Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Most meetings are a waste of time and most meetings are conducted by educated, intelligent, and accomplished people. These contradictions fit when I realized that the people conducting the worthless meetings simply didn’t have the energy to make them worthwhile. I needed another tact besides sighing and suffering.

I have sat in a lot of meetings in my career. Most of the meetings were bad. There was no agenda, there was no point, there was no organization, and there was no idea of how much it cost for a bunch of people to sit in chairs and accomplish nothing.

What frustrated me was that the people leading these worthless meetings were smart people. They were educated, intelligent, and accomplished. Yet, week after week, we had these awful meetings. Nothing ever changed. How in the world could such smart people allow such stupid behavior to continue?

Such questions led to long sighs from me. Then it hit me – I was sighing. I was gassed, no energy. That was it. These smart people had no energy to fix their meetings. They spent their energy on everything else. That is how they had become accomplished people. They had put their energy into accomplishing things that their superiors noticed and rewarded. Internal meetings were not noticed by superiors; internal meetings were only suffered by subordinates like me.

Try as I might, I could never persuade these managers to fix their meetings. The meetings simply were not important enough to fix; bettering the day of subordinates didn’t merit a piece of energy as energy was precious and devoted to only a certain class of task.

Please take note when something awful continues. There is no urgency in correcting it; there is no energy to change it, and there is no reward from improving it. Try what you can to improve it from your side (I started writing stories in my notebook to help me stay awake, plus I enjoy writing stories). If possible, provide the manager with extra energy. Some of that may go to fixing the meetings, but alas, that extra energy may merely be spent accomplishing extra tasks that are noticed and rewarded.