If there's a loner scale, I must score about 97 on it. That's not to say I don't need human contact (beyond my husband), because I certainly do--just not very often. When I do get it, there's one form I can barely tolerate: the Meeting. Need me to rub shoulders with crowds to get a job done? No real problem, as long as it's not a daily thing. Recently I've become what the Episcopal Church calls a "lay eucharistic minister," otherwise known as either a lay reader or a chalice bearer, who reads part of the daily lessons or prayers during Sunday services and helps administer the sacramental wine. That's a sort of human contact I enjoy very much. Want to gather in large numbers to produce music? Great! My other favorite sort of gathering is the barn-raising variety: there's a big task to get done, and large numbers of people to work in joint harness until it's finished. I quite enjoy a quarterly meeting of the local Woman's Club to pick up trash along the roadside.
Where I draw the line is a gathering of humans to follow some kind of vague agenda and stumble through a drawn-out process of reaching decisions (or, more often, not managing to reach any). Those make me homicidal. Law firms are very much given to them, especially the sort that drag on all day long to no apparent purpose. In recent years, I've ruthlessly pruned back on social activities that give people a right to expect me to attend meetings.
So it was with real chagrin that I read an email from my county Republican party chairman last night, casually explaining that, for obscure reasons involving the security of the documentation for Tuesday's primary election, I would be required to hang around until the post-election precinct convention is concluded. After thirteen hours of manning the polls. I do not think so. I think I have an alternative solution, which will not violate any state election laws. If I'm mistaken, and catch any flack for it, it may turn out that I'm going to be out of town for any future primary elections.
10 comments:
I also find meetings to be gravely difficult to tolerate. My attitude about them is that they should be run by someone who hates meetings as much as I do, and is therefore ruthless about shutting people up and holding to the agenda.
It was one of the nice things about this one brigade commander in Iraq. He seemed very brusque, I'm sure, but he thought nothing of interrupting someone's presentation thus: "Got it." We'd move on to the next point, and out in a tight thirty or forty at most.
I recently switched jobs from a firm that had endless amounts of meetings, to one that has almost none.
While the first situation wasted lots of time, the latter situation is at times almost worse.
In any large human enterprise there will be meetings. It is the nature of the thing.
My experience is that this has less to do with meetings as the nature of the group dynamic than the nature of the meetings themselves.
William sends.
Yes, if the meetings are run by someone who knows what he's doing, they're tolerable. But that's a rare skill. A chairman should have his eye on two goals: (1) obtaining decisions on a finite number of critical points that require a consensus, and (2) ending the meeting promptly. Properly understood, that's what an agenda should make clear.
Before I can be made to attend a meeting, someone has to identify something I need to vote on, and persuade me that I won't be happy if the decision goes against the way I would have voted. If the meeting smells like a fun-free simulacrum of a cocktail party, I'm out of there.
"...fun-free simulacrum of a cocktail party..."
Love that description.
...critical points that require a consensus....
There are very few of these that actually exist, either in the wild or the domesticated zoos of conference rooms. There's very nearly always a boss. If the boss can't make a decision based on the only vote that counts, he's sitting in the wrong chair. If the enterprise really is run by committee, it'll self-select itself out of the environment soon enough.
There are roughly two proper purposes to a meeting: to announce a decision, there being some of these that are better done in person than via an email blast, and to gather information with which the boss can make a decision, or which can give the boss pause or cause him to alter/reverse a decision he was about to announce.
Eric Hines
There's not always a single boss; sometimes there's a board of directors, for instance, or matters that require a vote of members. It's also sometimes helpful to have a team of colleagues to assemble and quickly settle who needs how much time for what task, so an overall schedule can be composed and circulated. A good manager can do this in 30 minutes max; bad ones drag it out until people start thinking up medical emergencies. I had one boss who loved to call everyone in on a Saturday to announce a hair-on-fire emergency like a big chapter 11 filing by a big client's debtor, then leave everyone assembled in the conference room while he left to take a phone call, never to return--because he wasn't about to take responsibility for any decision that might go south. We'd organize ourselves and go off to find something useful to do, hoping to discover who had contact with a decision-maker at the client's office. If we were lucky, the same process was not duplicating itself at the client's office.
But I agree, there are ten situations in which business can be handled by email and a series of personal encounters, for every one that really requires sticking everyone in a room to reach a simultaneous, formal consensus.
I can't count the number of mediations and other "settlement" meetings I've sat through, with 3-4 representatives from the business and legal sides of each of many parties. All the useful work got done in very brief "break-out" meetings of two people at a time. (If two guys really want to come to an agreement they have the authority to make, they can do it quickly.) Everybody else spent a lot of time reviewing documents, checking email, and jockeying for ego-position. An all-day meeting like that can easily cost $100K, especially if people are forced to travel to it (why, oh why?).
Boards of directors generally are pretty easily manipulated. He...ck, I manipulated my Colonels and Generals pretty easily. The risk, of course, is the consequence of being wrong, but that's the nature of actual decision making.
A board's vote, too, absent a requirement for a supermajority on a particular item, isn't a consensus, it's an up or down vote by a simple majority. And the boss, if he's worth his paycheck, nearly always has predetermined the vote's outcome before he calls it, via that sequence of one-on-ones that also are part of his data-gathering and data-disseminating tasks.
Getting schedule assessments is part of the data gathering preparatory to the boss making a decision, as I see it.
There is a third legitimate purpose for a meeting which, embarrassingly, I forgot: information dissemination by everyone else present to everyone else present. In contrast to how many of my bosses ran their staff meetings, I always went last. We'd go around the room with each participant saying what he was working on and his progress made. I wanted everyone to know what everyone else was doing directly, not just from me. And I wanted them to speak without their words colored by what I'd said before them.
Not quite as bad as your boss, I worked for an L/C who had staff meetings in his office, daily. All of us staffers brought along our staffs (this was at a Numbered Air Force), so the room was both crowded and close. I was a newbie to the staff, so on my first attendance, my staff came with me. That one time. On the next staff meeting, my staff stayed at their desks. The boss asked me where my people were; I answered that a) I speak for them, they didn't speak for me, and b) they had work to do and no time for meetings (never was I known for tact). On the third staff meeting, the only ones who showed up were us staffers; subordinate staffs remained in their areas doing their work. Subordinates can be bosses, too.
Might not work often in the civilian world, and it won't work everywhere in the military. But the military in which I grew up valued initiative--even uppitiness--so the odds of getting away with that sort of thing were far from zero.
Eric Hines
I refuse any meeting notices that do not have an agenda attached - and I take pains to inform the sender of the reason why their meeting request was rejected.
I like my meetings. They go like this:
"Hey, VES, come here. *pause to wait for arrival of said child* Would you please explain "this"?"
Followed by any and all questions to arrive at the reality of the situation at hand.
Meeting over.
heh
0>;~]
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