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How to Attend Meetings

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Re: How to Attend Meetings

#11

Post by dasil003 »

garciasn wrote: post #7

I agree with each and every single slide in this presentation; I do. I also know that in each and every company I have ever worked for, none of this is going to fly. Especially, "Attending meetings is a choice." Just like paying taxes is a choice; got it. --- For decades, I have been asking for agendas; I have asked for clarification on what to do to prepare; I have even suggested that we have solid outcomes. None of…

That's such a reductive statement. Yes there are always some unproductive meetings one has to attend. On the other hand, you'd be surprised how many leaders and middle-managers viscerally understand the cost of low-value meetings, and are doing everything they can to empower individuals to manage their own time. They might not call bullshit in a group setting (after all, as the slides call out: critical feedback should be given 1-1), but rest assured plenty of folks understand and will not hold it against you if you vote with your attendance.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#12

Post by unregistereddev »

nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote: post #9

Had an idea These are ideals but in reality your boss calls a meeting you go and forget the rules. So... What if there were decoy meetings. Useless fake ones where if you accept you get a reminder of the rules. People are motivated by power lines so doing this reverses it so that non attendance or thinking about attendance is aligned.

I'm somewhat convinced this is already a thing. It would explain some of the meeting notices I get.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#13

Post by smallnix »

The flow diagram for yes/no attend meeting is missing to weigh the estimated impact you can make against other meetings.

Even if I can contribute real value to 20 meetings which I am invited to, I can't attend all of them.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#14

Post by tehjoker »

Does underrate discussion. Larger shifts in strategy require iterated discussion and consensus formation. Not every meeting is this, nor should it be, but this is something that is underrepresented and under respected.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#15

Post by garciasn »

dasil003 wrote: post #11
garciasn wrote: post #7

I agree with each and every single slide in this presentation; I do. I also know that in each and every company I have ever worked for, none of this is going to fly. Especially, "Attending meetings is a choice." Just like paying taxes is a choice; got it. --- For decades, I have been asking for agendas; I have asked for clarification on what to do to prepare; I have even suggested that we have solid outcomes. None of…

That's such a reductive statement. Yes there are always some unproductive meetings one has to attend. On the other hand, you'd be surprised how many leaders and middle-managers viscerally understand the cost of low-value meetings, and are doing everything they can to empower individuals to manage their own time. They might not call bullshit in a group setting (after all, as the slides call out: critical feedback shou…

I have worked at many companies over my career. From 10s of thousands, to thousands, to hundreds, to tens of employees. There wasn't a SINGLE ONE that would tolerate someone declining EVERY MEETING when the culture does not align to the ideals this presentation outlines.

Clearly your experience is different and that's absolutely awesome; consider yourself incredibly fortunate.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#16

Post by shoo »

nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote: post #9

Had an idea These are ideals but in reality your boss calls a meeting you go and forget the rules. So... What if there were decoy meetings. Useless fake ones where if you accept you get a reminder of the rules. People are motivated by power lines so doing this reverses it so that non attendance or thinking about attendance is aligned.

> Useless fake ones where if you accept you get a reminder of the rules.

Like phishing training, but for meeting attendance. Fail the test and accept a decoy meeting and you must complete a round of mandatory training in how to distinguish a useless meeting from one that is worth attending.

I wonder if enterprises would buy this? Phishing training companies make a living.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#18

Post by arjie »

I wonder if the (AFAIK original to) Bridgewater technique of recording all meetings will spread. One thing I think that would have helped me quite a bit is to have a transcript (with speakers annotated) of a meeting. With a sufficiently advanced LLM summarizing, I could probably a handle a much larger volume of meetings where I needed to know what was going on just as a tail-risk capturer.

e.g. if someone has a meeting on which task queue to use, then even as an engineering manager (let alone some of my later roles) that is a thing where I just need to know if the decision-making process was sane. I don't need to interject, or pick one tech or the other. I do need to know that the group picked something and that they did so for good reasons.

In the past, teams I worked on would try to formalize the discussion into a decision document, which is nice but I think we could capture a lot more decisions this way if we had an automatic way of handling them.

I'm sure the natural pushback against this will be that people dislike being recorded in general, but I think with the kind of team that doesn't mind it or that has it as part of its explicit culture, it would be an interesting exercise in organizational transparency. Maybe I'll give it a crack if I'm ever in such a position again.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#20

Post by JadeNB »

jmkd wrote: post #5

Should be a doc on the harder skill of how to schedule meetings, then you wouldn't need a guide on how to attend them.

Educating people on how to schedule meetings requires that everyone else have the skill for you to benefit. Educating people on how to attend meetings only requires that you have the skill for you to benefit.
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