Whaddaya hear, whaddya say? Welcome to episode 28 of the Career Consigliere podcast: your no frills, no BS forum for navigating the corporate job scene. We’re back with you once again for what we hope to be a highly informative and engaging half an hour, or so! In the last episode, we covered how expensive meetings in the corporate workplace can be. And today, we’re going to expand that discussion by going into how USELESS they can be! Yes, expensive and useless is a lethal combination, and we’ll be headed down the basement to explore the whole concept of meetings from the bottom up. We’ll first talk about what meetings are for (or at least, what they should be for). Then, we’ll reiterate how they can be bad for business, before finishing up with some wisdom on best practices for setting a meeting up. Everything we’re covering today comes from a 2023 article in Psychology Today. As always, I’ll hit the highlights for you here in the episode, and, as always, you’ll get the link to the full saga in the episode description. Should be an educational one today, podcast land: Lettsssss get it!
What are meetings for?
Let’s kick this off by talking about what meetings are actually for: their original intended purpose, the very root of the issue. Now, I picked this article because of where it comes from. Psychology today, hence its name, focuses on the people aspect of the meeting dynamic, and I thought this would be a great place to start to highlight the effects of a meeting on the person. Because ultimately, an organization is made up of....what? Ding ding ding! People! Very Good! Meetings affect the people, the people are what make up the organization, and round and round we go.
The sole purpose of “the meeting”? To gain consensus: that’s it! Just like Mariano Duncan famously said back in the 90s: Yankee fans out there know what I’m talking about. “Dass it!”. Gonna nerd out on you here for a minute: the article talks about two kinds of communication: synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous deals with the real-time exchange of information, which should be reserved exclusively for making a decision. Meetings actually mark the END of the decision making process, not the beginning. All the relevant facts, data, inputs, whatever influences that decision should be considered BEFORE a meeting ever happens, and that should happen asynchronously. So by that logic, asynchronous communication is when there’s a lag between a message being sent, and the receiver reacting to it. This is where your emails, instant messages, pings, text messages, channels posts, and the other 85,000 ways we communicate in the workplace come into play. This kind of asynchronous communication is best for information dissemination, which allows people to absorb and digest all the information on their own time.
The corporate world gets this backwards a lot: out on the range, usually a new project or initiative STARTS with some kind of a meeting, usually in the form of one of those dreaded “brainstorming” sessions. You ever get invited to one of those? Here’s how they usually play out: the loudest, most dominant, and usually the highest-ranking person in the room monopolizes the conversation. Feeling outmuscled, the others in the room usually smile and nod “uh huh, gee sure thing boss”, because how dare they ever challenge someone who makes $20K a year more than them, right? So what happens? The alpha in the group essentially runs an echo chamber, and the outcome is usually little more than a unilateral decision anyway. And when I say alpha, I’m not just talking about guys either: I know there’s sometimes a connotation there, but not in this case. I’ve been in PLENTY of these kinds of meetings that were led by women, and the same thing happens, so this one here is gender neutral. Nobody wants to challenge the boss. And it’s even WORSE if the person ISN’T a formal authority figure: then the whole thing becomes a pissing contest. Say you have 5 people in the meeting (pretty common for a brainstorming session): two of them play rock’em sock’em robots and battle it out for who can be the loudest and push their agenda the hardest, while the other three sit there zoning out, speaking only when spoken to, and keeping themselves on mute after turning their cameras off so you won’t notice their eyes focused on the other screen where they’re clearly doing other things.
Granted, not every single meeting is a brainstorming session. But this is a good example of how the trend of useless meetings starts: let’s get everyone together to think of ideas for stuff. And guess what? Now a precedent of meeting live to discuss this topic has been set, which sets an expectation for future conversations on that project. And all those people that were on the original invite, even the ones who sat there silent? They wind up getting invited to all the subsequent meetings about this topic, and they feel compelled to go because now it might “look bad” if they don’t show. And there you have it people: the vicious cycle has begun. And it gets even worse as the project goes on: the alpha gains momentum, power, and control as the project matures, and the others feel increasingly more useless and waste inordinate amounts of time in situations where they’re contributing very little, if anything, while all their other work piles up.
One of the biggest offenders here? Steering committee meetings! Corporations LOVE steering committees, particularly the bigger, more complex companies. This is basically a group of influential people, usually manager-level and above, who act as talking heads on a project because their function is somehow impacted by the project. They usually don’t do any of the actual work, and many aren’t involved at all in the day-to-day, but their input is solicited usually for political reasons. And boy oh boy, I’ll tell you: if even ONE of them is having a bad day, or feeling inadequate in some way, or just has a bug up their ass for a completely unrelated reason, they will flex their corporate muscles to no end. They’ll start playing devils advocate for no reason, asking asinine questions to challenge basic things, and really just slowing the whole process down. And guess what? Every time somebody with enough clout throws up a smokescreen like this? Now it’s MORE meetings to resolve whatever issue they pulled out of their rear-end. And down the rabbit hole we go! Any of you listening with even just a few years of corporate grind under your belts should be smiling and nodding right about now. Like I said earlier, meetings can take many shapes and forms, but this is an extremely common scenario that we’ve laid out here.
