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Friday, October 28, 2005
From The Bit Bucket: Meeting Malaise And Committee Behavior
If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be "meetings." -- Dave Barry
Everyone in the business world hates meetings. Everyone, without exception. Pick a white collar worker at random and ask him. The answer is guaranteed.
Oops, small correction: Everyone in the business world claims to hate meetings. Clearly someone must like them, or they wouldn't keep expanding in number and length. They wouldn't be the cause of so many husbands phoning home to announce that they'll be working late yet again. They wouldn't spring up like toadstools in automatic response to the discovery of an unmade decision about the color of next year's complimentary coffee cups.
Someone must love meetings. Someone with one hell of a lot of power.
Psssst! Your Curmudgeon has a little secret for you. Lean close; we wouldn't want this to get around.
Lots and lots of white-collar types love meetings.
Why? Dave Barry's diagnosis above is utterly on-target. Anyone who genuinely believes in the importance of his work would agree. One cannot achieve anything of significance sitting in a conference room while one's coworkers talk at one another. So what's to love?
Well, think about what a meeting can do for the guy who doesn't believe in the importance of his work:
- It gives him a reprieve from actually doing it;
- It gathers others of similar desires into a temporary support group ("Welcome to Goldbricks Anonymous, my name is John, and I've been work-free for, uh, five minutes.");
- If the topic is significant, he gets to watch others squirm over violated specifications and deadlines; if the topic is insignificant, he can pontificate about it as if he actually knew something about it;
- If his company pays for overtime work, a sufficient burden of meetings will justify his petition for it;
- He who'd like to blame his lack of progress on someone else can often find a suitable target at a meeting;
- Meetings are terrific places to denigrate one's in-house competitors and exchange gossip;
- Sometimes there are free doughnuts.
Your Curmudgeon knows persons who search for meetings that have no conceivable connection to their specialties or responsibilities, arbitrarily invite themselves to them -- and then do their level best to take those meetings over, often on the overt grounds that "none of you knows how to run a meeting." As bizarre as it sounds, in certain kinds of company it's a well-trodden path to visibility and advancement.
There are other weirdnesses associated with the love of meetings, some of which are every bit as strange as the love itself, and more distasteful than anyone could imagine. For example, some persons attend meetings specifically to humiliate others by a show of contempt or superior status. If Smith asks Jones for information or opinions on a subject, and Davis interrupts Jones and suppresses him by sheer relentless volume, you can be sure that Davis is there out of a desire to strut at others' expense. Alternately, Davis might insist on revisiting earlier situations in which Jones admitted to an error in judgment, implying that for Smith to go to Jones for expertise is misguided.
Some persons deliberately arrive late, as if to emphasize what terrible pressures they're under, and the relative lack of importance of the other, more punctual attendees.
Some middle managers -- quite a number, actually -- will direct a subordinate to prepare a presentation for an upcoming meeting, and on the appointed day will commandeer the meeting and the presentation for themselves, making free use of the subordinate's materials and ideas. This is commonplace when a corporate officer decides to attend.
Even necessary, well-run meetings are more often than not unsatisfactory, even destructive. A meeting is a committee pro tempore on some subject or sheaf of subjects. Committees are, in Robert A. Heinlein's phrase, "the only known form of life with six or more legs and no brain." They're where decisions go to be delayed and new ideas go to die. Their inherent responsibility-diluting effect virtually guarantees that even the most important tasks will be under-served: that no one will take the initiative in analyzing them, promoting solutions to them, or seeing to it that what must be done about them actually is done.
Your Curmudgeon's week has eight regularly scheduled meetings in it, all but one of them obligatory. Their aggregate scheduled length is 7.5 hours, but only rarely do they consume less than 10. For a front-line manager who's still also a working engineer, this can be disastrous. But as bad as that is, it's far from the zenith of the meeting disease; there are persons at your Curmudgeon's shop who spend as much as 25 hours per week in meetings.
