I agree with each and every single slide in this presentation; I do. I also know that in each and every company I have ever worked for, none of this is going to fly. Especially, "Attending meetings is a choice." Just like paying taxes is a choice; got it.
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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.
> I also know that in each and every company I have ever worked for, none of this is going to fly.
My favourite part of climbing the corporate ladder is finally having enough clout to just say "no".
> I have been asking for agendas; I have asked for clarification on what to do to prepare; I have even suggested
Try "I am unable to attend meeting without an agenda. Let me know when one has been posted." in your decline message. Do you sound like a dick? Yes. Does it work? Also yes, unless you weren't actually required in that meeting, in which case it becomes a self-solving problem.
I echo the parents sentiment - I don’t need to be there for a one hour meeting while 12 people give a perspective on a topic, but if you make the wrong decision I will say no.
My job as a higher level manager is to ensure that whoever is there on our behalf avoids stupid decisions being made, and if I can’t delegate that then I need to go myself. Sometimes its unavoidable, and sometimes politics prevail but 95% of the time making my priorities clear to my team and being consistent in my them has the correct outcome.
This can lead to weird dynamics. A lot of workplaces, no one seems to have direct power (or incentive!) to say "yes" to anything but lots of people (including 3 teams you weren't even aware existed) are able to "provide feedback" or say no.
This leads to all progress being achieved very slowly if at all, or by using the element of surprise and then seeking forgiveness.
While I know your heart is in the right place, as someone with a reporting structure on both sides, I can tell you that this kind of handholding is the entire reason they keep making bad decisions. You must let people fail, and from there your entire job is ensuring that winding back that decision is the responsibility of the people who made it. Few decisions are irreversible, and everything will almost always work out in the end despite how it feels at the time -- but letting people fail, then making them clean up after themselves, is possibly the absolute best teaching method out there.
I think you’re reading into a hip fire comment here - I’m not saying I’ll override any decision you make that i disagree with. Simply that if push comes to shove my team should feel empowered to make a decision and bring it to me for “ass covering” knowing that I will challenge them on it if I disagree, but also feeling confident that they know how I’ll feel about it before they make that call. I trust them to do this without me there.
Blindly allowing someone to make a bad call without questioning it is as bad as overruling their call without any explanation!
> And then you risk people making stupid decisions, which you have to fix later on, because you didn't attend the meeting.
If you are the one responsible for the work to fix something, you need to be the one driving the meetings or pushing alternative communication.
This is why all of the generic “just say no to meetings” advice is useless: It’s all dependent on the context. You can’t just decline meetings from your boss’s boss without good reason, for example.
A lot of snarky internet advice about saying “no” at the office is just people venting or doing imaginary role play. In a real office you have to push for communication, pull details out of people, identify who you need to report to and who you can safely decline.
If you get in a situation where you’re declining meetings and the responsibility for content of that meeting lands in your lap, you have made a severe misjudgment. These things are easy to clarify with a little proactive communication, but you get nowhere if you just say “no” or send off a singular “agenda plz” email and then forget about it. People are busy. You have to push and make it clear what you need from them, following up if it doesn’t come.
I’m not sure if this is more bad advice, but it seems like we’d all be better off if people just shared their experiences, rather than trying to proscribe them for others: you telling me to decline meetings is worthless, but you describing how you did, and what the effects were has value.
> Your head might not be, but you might find yourself being unhappily cleaning up a mess for months
From my experience it is going to happen regardless of whether you pay attention or not. People will fuck up, period. Compulsively being hypervigilant will drive you insane.
Someone explicitely asked for your input, you refused and they fucked up. Your head might nor roll, but you won't be unscaved either. If it's not as your responsibility, it will be by the size and impact of the fuckup.
IMHO it'l should be the same approach as any other human communication: not everything can be fixed, and at some point you'll need to compromise.
Some people talk slowly, will you refuse to listen to them if they don't speed up to some given wpm ? Some take time to come to their actual point. It might be utterly uncomfortable, but if they actually tend to have very good points, you'll probably bear with it.
As a manager or even a technical leader, your head IS on the line, it just might not seem so obvious.
Rollout delays, customer debacles, etc all shape your image to promo panels.
If you’re just a junior engineer, it’s not like it will be held against you, but you certainly missed an opportunity to demonstrate ownership and make a name for yourself as one of the 1 in 20 people who aren’t NPCs.
You are correct that caring is important - but it also isn't your responsibility at the end of the day. If you don't care you're doing it wrong - if you let it eat you up inside whenever anything goes wrong you're also doing it wrong.
