
When we complain that meetings are boring, time-wasting, maddening, or frustrating, it might help to check first about the roles we play ourselves. There are dozens of tactics and ploys, which I've been collecting over the years. Here's the third installment of a little catalog of the more common ones. See "Games for Meetings: II," Point Lookout for February 19, 2003, and "Games for Meetings: IV," Point Lookout for April 16, 2003, for more.
- Rewriting History
- Let's recast this enterprise-scale disaster into a near-miraculous feat of strategic planning.
- When we all want to see things from a particular perspective, we sometimes re-enforce each other. We support each other in denying the obvious. And smart people are especially vulnerable, because they can create more elaborately plausible pseudo-explanations. If your team has these tendencies, invite one or two observers. Their mere presence can be a deterrent.
- Piling On
- Someone is declared "it," and many of us attack. Much more interesting if designee is actually present.
- When several people attack another, they can cause permanent damage to the team, because afterwards, everyone knows that anyone can be a target. When an attack occurs, the chair is in the best position to intervene immediately to end it, adjourning the meeting if necessary, to deal privately with the problem of piling on. If you're present when an attack occurs, and the chair doesn't intervene, either raise the issue, or object, or excuse yourself from the room.
- I'm Finally Here
- I always arrive late, proving my importance.
- Late arrivals, at best, disrupt the flow of the meeting, and might even delay its start. Tolerating this pattern is an expensive habit. If many people are often late, it's possible that everyone is overloaded, or that the pattern is so well-established that it doesn't pay to arrive on time. Whatever the case, this problem is one that management is best able to address.
- I'm Rarely Here
- I'm too important for this, but please schedule these meetings to fit my downtime in case I can make it.
- Making allowances for someone who rarely shows up degrades the importance of the effort and demoralizes the team. Schedule the meeting for the convenience of the people who attend it.
- Approving the Minutes
- We always approve the minutes, no matter what they don't say.
- Minutes are useful as records of what was decided and why. An organization in which people are afraid to write down this information eventually pays a high price — it cannot learn from its mistakes.
- Cellular Escape
- Have someone (or some device) page you.
- Tricky, tricky. This one used to work, maybe in 1999. No longer — now people who excuse themselves this way have been heard to exclaim, "It's real! Honest!"
Which of these do you do? Which can you stop doing? What can you do instead? Keep track of what you see in your meetings, and talk about their costs. More coming in future issues — send me descriptions of your more delightful discoveries. First issue in this series
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Do you spend your days scurrying from meeting to meeting? Do you ever wonder if all these meetings are really necessary? (They aren't) Or whether there isn't some better way to get this work done? (There is) Read 101 Tips for Effective Meetings to learn how to make meetings much more productive and less stressful — and a lot more rare. Order Now!
For more on telephonic deceptions, see "Telephonic Deceptions: I," Point Lookout for September 14, 2011.
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Related articles
More articles on Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness:
Pygmalion Side Effects: Bowling a Strike
- Elise slowly walked back to her office, beaten. Her supervisor, Alton, had just given Elise her performance
review — her third consecutive "meets expectations." No point now to her strategy of
giving 120% to turn it all around. She is living a part of the Pygmalion Effect, and she's about to
experience the Pygmalion Side Effects.
Dealing with Negative Progress
- Many project emergencies are actually the result of setbacks — negative progress. Sometimes these
mishaps are unavoidable, but often they're the result of patterns of organizational culture. How can
we reduce the incidence of setbacks?
Unnecessary Boring Work: I
- Work can be boring. Some of us must endure the occasional boring task, but for many, everything about
work is boring. It doesn't have to be this way.
A Pain Scale for Meetings
- Most meetings could be shorter, less frequent, and more productive than they are. Part of the problem
is that we don't realize how much we do to get in our own way. If we track the incidents of dysfunctional
activity, we can use the data to spot trends and take corrective action.
Improvement Bias
- When we set about improving how our organizations do things, we expose ourselves to the risk of finding
opportunities for improvement that offer very little improvement, while we overlook others that could
make a real difference. Cognitive biases play a role.
See also Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness and Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
Coming March 19: On Lying by Omission
- Of the many devious strategies of workplace politics, deception is among the most commonly used. And perhaps the most commonly used tactic of deception is lying. Since getting caught in a lie can be costly, people try to lie without lying. Available here and by RSS on March 19.
And on March 26: Seven Ways to Support Word-of-Mouth About Your Content
- Whether you're making a presentation or writing an article or a book, making your material more memorable is a desirable objective. After the talk, or after the reader sets down your work, what you have to offer will be accessible only if the auditor or reader remembers something about it. Available here and by RSS on March 26.
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