What I found the most useful was the focus that was put on having agendas for every meeting, something that I try to do for every meeting that I schedule.
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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 which are followed nor what anyone else wants.
Even as a leader at organizations where I can enforce this on my team, it makes absolutely no difference. Hell, Google Calendar (we use Workspace at my current org) doesn't even have solid support for good meeting invite commentary. And, even if it did, 99.99999% of folks wouldn't read any of it anyway.
Anecdotally - this happens at the majority of places/teams/situations unless it's a very small, and coherent team.
Clearly your experience is different and that's absolutely awesome; consider yourself incredibly fortunate.
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 (person). I hate a big meeting when someone says something like "so who wants to bring something up" - no no no. I don't want free-form conversation in a large meeting. I want someone to drive the hell out of the meeting. Keep people in check!
Most important:
3. Do what you can to discover the underlying motivation of the meeting organizer and solve their motivation some other way. Recently sat through a disastrous JIRA-focused meeting. Talking about tickets, their purpose, their descriptions, etc. But I knew the person needed the data for executive-team reporting. So I offered to help fill in gaps (without a call) to improve their reporting. I saved myself future time, he got better reporting - a win.
Constant and outright decline behavior will probably backfire.
Way too much upside for this kind of "low value" meeting to disappear
With a sufficient hourly rate people are less likely to have you waste time in meetings.
Or maybe I’ve just been lucky. Prob doesn’t work everywhere.
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.
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.
Even if I can contribute real value to 20 meetings which I am invited to, I can't attend all of them.
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.
Brian doesn't work at NYT anymore I don't think
folkhack•54m ago
jf•53m ago
folkhack•42m ago
I'm being pedantic, but my experienced inverse of these slides is that meetings are the "social" part of work. It really really depends on the company, the leadership, the people. But, sometimes - it's more in your professional interest to talk about + market the work vs. actually doing it.
Ultimately, we agree :)