Meetings are bad for business
So how does all this affect business? We talked all about the financials in the previous episode, so I’ll skip all that here. But again, this article comes at it from a psychological standpoint, and this one really resonated with me. Check this out: it’s been shown that meeting attendees typically stop working on their regular tasks about 15-20 minutes before a meeting is set to begin, regardless of whether it’s in-person or virtual. So there’s a nice piece of time gone. Then there’s the time the actual meeting is taking place, so that’s spoken for too. And then there’s time lost trying to refocus yourself back to your regular work after the meeting is over: let’s call it another 20 minutes worth of using the bathroom, grabbing another cup of coffee, making strained chatter with whoever you run into while doing all this, and then finally trying to get back into the swing of whatever you were working on originally. So if the meeting is an hour, add 20 minutes onto either end, and you just lost an hour and 40 minutes worth of actual work time thanks to that one meeting. And if you’re one of those people whose calendar is constantly wall-to-wall with meetings like this? Good luck getting ANYTHING done in a given day. Then you wind up working late, you’re more stressed out, not enough time for family and for sleep, and the whole thing can really spiral quick if you’re not careful.
And if organizations have a bunch of people like this on their hands, what happens? Are these people going to be happy? Are they going to be reliable? Are they going to go out of their way to be proactive on things and take on more responsibilities when duty calls? Now virtual or hybrid work capabilities definitely help this: even if you’re one of those people who lives in meetings, if you’re working from home at least there’s no commute factor, and nobody around the office can harass you in person with water cooler conversation or trying to get you to join their fantasy football league all in the name of winning 50 bucks. This is why many argue for remote work, and rightfully so: has its drawbacks, but definitely helps alleviate wasted time for a person’s schedule that’s full of useless meetings. But overall, I think we can all agree that spending excessive amounts of time in meetings does WAY more harm than good for an organization.
Best practices for setting up a meeting
So what’s the moral of this story? NO! NOT all meetings are useless: in fact, without bringing people together, you’d have a completely siloed and dysfunctional organization that wouldn’t accomplish very much. But the goal should be to limit meetings to what is absolutely necessary, and we’ll answer how to do that with today’s.......consigliere call to action. As a best practice, you should set high standards for how your meetings are held, and our article breaks this into several steps, two of which I’ll mention here.
First, the meeting needs to have a solid agenda. WAY too many people send out lazy meeting invites that say very little, if anything at all: You ever get an invite that just says “sales discussion”? And then when it comes time for the actual meeting to happen, you have no idea how to prepare or what to expect? It takes 5 minutes to write a decent agenda, and you can put it right into the text of the meeting invite. Doesn’t have to be fancy: all it needs to state are three things: the purpose of the meeting, what will be discussed during the meeting, and how the meeting will benefit everyone involved in the discussion. Dass it! Thanks again, Mariano Duncan – you’re famous words live on! This alone will make the whole experience so much more value added for anyone who attends, and it also gives people an out to NOT attend if the subject matter isn’t relevant for them.
Second, the organizer must disseminate any relevant information and ask for asynchronous feedback before the meeting. In English, that means send your slides out in advance, so that the crew has an opportunity to review them in advance and hit you up privately with questions before coming together to discuss the subject. That way, when you DO meet, everyone involved is likely to be more familiar with what’s happening and can come prepared to have a fruitful discussion. No, not everyone’s actually going to look at what you sent ahead of time: in fact, most of the time they probably won’t (though they’ll lie and say they did!) But even if only one person does, it’ll make the meeting at least THAT much more productive once it actually does happen, and you can rest easy knowing that you’ve done everything you possibly can to streamline things as best as possible.
And as for what to do in the meeting? That, my friends, will be the topic of episode 29, so stay tuned until next time!
Sadly folks, that’s all the time we have for today. But have no fears, and shed no tears, because I’ll be back with a new episode very soon. As they say in the industry: no listeners, no show, so do me a favor, and stay loyal! If you find value in my content, please leave me a nice review, tell all your friends, and don’t forget to like, subscribe, and follow on whatever platform you use to get your podcasts. Beyond the confines of your headphones, speakers, TV screen, or any other crazy contraption with the ability to stream audio, I also provide one-on-one career assistance, so visit my website at career-consigliere.net to learn more about me, book me for a private consult, join my email list, or explore some of the other career services I offer. And to all of you out there in podcast land, remember this: Who’s the boss in your career? You, nobody else.
