a good suggestion when viewed from their viewpoint? Why dont you share that "better perspective"? We are not dumb, you know. And you might get a few good ideas from it ( dont pass them off as yours, though, be man / woman / whatever enough to give credit where it is due. ). It's a whole lot easier to charge that hill when you know that the hill to your right is also being taken. It is easier to hold there in the face of resistance when you know there is another unit you are supporting. And what, aside from your ego, or making you look important enough to keep, is stopping you?
The reason most of you "managers" get where you are is not because you are inherently superiour. You got on the bus earlier, and where lucky enough to get a good seat. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but it is little different than the old "divine rights of kings" arguments handed out during the aristocratic days to support the failed notion that the King should rule.
As to the "right to a job", I ask you, are you any better? I'll bet you think your "management position" entitles you to a thing or two. Examine yourself.
RE: The military slant. It's all fine, but recall that the should be making sure that his/her/its subordinates have sufficient knowledge to step into his/her/its role in the case he/she/it is removed from that position. Anything less is not acceptable. Now in business, the need is different, but if you arent tring to bring along to your level those currently subordinate to you, then I would argue you are not doing your job. It only works because most of the other "managers" out there are not doing it either.
Also, you need to watch out for the command from the rear problem. The people at the front *know* what is going on in front of themselves better than you do, and Hitlerian rantings from your bunker about holding till the last man will kill morale and make your team far less effective.
Know why Rommel was such a good General? He spent a fair amount of time at the front. Yes, he spent time in the rear as well, but he moved down to the front to see what was going on before he made his moves. I would love to meet *one* business leader who did that. ( Yeah, and maybe you could live in a cubical, before you tell me that it is good enough for me. I *might* believe you then. )
emt 377 emt 4
Having worked for a few large and small coporations, one of the biggest indicators of the corporate culture is how the meetings are conducted.
For one company, when I was in a management position, it was drilled into us not to come to a meeting without a specific agenda. If there was no agenda, there was no meeting. Period. Do not call a meeting unless you are actually attempting to do your job better.
For another company, meetings followed no timetable. They would drift in and out of discussions, and often the people invited to the meeting shouldn't have all been in the same meeting. You can't have the marketing people trying to hammer out strategy while the tech guys are trying to figure out how to make the products link up.
Some companies only have meetings to convey information. Sometimes these are large meetings designed to look like town meetings, but just as the article stated, only a few idiots believe that. I try to avoid these meetings. You want me to get some information about the company? Send me an email. I don't care if nobody else reads it, I do and I don't lose two hours out of my day.
My meeting rules, from my personal experience:
1. Don't go to any meetings unless you have an agenda. It doesn't have to be printed out, but you need to have some goal for the meeting beyond just sitting and talking.
2. Do not have mixed dept meetings unless it's a getting-to-know-you meeting. If it's a meet-and-greet, then say so up front. Every time someone tries to divert the meeting, just say "Let's table that discussion for a more focused meeting". You don't want the sales people talking shop while the tech guys are staring into space and vice versa.
3. Some people work by talking, some work by doing. This isn't a statement of laziness; it's just that different jobs require different interactions. Programmers work by sitting at their desktop writing code. Marketers work by grouping together and talking through their concepts. Don't confuse meetings with work when it isn't,but also don't assume meetings accomplish nothing.
Some groups DO have meetings all day and they DO accomplish something. For most tech guys, any time away from networking or hacking is time lost.
But if you're a tech and you call a tech meeting to brainstorm architecture for a new project, that's still worthwhile work. It goes both ways.
Does it really matter if the meeting is useful or not? I get paied the same if I spend all day in useless meetings or if I spend the day being productive.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
When I ask this question of others, I usually at least get several seconds of stunned silence in response. Asking this question of others often tends to annoy and frustrate them just like it used to do the same to me, so it won't make you friends with them, however. But it sure cuts through the crap.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
A meeting of 10 people each each earning an average of 50K year costs $100 an hour.
This applies to email as well. I spend a lot of time typing out answers to questions in email ( everyone likes to have a "receipt for my answer")
IMHO any cost/efficency conscious business person should teach people to ask themselves the following questions when requesting information:
1. what do i want to know or what do I want to communicate?
2. what is the fastest way for me to ask/tell my point and what is the fastest way for those I am communicating with to respond?
Steve
This went on for almost a year before anyone noticed what was going on. When confronted with his actions his response was, "Well I put in a request for more disk space, but never heard back about it."
He did the right thing. Presumably, his job was to keep the system up and running, no matter what. He asked for the resources necessary to do his job, his manager didn't respond, so he did his best.
It's like blaming a DBA with no budget for tapes for not taking backups of the database. We're good, but we can't spontaneously create matter from nothing...
The problem with the situiation was more that he didn't tell anyone that he had been deleting their data and he didn't really follow up with the purchase request for the drive space. Had he done either of these things the situiation could have been resolved without nearly as much heartache.
Obviously we should stop teaching our kids to play fairly with each other because it leaves them ill-equipped to deal with the real world of adulthood where unfair and unethical behavior reaps the highest rewards and more people consider it only reasonable for it to be so.
Or maybe we could treat people better and expect the same.