Gracious reader,
People love to hate on meetings. Fact: they're not going anywhere.
Meetings work differently in every organization, best practices be damned. Tricky.
So, beyond what you read on the Internet (and here lol), you must endeavor to crack the code in your own workplace.
Hopefully with some help from your manager and more-experienced co-workers.
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Design Thinking
- Meetings often aren't the best way to arrive at decisions. 8 Steps to Prepare for (and Win) a Meeting is all about the prep. The author calls out what I call "the meetings before the meeting" -- often-necessary conversations with stakeholders that can smooth the path to good decisions.
- In Reaching Peak Meeting Efficiency, Steven Sinofsky downloads "a few decades of meeting experience, dysfunction, and best practices." Long, and worth reading to see what applies in your workplace.
- No, you can't multitask and be effective. Really, you just can't. Put your phone away: you look like you're not paying attention. Especially in meetings with clients, or more senior people, the impression you make will matter.
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Powerade
- Women in President Obama's first administration "...complained of having to elbow their way into important meetings. And when they got in, their voices were sometimes ignored. So female staffers adopted a meeting strategy they called 'amplification': When a woman made a key point, other women would repeat it, giving credit to its author..." White House women want to be in the room where it happens, by Juliet Eilperin at The Washington Post offers a bit of history on a practice that can be universally useful.
- "...at Facebook, we hosted a very senior government official, and he came in to meet with senior execs from around Silicon Valley...He had these two women who were traveling with him pretty senior in his department, and I kind of said to them, 'Sit at the table. Come on, sit at the table,' and they sat on the side of the room...." This story around Sheryl Sandberg's anecdote launched 10,000 inspirational quotes about taking "your" seat at the table.
My assessment? This a story about power. The women in the story had to live in the very real power structure that existed in their own office, not the one in Sandberg's world. And so do you. When you're junior, there may be a wrong place to sit. And it's different in every organization, and in different settings. When feel like you don't know where to sit, it's a good signal to get direction from a more experienced co-worker.
- Similarly, in When You’ve Had One Meeting Too Many, Carson Tate encourages you to push back on how meetings happen in your office. YMMV.
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If you're in the US, hopefully you had a bit of time to breathe over the holiday week. (And for my non-US readers, hopefully you had some downtime in your non-holiday week.)
Thanks for reading, for sharing How to Have a Job with your co-workers and friends, and for sending me your smart questions and suggestions.
Anne Libby
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