Ah, the folks at despair.com have it so right (forgive me, “despair” folks, for using your image – but hopefully, I will be directing some more traffic to your site – and how often do you get an endorsement from an ex undercover KGB agent?).
In my 30 plus years career in corporate America, I have not met anybody who does not complain about meetings. “They are boring”, “They keep me from doing real work”, “Every week we discuss the same problem, but nobody does anything to fix it”, Those are some of the comments you hear every day. Borrowing from thermodynamics, meetings are like corporate entropy. Here is the definition of entropy: the measure of a system’s thermal energy per unit of temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work.
Aha, there we have it, meetings suck the energy available for useful work out of its participants. Yet, as if drawn by an invisible magnet created by the devil himself, meeting participants trudge to their scheduled meeting, day after day, and week after week like lemmings towards the cliff. Having watched and willingly participated in this ritual, I was often tempted to scream: “Let’s stop acting like robots and start THINKING!” I stopped myself just in time, because like most of us, while I did not love my job, it was the only one I had.
Enter the CONSULTANT. He or she knows how to remedy the meeting dilemma: “Have a fixed agenda and stick to it”, “Move peripheral issues to the parking lot”, “Leave your egos at the door”, “Define roles such as leader, facilitator, record keeper, time keeper, etc.” And on and on this goes.
None of that well-meaning (and not entirely wrong) advice will fix the problem. The root cause of these time-wasting exercises is …… drumroll …… fear and its sidekicks low self-esteem and insecurity. Fear is a base instinct innate to all of us. It is critical for survival – after all you MUST fear the lion! However, the culture that prevails in many corporations often raises fear to unhealthy levels. And that is the territory where insecurity and low-self-esteem thrive.
And so here goes the thinking: “If am not invited to that meeting, I am being ignored and my standing in the organization suffers”, “I must attend as many meetings as possible to retain visibility and relevance”, “Once in a meeting, I must contribute to justify my attendance.” And now we can close the loop and come back to the ‘despair” quote. We have arrived at a state of affairs best described as dilution of competence. There are too many meetings with too many people who do not belong and who should not feel compelled to contribute (simply because they have nothing of substance to contribute). I have witnessed that over and over and over. In one extreme case, a junior participant somewhat naively volunteered the following: “I really do not know anything about this subject, but this is what I think should be done”. Ouch!
I once suggested to senior management the following cure for this malaise: Mandate that every single employee pick one standing meeting they will not attend anymore and share that fact with their respective boss. Senior management did not even bother to respond to this idea. No wonder Dilbertian cynicism runs rampant in the modern corporation.
I will follow this piece up with an observation on insecurity and its flip side, arrogance, and where both are often absent (this will come as a surprise to many). For now, I will conclude with a bastardized version of a cynical quote: “The meetings will continue until morale improves” – Happy Meetings!
