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How to Attend Meetings
41–50 of 193 posts
Re: How to Attend Meetings
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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. Exactly. Love the deck. Like you, agree with many things. My similar suggestions (but a little looser): 1. Long meetings need agendas. But don't expect perfection. You can get away with no agenda in a short (30 or less) meeting. 2. Very large meetings need a DRIVER…
> I hate a big meeting when someone says something like "so who wants to bring something up" - no no no.
This makes the meeting end really quick when nobody has anything to discuss right? For some people the only way you are ever going to get them to bring something up is by asking in a meeting.
Re: How to Attend Meetings
#43Should be a doc on the harder skill of how to schedule meetings, then you wouldn't need a guide on how to attend them.
I think the cultural norm of a stance like this for attendees will condition people over time to follow the opposite side of things.
Re: How to Attend Meetings
#44Elephant in the room: what about meetings where the purpose is to receive updates, maintain context on project progress, etc.? Yes, sometimes (often!) these meetings can be emails or messages — but sometimes it's important to be able to ask or even hear others ask questions, and to get a sense of how people are feeling directly. This seems to be missed by the author.
Using meetings to sync on status is an anti-pattern. Questions can be asked in tickets and shared documents. True feelings are rarely shared in large forums anyway and are only reliably shared in private 1:1 sessions.
Re: How to Attend Meetings
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Exactly. Love the deck. Like you, agree with many things. My similar suggestions (but a little looser): 1. Long meetings need agendas. But don't expect perfection. You can get away with no agenda in a short (30 or less) meeting. 2. Very large meetings need a DRIVER…
Wow, I might need to steal that idea for bypassing Jira discussions. I hate Jira with all my might.
Please do. It works!
I don't think most folks are both interested and trying to sit in mindless meetings (like my JIRA example).
That JIRA example is particularly annoying. It's a product team (with an external consultant) using JIRA to track progress. But like anything with a reporting component, people are now optimizing toward what's reported - not toward real work. Success in a week (or sprint) is number of tickets closed not whether anything actually happened.
I declined several of these JIRA update meetings. At least two invites popped onto my calendar as agenda-less hour-long blocks.
Then I joined one, asked all the questions around purpose, and suggested what I would do to help with less overall effort and a reduction in pesky meeting invites.
Re: How to Attend Meetings
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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've had one manager over 10 jobs spanning 40 years that was on board with this
I’ve had multiple managers over many jobs who’ve said they were on board with this. I’ve had CEOs saying from the top down “decline meetings without an agenda”, and yet somehow it never changes.
Re: How to Attend Meetings
#47I 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…
> "Attending meetings is a choice." Just like paying taxes is a choice; got it.
It is completely valid to say "no" to meeting in our company. Not to all of them, but to most. Or to ask "Do I have to be here? Why was I invited, it seems out of my scope" and move from there. I see people doing that and I was doing that.
Re: How to Attend Meetings
#48This was great!
Re: How to Attend Meetings
#49Had 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.
When I was at a large company I made meetings with fellow EMs to prevent others from scheduling with us. It was the only way to get quality heads down time. All of them were titled something like “$X WG” where X was what we needed to work on and WG is an acronym for “Working Group”. We fooled our manager for a long time, though sometimes she would join the automatically-attached Zoom to find us.
I do this, except without the foolery. I schedule recurring blocks on my calendar like "Focus time" and "Personal time" so people know that scheduling meetings with me during those blocks may not result in my attendance.
Re: How to Attend Meetings
#50"Small brainstorming" is a bad meeting flavor? Not sure I agree with that. I find that brainstorming meetings with >3 people turn into trainwrecks.
Otherwise, very good. I once did something similar for a company that I worked at. It made little difference, even though I presented it to 80+ office workers at my site. You really need some enforcement from a senior person to get this stuff to take hold. But its worth it. Meetings are a massive source of time waste for most companies.