Meetings

Meetings: none of us are as dumb as all of us.

I walk in with dread. I am on time, which means I will be waiting for fifteen minutes for the meeting to start. If there is one thing I am completely sure of in the corporate world it is that meetings only start on time when I am running late; on time or early and I will be waiting.

There is actually another thing I am fairly confident about concerning meetings: meeting titles are intentionally misleading. For instance, a “roundtable” which would indicate a meeting of equals where all input is welcome is typically led by a manager standing at the end of a very not-round table giving a presentation. The "roundtable" should be called the "lecture hall." A “town hall,” which you might think would be predominantly question-and-answer with brass present in the same room with staff is actually a Power Point presentation led by conference call that is so carefully scheduled within the allotted time that there is no room for questions and answers. I call this the "Bejeweled" meeting.

Another thing I have noticed, is that the more dire the information being presented, the more optimistic the presenter. I was in one “town hall” where I listened to four managers of different divisions give a yearly report. The manager whose division had fallen short on every key result objective spent his time talking about exciting opportunities. The manager whose division had met or exceeded all objectives was talking about contracts that they couldn’t close and sounded like they were about to close the doors. It was like the post-game interview where the losing coach is talking about how proud he is of his boys for making some great plays while the winning coach is talking about all the mistakes his team made.

           The most important thing I can tell you about the meetings I attend is this: almost all of them could be handled more efficiently in a reasonably short email. I suppose the idea is employee engagement, not being the big impersonal corporation, but how am I supposed to feel engaged when I am listening to disembodied voices out of a speaker phone explain poorly designed graphs on a projector screen. If possible, this is worse with the regularly scheduled meetings where instead of new data, it is just a constant drumming. “Be safe. Follow procedures. Quality is important.” In these instances, not even an email is necessary; a poster over the urinal would probably be the best way to convey this information.

The meetings I find the most useful, are almost always the shortest. These are typically the ones where there is specific information to be conveyed and only one manager is present. “Here’s what we did last week; here’s what we are doing this week; here’s what’s coming up.” Back to work. Which highlights my biggest problems with meetings: they take away from work productivity. I know, some of you need to coordinate projects and brainstorm and such. I have been in productive meetings where we discuss issues and work to solve problems or discuss particular decisions, but most of the meetings I go to are not that. They are information dumps that I could read on my own schedule while continuing production.

But the people that sign the checks make the decisions. At least there is a chance there will be donuts. Here we go.

"Alright everyone, thanks for coming." It was mandatory.
"Before we get started: what's the most important thing here?" My paycheck?
"That's right; your safety. Now who's job is your safety? Is it the safety committee?" Yes.
"It's your job..."

Ah, we will be doing the thirty seconds of information crammed tightly into an hour routine: the urinal poster meeting. 
And now I have to pee.