Meeting Pet Peeves

In my career, I’ve had the pleasure of joining numerous meetings. Many meetings are productive but there are equally many that are not. There are certain patterns in these ineffective meetings that come to mind and are my personal pet peeves.

Sorry I am late, my last meeting overran.

Here is a typical scenario:

Being late to a meeting is not unexcusable, things happen. However, the definite worse is saying your last meeting overran. In a sense, you value that meeting more than this one. This overrun also propagates through the chain of meetings. Like a train schedule, because of one delay, now all trains are delayed. This gets even more exacerbated by the number of participants.

The same meeting only at a different time

Some meetings feel like deja-vu. You’ve heard this same point before just last week. Nothing changed and there hasn’t been any progress. The whole meeting is totally wasted. This usually happens in status meetings. The right strategy is to have a mechanism to cancel the meeting.

Lunchtime meetings / double booking meetings

Booking out someone’s time when it’s clearly blocked without any prior asking is plain rude. It invalidates another’s schedule and how they have already prioritized their day.

Sorry, can you repeat that?

A big reason for this is that 90% of the meeting is irrelevant to the participant. Only in that 10% is their input required. This is on the organizer too. Instead of a meeting, it might be better to use offline communication to get their input instead of making the participant sit for 25 minutes to only listen for 5 minutes.

Final thoughts

I am both a culprit and victim of all of these poor behaviours above. It takes accountability and effective meeting management processes to reduce this ineffectiveness. Both managers and contributors need to be aware of all the costs involved in meetings.