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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."
...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.
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.
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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...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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...