Work-life balance is mostly talked about in terms of time commitments but there is also an emotional commitment you need to balance. It's unhealthy to be too far in either extreme and, especially folks that are naturally empathetic, should be more wary of falling into the trap of overinvesting in a workplace and suffering mentally for it.
> Try "I am unable to attend meeting without an agenda. Let me know when one has been posted." in your decline message.
If you have a good manager you can often CC them or quote them in your response as well "Sorry, I'm busy with project work and Sarah wants me to stay focused to hit our deadlines. If we're going to need to budget time outside of it I'll need a clear agenda to offer as a rationale to my stakeholders."
I think it really helps to sell this if you've got casual impromptu voice calls as a norm in the company. If it was really just a quick thing then throw up a hangout for us to chat - if it's worth scheduling a meeting for it's certainly worth actually putting together an agenda.
As an aside - my company recentlyish switched from google to ms for calendar management and (among many things MS is terrible at) the fact that agendas aren't immediately visible in meetings on your calendar is the absolute worst UX decision.
> My favourite part of climbing the corporate ladder is finally having enough clout to just say "no".
But the thing is, in big companies, you can keep climbing all your life and never reach that level. You can be a VP and it still doesn't matter, because you're one of several hundred VPs in a company that values lawsuit-proof consistency over giving executives infinite latitude. You're still dealing with the same spreadsheets, processes, and meetings as everyone else. At best, you might be able to send your minions to some, but that doesn't solve the issue, it just messes up someone else's day.
In a company of several hundred people, on the other hand, you don't really need to climb far because relatively little is set in stone. So to folks who are at Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, and who're waiting for the day when they're finally free to say "no" to overhead, I have bad news.
I’m a Senior Director. I can and do say no. But, let me tell you, it doesn’t go over well—especially for declining meetings.
Sure; they can go to my boss and he’ll largely cover, but it’s still not enough. I imagine unless you’re the CEO/equiv, this isn’t a thing you can do without fallout.
Worked at Sonos for several years. Was an IC4. My boss empowered me to say no to meetings whenever I wanted, and she was a new manager!
Sometimes all it takes is someone with a tiny bit of courage.
Literally nobody but people who want to waste their time and not do work or PMs who don’t know how to communicate want to have all these meetings.
I zealously avoid meetings and now that I’m a team lead at my new job, I’ll be encouraging my team to do the same and covering their asses when needed.
I assume this works nice to get you out of any meeting they didn't want you to attend, but couldn't just remove you from.
If they plan to move resources out of your team but need highers approval, having a meeting that you refused to attend sounds like a good first step. You might be there on the next one, but the terrain is already prepared. And as it's a sensitive subject, a vague agenda would also be natural enough.
"Go to every meeting that has a vague agenda just in case it's the one where they talk about their plan to downsize your team" is not a good strategy. (And probably by the time it's come to a meeting that you're invited to there's already nothing you can do)
Often, corporate culture is more about maintaining status-quo vs. actually achieving or organizing efforts. People often just want to hear themselves talk, stroke their ego, and position/politic. As an IC/leader/owner this can be _so_ annoying.
Anecdotally - this happens at the majority of places/teams/situations unless it's a very small, and coherent team.
Yeah, in my experience "attending" a meeting is almost never a choice. I think a better slide title would have been "Scheduling a meeting is a choice". I see so many meetings are created (with a default time slot of 30 minutes), for what could have been a 5 or 10 minute phone call or even just a quick email.
> Especially, "Attending meetings is a choice." Just like paying taxes is a choice;
I am pretty aggressive about declining meetings and protecting my time. And I still agree to what you say. No matter how you structure meetings, there’s always a chance that items unrelated to the agenda are discussed, decisions are made when they’re not supposed to be made, incorrect information is conveyed or misunderstandings are not addressed. Unfortunate reality of corporate world is that you’re more likely to ask yourself be included than you decline meetings.
This of course doesn’t even touch the performative parts of corporate bs where “yOu NEeD tO Be MOrE ViSIblE”
- regular reports sent to all stakeholders with relevant detail
- videos that demonstrate important features that folks can watch on their own time
- scheduling small, focused meetings with the most important stakeholders so they can actually get what they need
It doesn’t look like going to meetings and never talking, or worse, going to meetings and blathering on so someone knows you were there.
