The Story of Perpetual Meetings
Not that long ago, I’ve heard this person, who is a senior consultant/advisor, inside a company, brag about how productive he is: “I have all days of meetings. I’m very productive”. Those were his exact words. When I heard that, I tweeted to the world that no matter what your profession is, meetings are never an indicator of success.
And right on cue, several people responded that for them, that is simply not true. And while I agree for some of them, there might be roles that require more meetings, generally, meetings don’t really add value to your job. If you are a sales person, you probably have a lot of meetings, and that is your job, but you add the value when you are in the office, following up on those meetings, coming up with new offers, sending proposals to clients, etc.
Bragging about productivity because you attend & call meetings is like bragging about having sex because you bought condoms.
Now, let’s get back to the person mentioned above. He is a consultant/advisor. Technically, that is a role that really does add (some) value through meetings. Because that is where knowledge gets transferred to the people who need it. But the problem then becomes, who schedules those meetings? If it is the consultant, you may have a problem. Same goes if that consultant keeps talking more than listening. In my opinion, a good consultant will be mostly asking questions during a meeting, giving hints, and then work (think) on a proper solution later, and send the suggestion to the teams. So even here, meetings don’t really add all the value, they just create an atmosphere where people think they work. In reality though, if teams don’t find the input useful, all those meetings are basically in vain. You just bog down the entire team and feed that person with fuel to spread those ideas of “working”.
Status Meetings
Another amazing idea is holding status/reporting meetings. Because what else improves productivity of a team better than holding reporting meetings with everybody at the same time and talk about how slow the work is.
Work is not going fast enough! Let’s have a 4-hour meeting to discuss why.
Now, I do believe there is a time and a place for reporting meetings. For examples, I really like the Agile format of daily stand-ups. But those are not formal reporting meetings. You will not improve a team’s morale by holding a meeting to discuss the team’s morale. You will improve it by showing that you can do something about it. With actions!
For some reasons, management often wants to hold reporting meetings more frequently when things are risky, or are worse than expected. For example, when deadlines are tight and so on.
But here’s the trick. IT IS NOT HELPING. In fact, it’s making it worse. I think that a lot of people still don’t understand that developers have a hard time focusing. And we have to focus on a lot of things — that is the problem.
Little emails, asking about the status report, about this and that, about some feature… are all interruptions. The worst thing that can happen is that we shut off the communication channels (Outlook, Lync, Slack, whatever). Instead, try and turn to other tools, like Visual Studio Online, task boards, Jira issues, whatever is implemented, to glance the status of the tasks. If management really needs a status report, make sure you have a dedicated person writing it, and that person knows and agrees on the time commitment required to write it.
But if you show a team you trust them, that will give you a big productivity boost. The exact opposite effect of status meetings & phone calls.
“Nobody disagreed, so they all agree” Meetings
Going back to our story, another huge problem with meetings is the fact that people like to call them so that they will not have to take any responsibility or ownership of a task. Often, suggestions are tossed around the room, with several people in that meeting who really should/could be doing something more productive. Then, a meeting note is written that the idea was suggested and years later, when that turns out to be a bad decision, nobody will want to change it or do anything about it because they were all at that stupid meeting when the idea was mentioned and nobody had anything to say back then.
If a meeting does not have a clear goal, it should not be scheduled. The clear goal is an actionable task, that has an owner, and everyone in the meeting has to have an input.
Sales meetings have a clear task: the seller needs to create a lead, qualify it, or convert into a customer. Imagine if you will, the following scenario: you are a sales person. You get to sell a big project to a potential client. You get to pick the people from the customer to join the meeting. Who will you bring? As few people as possible, right? Because you want the stake-holder there, and people with whom you will be able to have a high level of discourse. The more people there are, the more likely it is to have someone asking stupid or unrelated questions.
If someone has to prepare something, and needs inputs from other people, it is more or less useless to schedule a meeting. Send an email, asking for that information. If you establish a culture of accountability, people will respond. If they need more information, they will contact you (assuming they haven’t closed communication channels…). But at the same time, remember to give people ample time to pick when to prepare that information. For the love of God, don’t send emails just after lunch, saying you need X&Y by the end of the day. Worse still, don’t demand it.
I believe the key thing to working effectively in any company, is that people have their own schedule.
Sure, that schedule is closely tied to the company schedule & deadlines for the projects we are working on, but we all have a different schedule non the less. Personally, I have my own plan on what I want to work on throughout the day, and how. As a developer, I do not want to be micro-managed. By the way, that’s what bosses do, not leaders.
As soon as managers understand this, communication starts to flow much better and faster.
Trust Issues
Another thing, less related to the story above, are trust issues and meetings that take place because of it. These meetings are “committee” type meetings, consisting of several people with similar skills, and a task of confirming a decision. That is probably one of the worst things that you can do to any person. It shows your lack of trust to that person and it shows your inability to act on that — because you simply hide that behind a facade of “knowledge sharing” across a company.
If you want to do proper knowledge sharing meetings, leave the team room to organize events. We did that in a team, a long time ago, we had Friday talks. Each member could pick any topic and give a talk about it. We learned a lot. You know why? Because each of us wanted to be there, and see what the speaker invested his/her personal time in.That makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?
You see, you have to understand that decisions by technical people are rarely made on impulse/gut feelings. They are made by careful deliberation, sketching, prototyping, trying stuff out. Asking anyone to make the same decision based on 15 minutes of “slides” is ludicrous.
Conclusion
If you want a happy team, keep the meetings down to a minimum. Same goes if you want a productive team. As a manager, your job is to shield the team from meetings, not to delegate decision making to the team and micro-manage them. But if you do have to schedule meetings, make sure each of them has a clear goal, an owner and that each attendee understands their role in the meeting.
