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How to Attend Meetings

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Re: How to Attend Meetings

#121
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a functional organization, it's almost certainly going to be absurd to argue that you can't provide value to any of the meetings that you are invited to.

I can provide value to any meeting that I’m invited to. That doesn’t mean it’s the most valuable thing I can do with my time (especially given how tragically frustrating most of them are).

I mean, I can probably rephrase things to somehow eventually pin you down to admitting that maybe some meetings are worthwhile or otherwise necessary.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#122
These slides miss most of the point of meetings. You don't just go to talk, you go to listen.

Generally if you have enough information that you know what you will share and can expect to receive at a meeting, it should be an email. People can share things on their timetable in the style they are most comfortable with and the information can be reviewed without anyone needing to worry about meeting minutes.

Even when you are uncertain exactly what will be required or gained, email is still generally the better option. People can look up the answers to questions instead of speaking off the top of their head about something they were unprepared for, and people with low stakes can skim the conversation for the bits that are relevant.

Meetings are for highly unstructured, free-form communication where you really need to talk through something. That's not to say an agenda can't be useful, but it should be nothing more than a starting point. Meandering discussions that don't really accomplish anything besides sharing information no one realized they needed are the point. If the meeting doesn't efficiently accomplish what you wanted, that's because you used the wrong tool for the job.

Meetings are best when the communication is multiplicative. For example in a brainstorming session where people build off eachother's thoughts in rapid succession. The more people contribute, the more everyone benefits. Even very low value contributions may be key catalysts. You don't get creativity and emotional investment and comradery by keeping a tight schedule.

All too often people will try to lump a bunch of different things together into a single meeting which really should be handled separately, and then try to use the agenda to recover the specificity of the various portions of the meeting. This never works well. Because everything gets improperly handled in one meeting, you need more meetings to revisit the various parts, and oftentimes those too have other things mixed in. Often you'll have a meeting to prepare for the meeting with a select group, and a meeting to follow up the meeting with a different select group, and of course the results of these meetings beget even more meetings. The ubiquitous feeling that a meeting was useless is almost always because you had a legitimately useful reason for holding or attending the meeting that was not accomplished. You don't fix this by holding better organized meetings, you fix this by eliminating the need for these meetings.

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As an aside, I find it funny that there is a slide stating meeting attendance is a choice and then a subsequent slide listing optional meetings as a red flag.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#123
post #117

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.

Thanks Michael Scott.

There is nothing in the world Michael Scott loves more than an all hands meeting that no one actually needs to attend, and we would never play a part in combatting them.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#124
Though these guides are well meaning, they completely misread the inadvertent outcome of meetings. Even a perfectly planned meeting has a number of other effects beside resolving the stated agenda.

When and how people are invited and declined, who attends, who engages, how people engage are all signals gleaned from a meeting.

Think of how many times someone felt jilted by not being invited, called on, not responded to -- etc -- during a meeting.

If you consider yourself hyper rational and business focused, you have to account for the personal dynamics occurring before, during & after a meeting.

You ever wonder why everyone "hates" meetings, yet they still invest in them? Even being cynical or dismissive is a form of attention.

Meetings are like money in that people are interested even though they say otherwise.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#125
The only meeting resilient to all possible outcomes is one that can easily be split. Sometimes you need to branch the timeline, and people need to talk about different things that are the right things for their priorities. In real space you can do this easily, but in tools like zoom, it needs to be blessed form above (creating breakouts).

Digital tools suck for running effective meetings that can have a branching timeline.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#127
post #81

While I have several disagreements with this deck, there are two large ones: 1. In my experience, a lot of teams don't have long enough meetings to avoid the litany of small meetings. For example, a lot of staff meetings could easily be 2 hours and then cancel many project specific meetings that have 50%+ of the same attendees later in the week. They also enforce a cadence of execution - everyone knows they need to p…

While I agree a lot of information is conferred, most of it is not useful. I'm quite a fan of not attending meetings where I don't get specifically invited (as in, directly, not as part of a group). This may or may not fly at a given organisation. Anyhow, my main learning has been that:

1. All truly important information will be repeated (in the form of tickets, slack messages, further meetings). Usually several times.

2. Most useful subordinate information (the kind that doesn't get repeated) only needs to be related to 1 person 80%+ of the time. It's vanishingly rare 3 or more people need some information that isn't ever repeated elsewhere.

The only really useful work in meetings is making decisions. This is an essential feature, but a big problem is often many "spectators" are invited (attendees without decision power or context). Being a pure spectator in a meeting is almost always completely pointless. Also, people like to make decisions/input so meetings are rife with bike shedding (most people have decision power + context for low importance items usually).

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#128
I worked for a Japanese corporation, and meetings were their DNA. Attendance at meetings conferred the ability to participate in a project, so teams would often send "placeholders." People that had no idea what the meeting was about, but their presence meant their team was represented.

It's quite common to see people sleeping in meetings, over there.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you make the wrong decision I will say no While I know your heart is in the right place, as someone with a reporting structure on both sides, I can tell you that this kind of handholding is the entire reason they keep making bad decisions. You must let people fail, and from there your entire job is ensuring that winding back that decision is the responsibility of the people who made it. Few decisions are irrever…

I think you’re reading into a hip fire comment here - I’m not saying I’ll override any decision you make that i disagree with. Simply that if push comes to shove my team should feel empowered to make a decision and bring it to me for “ass covering” knowing that I will challenge them on it if I disagree, but also feeling confident that they know how I’ll feel about it before they make that call. I trust them to do thi…

If you have a team member you don’t trust to make good calls, then you need to coach them.
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