One of your Curmudgeon's former employers, a puckish gentleman with a gift for the slyest of sly digs, once suggested to the senior vice-president of a largish customer that, to relieve the burden on its obviously overworked managerial cadre, the company ought to form a Meetings Department. The veep literally caught fire on the spot. The idea was soon after made reality. But that's not the punch line: more than half of the managers at that company applied to be transferred to the Meetings Department.
Why this topic today? Well, this morning your Curmudgeon was commanded to attend an impromptu meeting on laboratory concerns. He spent nearly an hour listening to technicians talk about cable runs, procurement agents rant about the intricacies of the purchasing system, front-line managers complain about one another, and ambitious middle managers deliver portentous but empty statements about why A must take precedence over B -- but not, of course, at the expense of B, which is very important too! -- and why they were the exact right people to see to it. Not one decision of consequence was reached. No action items were defined; no one took responsibility for any ongoing effort.
When he'd had as much as he could stand, your Curmudgeon got up quietly and left. No one noticed. Back at his desk, the problem he'd been laboring over was still there, and still unsolved.
Perhaps all military engineering shops are this way. Companies tend to absorb the character of their most important customers, and a defense contractor has but one. But your Curmudgeon's experience with non-defense shops has been quite comparable.
Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, in his book The American Challenge, named America's aggressive, seasoned, highly educated management as its critical competitive advantage over the rest of the world.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Comments
It is not those managers described by the gentlemen with the articulated name, but the secretaries of those managers, who do most of their actual jobs. I see it every day. I wish it were different but it is not.
Posted by og on 10/28/2005 at 02:54 PMBack when I embraced an oath of fealty to an faceless indifferent corporation, I used to bring my laptop to meetings to “take notes”. Actually, I was catching up on my email. Very often, I was able to get productive work done, communicating via email to *other people in the same meeeting*. This was pre-IM - it’d probably be even more effective these days. And with a networked high-end laptop, there’s no reason why you can’t check your project out, fix a few bugs, rebuild it, and check it back in again.
Just because your bod has to be there doesn’t mean you mind must.
Posted by on 10/28/2005 at 10:13 PMJust a wonderful bit of writing Francis. As a former IT middle scrub (I mean “manager"), I was blasted by other middle scrubs (I mean “managers") because I didm’t call enough meetings. Needless to say, I became ROYAL ARSE #1 and was cast out of the management queue into 3rd Level support. Thank goodness I gave up IT!
Posted by T-Steel on 10/29/2005 at 12:44 AMMeetings aren’t quite the source of all corporate evil...anyone who believes they are should try working a year for a company that doesn’t have _any_. (I have. It’s not nearly as fun as those tortured by corporate bureaucracy would imagine it to be.)
I think of meetings sort of like salt. A tiny bit is required to keep you alive. A little more makes your food taste better. But the line between what improves a meal and what ruins it is perilously thin, and danger-to-health territory lies close beyond that.
It’s one more reason why I no longer work for companies with “middle management”. The more managers you add to an enterprise, the more meetings they _must_ generate in order to keep minimal communication up...and once you get past a certain meetings-per-week threshold, you stop being able to attract anybody _except_ the folks who _enjoy_ meetings, no matter how hard you might try to bring in people who want to work.
Posted by Matt on 10/29/2005 at 01:40 AMI’m just thankful that the two churches where I serve as pastor have only the bare minimum of meetings: a monthly Church Council meeting at the one church, a quarterly Session meeting at the other church. Plus a 125th Anniversary committee at one of the churches— fortunately but a temporary source of meetings, now ending up its run, which will permit me to reclaim about two evenings per month on my schedule. If there’s anything worse than meetings, it’s evening meetings.
I can think of other churches I’ve been where there was a profusion of committees. Often the same individuals discussing the same topic over and over and over in virtually the same words at every meeting of the committee, and nothing they discussed ever got done.
Posted by Paul Burgess on 10/29/2005 at 07:35 AMMeetings are an American corporate institution, and any institution that hands out free doughnuts cant be all that bad, unless someone gets to that jelly doughnut you’ve had your eye since the meeting began before you do
Posted by akaky on 10/30/2005 at 02:32 PM
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