How to Attend Meetings

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 prepare for the weekly staff meeting, rather than many small meetings every day. It also avoids the problem of people feeling not included - you're always invited to the one huge meeting every week, it's up to you to attend or skip.

2. The problem with meeting culture cannot be solved with education on how to say no, it's about admitting that attending meetings actually does convey a lot of things. Lots of information is not shared outside of meetings. Seniority of attendees actually does have a huge impact on visibility in folks' careers. A lot of the advice in this slide deck feels like it should work, but doesn't in practice because of self interest.

The education that needs to happen is quite different imo:

- leadership needs to be done through writing

- meetings should be recorded and minutes sent out broadly, along with allowing silent attendance.

- decisions need to give time for dissent outside of meeting attendees before committing.

At a previous team, our ceo would send out a weekly 5 minute “catch up” video. This covered pretty much everything you needed to know in our company, it saved so many hours, until people complained it could be a message, and then people couldn’t find the message in the other updates and eventually it became a bimonthly hour long meeting for 60 people as they always do!

I attempted a startup to fix meeting culture a few years back. Selling the product was nearly impossible. We got some nibbles and a couple bites, but it eventually became clear that the vast majority of companies just don't care about the problem. They'll tell you it's a problem (because it is) but nobody wants to write a check to fix it.

The problem with time-bounding is it becomes an obsession with meeting optimization, and the content of the meeting comes secondary.

"Ok let's quickly do X Y and Z so the meeting can be over and we can be outta here!"

"Hey, it's been 8 minutes and we have only allocated 30 so we need to move to the next topic."

Letting meetings be dictated by the clock has the effect of making them feel a bit like reading an executive summary of a book instead of reading the book. You're letting the clock dictate the importance of something to a company, and not the something. It's like delaying a huge feature launch because the person in charge of it is out sick.

The reading -is the thing-. Discussing the difficult decision is -the thing-.

I recognize that there is a fishbowl effect, where if you allocate four hours for a meeting about office dishwasher etiquette, you'll be amazed that all four hours are filled with lively, constant discussion. So there does need to be some light facilitation. But I'd argue that over-facilitating is just as unproductive as under-facilitating.

As for the other stuff, agendas are great. A purpose for a meeting is great. Having the right people in the meeting, great.

Relatedly, the craziest thing I keep hearing in corporate land is this idea of "open calendars." So your hard-won 15-minute lunch break can vanish because someone drops a meeting on it, and you first hear about it via email notif. Calendars should be opt-in, period.

People attend meetings for job security, not to accomplish an agenda.

Being seen as important, is important.

You can't solve this without true ownership, and employees aren't owners.