2 ms·
Two suggestions, one more plausible than another: 1. Dedicate the first X minutes of the meeting to reading the document. It sucks, and you shouldn't have to,
by pavel_lishin 3y ago
Two suggestions, one more plausible than another:
1. Dedicate the first X minutes of the meeting to reading the document. It sucks, and you shouldn't have to, but clearly people aren't doing their homework, so you gotta give them time to do it during the meeting.
2. "I couldn't do the prep work" "Ah, I'm sorry to hear that. I'll cancel this meeting right now, since we cannot proceed without that; everyone can use the freed up time to go over the prep work required, and I'll re-schedule this meeting for later in the week."
The second option requires you to have both the confidence to say this, and the credit to unilaterally cancel-and-reschedule a meeting and to call people out in such a way. But if the meetings are useless anyway, cancelling and rescheduling one doesn't sound like a big loss.
- maerF0x0 3y agoin my experience the second option is majorly jarring for those who did the homework and derails timelines. Often i've found if something is that low priority that it can be delayed for days to weeks then it's not actually important enough to spend time on.
- vidarh 3y agoWell, it 1) needs to be jarring so that it creates social pressure to address the issue, 2) it needs to implicitly be temporary, to institute a culture shift, or get the people who refuse to adjust to move to other roles. Consider that the alternative in this scenario is not to solve the tasks in the meeting in the allotted time, but to waste time holding a meeting where things don't get resolved because people haven't prepared.
- maerF0x0 3y agoWell, some folks do a lateral shift and simply stop having the meetings and solving the issues through other channels. Slack, google doc comments, 1-1s in a network of gossip protocol...
- vidarh 3y agoThat's great when it works. But it often does not work with the kind of people who fail to do prep work outside of meetings. Playing chicken with them over who will fail to get things done the longest before calling a meeting to force the issue is no fun.
- ashfernandez 3y agoThese are great. I'm making it such that if someone preps a meeting they HAVE to assign a responsible person for each and every talking point. When they do this, that person gets a notice saying they have something to prepare ahead of time for. SO even if they don't have enough time to look at the whole agenda, they can easily identify what exactly they need to pinpoint-prep for.