Yea like having 20 people on a project update call may be a poor of their time, but for boss man it's a great use - everyone he needs in the same room! Don't need to chase anyone down and someone can chime in if something inaccurate is said
Way too much upside for this kind of "low value" meeting to disappear
> And, even if it did, 99.99999% of folks wouldn't read any of it anyway.
One approach that I've seen work is start the meeting by having everybody read a document (see https://www.sixpagermemo.com). It's fresh on everybody's mind, and everybody just read the same content.
We do so much on slack I can safely ignore email at work and just look at meeting notes on Google calendar. I would expect that to include these notes but I’m not sure. Also I agree people won’t read them anyway.
> "Attending meetings is a choice." Just like paying taxes is a choice; got it.
It is completely valid to say "no" to meeting in our company. Not to all of them, but to most. Or to ask "Do I have to be here? Why was I invited, it seems out of my scope" and move from there. I see people doing that and I was doing that.
> And, even if it did, 99.99999% of folks wouldn't read any of it anyway.
Because meetings have become part of the job for many office workers, I'd say the majority of them, they (the meetings) are not sees as a means to an end anymore (as in "we hold this meeting in order to solve a specific problem"), and I'm not even sure that that hasn't always been the case, meetings are seen as a mainstay of holding an office-job, as means in themselves: "We go to (office) work so it's only natural that we'll hold meetings".
That's such a reductive statement. Yes there are always some unproductive meetings one has to attend. On the other hand, you'd be surprised how many leaders and middle-managers viscerally understand the cost of low-value meetings, and are doing everything they can to empower individuals to manage their own time. They might not call bullshit in a group setting (after all, as the slides call out: critical feedback should be given 1-1), but rest assured plenty of folks understand and will not hold it against you if you vote with your attendance.
I’ve had multiple managers over many jobs who’ve said they were on board with this. I’ve had CEOs saying from the top down “decline meetings without an agenda”, and yet somehow it never changes.
I have worked at many companies over my career. From 10s of thousands, to thousands, to hundreds, to tens of employees. There wasn't a SINGLE ONE that would tolerate someone declining EVERY MEETING when the culture does not align to the ideals this presentation outlines.
Clearly your experience is different and that's absolutely awesome; consider yourself incredibly fortunate.
Intel in the 90s-2000s did. I did customer research on them (worked on powerpoint at the time). I was amazed that the CEO gave a mandate to the company that if an agenda was not posted to a meeting 24H before the meeting, you did not have to attend that meeting. They also had other crazy strict meeting rules that I forgot.
> There wasn't a SINGLE ONE that would tolerate someone declining EVERY MEETING when the culture does not align to the ideals this presentation outlines.
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.
I don't think most folks are both interested and trying to sit in mindless meetings (like my JIRA example).
That JIRA example is particularly annoying. It's a product team (with an external consultant) using JIRA to track progress. But like anything with a reporting component, people are now optimizing toward what's reported - not toward real work. Success in a week (or sprint) is number of tickets closed not whether anything actually happened.
I declined several of these JIRA update meetings. At least two invites popped onto my calendar as agenda-less hour-long blocks.
Then I joined one, asked all the questions around purpose, and suggested what I would do to help with less overall effort and a reduction in pesky meeting invites.
> I hate a big meeting when someone says something like "so who wants to bring something up" - no no no.
This makes the meeting end really quick when nobody has anything to discuss right? For some people the only way you are ever going to get them to bring something up is by asking in a meeting.
I support the idea of bringing something to table. Instead maybe ask for simple 1-sentence ideas over email (or chat/etc.) in advance and then you use those as the driver of the meeting.
In a functional organization, it's almost certainly going to be absurd to argue that you can't provide value to any of the meetings that you are invited to.
I can provide value to any meeting that I’m invited to. That doesn’t mean it’s the most valuable thing I can do with my time (especially given how tragically frustrating most of them are).
The context I'm pulling in is by the caps in the comment I initially replied to, would tolerate someone declining EVERY MEETING. Note the caps.
As far as the GP, what I'm getting at is that they are tediously nitpicking my phrasing rather than addressing my point. If there are some meetings that make sense to spend your time on, (in the context of my comment) what the fuck does it matter if there are also some that it doesn't.
If they think they have never spent their time well on a meeting, an explication of that would be more interesting than saying that they can find better things to do than attend some meetings.
> wasn't a SINGLE ONE that would tolerate someone declining EVERY MEETING when the culture does not align to the ideals this presentation outlines
Well yes, if the culture doesn't allow it then it's not going to happen. That doesn't mean those cultures don't exist or that they can't be created, even if just in a pocket
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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.