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"I think another reason why meetings are an extra burden on Makers vs. for Managers is that for the Managers, the meeting is their work. " I am not very sure t
by plinkplonk 17y ago
"I think another reason why meetings are an extra burden on Makers vs. for Managers is that for the Managers, the meeting is their work. "
I am not very sure that's true. Most good managers I know kept meetings to a minimum and kept them short. Yes they did consider meetings to be "work", but they did try to minimize the duratin and frequency of their meetings.
The best manager I know considers meetings a necessary evil (and so minimize them). He ran a whole division on a weekly 1 hour all hands meeting (plus lots of emails and so on but those are not as disruptive). Any smaller meetings had a twenty minute timer ticking down, with everyone standing up, and decisions were made fast.
He once told me that every managers job was to make himself redundant as and that his (conception of his) job was to make sure he moved things to a state where the system would flow well in his absence, by setting up expectations of how conflicts would be resolved etc, and so he would have to interfere only in the very rare cases.
He brought back the division from chaos and I would often see him sit (he sat "on the floor", not in his office) working on crosswords and so on, apparently doing nothing, but he had a finger on the pulse of what was going on and interfered minimally and effectively, obstacles being removed before they manifested. The organization ran like silk. He was the best boss I worked for and his subordinates loved him. He got promoted and was replaced by a less capable manager and soon enough we were drowning in meetings and no work got done
- ricaurte 17y agoYour last two paragraphs hit on a point that more managers need to implement but are afraid to, because most managers think that if they make themselves redundant, then they'll be laid-off, instead of promoted. I know of one manager in particular that is amazing at managing restaurants, but his problem is that he has to put in long hours to make sure the restaurant runs, and if he leaves on vacation, then the restaurant has often fallen apart (not to mention the years of increased stress levels it entailed worsened his cholesterol levels to the point he needed surgery). If instead he had trained everyone else to do his job, not only would he have had a ready supply of people to promote all these years, but he would also be a lot less stressed-out and maybe wouldn't have needed surgery.
- access_denied 17y agoAnd the origin of this problem is hidden in his first paragraph: most MBA-types do not have a real conception of their jobs. (Just compare that to athletes, teachers or those technicians that even have a cute name for their profession.)