Don’t conduct a meeting if you can only come out with nonsense
Meetings and discussions are very common activities in the office and they are meant to discuss some important things and come out with best possible solutions for the problems faced. But throughout my 5 years of working experience, I couldn’t help but noticed that a lot of these meetings and discussions are actually useless and meaningless.
Why is that so? Here are some of the factors which I can think of for now.
- Agendas and things to be discussed in the meeting or discussion are not set. People do not know what to talk about and most probably end up talking nonsense.
- Most people are just there in the meeting room for the sake of being there, without actually wanting to solve the problem. Their bodies will be there, not their souls.
- The person chairing the meeting and discussion is not experienced enough or he himself tends to talk something unrelated to the objectives. Or worse, the person does not know what he wants from the meeting and just want to get it over as quickly as possible.
In my opinion, if you don’t have the willingness to achieve the objectives of the meeting (which, most of the time, is to solve problems), then don’t conduct a meeting or discussion in the first place because any meeting which fails to achieve the objectives is regarded as meaningless and a waste of time.
I think this kind of meeting is pretty popular
And if you conduct a meeting for the sake of coming out with ANY solution….then please…..don’t start the meeting at all. No solution is better than a very bad solution which might make things worse.
I started this topic after my sister told me that a customer service officer of a company called her up and changed her (the officer’s) statement from “Our company products’ warranty period is only 3 days” to “After confirming with our senior managers, we have to inform you that our company does not provide warranty coverage to the toys AT ALL“. See the difference?
Call this irresponsible, or whatever. To me, it’s lousy management and leadership. If you can only come out with such lousy solution (it’s actually a worse answer than the first one), then at least, don’t tell me “After confirming with our senior managers”. You are giving me the impression that your whole company, including the senior managers, consists of a bunch of idiots.
I guess the only thing you can do about the shop your sister went to is to never go back there again. Why give your hard-earned money to people who only stick it to you.
On meetings, you do know that some of them are just excuses for a coffee break, especially if it looks like an “fyi” meeting. Sometimes people plead to join meetings, not because they had something to contribute but because they were going nuts sitting in their cubicles and just wanted a breath of fresh air. In dysfunctional companies, meetings are actually an important social outlet so in a warped kind of way, pointless meetings do serve a purpose. They keep people from going insane.
But in meetings that genuinely matters, my secret is to start them backwards. Meaning that up front, I declare that by the time this meeting is over, we will have made these three decisions. Only then do I jump into the details. Many people start off with a mass of detail, get lost along the way and completely forget the key question by the time it ends.
Damien Tan
10 Feb 09 at 10:44 am
yeah having meeting… escially meeting w client… gosh i have this bad experience…
1st he is late
2nd he have nth to tell me…
3rd he forgot whatever things that needed to show me…
4th he make me pissed off LOL
jolenesiah
10 Feb 09 at 3:51 pm
@ Damien
My sister vowed not to go back there again. No point shortening our life when we are actually paying to do that.
Yeap, there are people who just want to go to the meeting, hide in a corner as not to be seen (and thus, won’t be questioned) and use the time to keep his/her sanity in check.
But well, if that’s the case, just go and have a tea break!
For me, I do prefer to have an agenda (though I don’t like to have minutes since I’m lazy to write). I’ll just write down some short notes next to those agendas on the things I’ve discussed and the solutions which the team managed to come out with. But if I’m not the organizer, or the meeting chairperson, I’ll just keep a low profile and let the “guy” runs the show.
Why? Some people might be offended if you try to take the stage from him
@ jolenesiah
Some people are like that. They take people’s time for granted and never respect. Thus they will just go for a meeting fully unprepared.
Alvin Lim
10 Feb 09 at 7:25 pm