I’m going to say this politely. If your “meeting” is reading every word on every PowerPoint slide, with no decisions needing to be made, please just send me the deck with a recap email and let me save my 30 or 60 minutes on work that truly matters.
Yesterday’s example was extremely painful. The setup:
- Over 100 people invited at all different levels from Senior VP’s to front line managers.
- Introducing the rollout of 2 new tools that will automate a lot of the heavy lifting we require clients to do today (reducing overall implementation timeline and greatly improving quality)
Great! Can’t wait! Except…
- 30 seconds into the presentation, we’re interrupted because apparently the conference bridge doesn’t have enough lines available and folks can’t get in.
- Presenter talks to the operator and gets it fixed.
- Presenter restarts the presentation, literally reading from a script, and with zero energy. Why am I here again?
- 3 minutes later, we’re interrupted again. People still can’t get in.
- Presenter talks to the operator and gets it fixed. Again.
- After spending 10 minutes on technical difficulties, he goes back to lifelessly reading the script again. Ugh.
- 30 minutes later we find out neither of the tools are even ready yet…
- …which means another meeting to be scheduled in a couple weeks after everyone forgets what they heard on this call.
For as many people who claim to hate meetings, we certainly have no shortage of them.
Meetings with no purpose. No agenda.
Sent to attendees who don’t need to be there (we don’t want anyone to feel left out!).
With little to no preparation beforehand.
Too many people multitasking and missing major pieces of the discussion (although they checked out and don’t know it yet).
Too many people on the phone “forgetting” to take themselves off mute (they were multitasking and not listening).
Too many people not saying anything – why were you invited in the first place?
No decisions made. Yet another meeting scheduled.
There is a solution. Read this manifesto by Al Pittampalli and share it with everyone you know.
Stop the madness. Please.
And now, for a little bit of levity, here is what a conference call looks like in real life: