How many meetings have we had where the meeting organizer glares at everyone and says "why are we all here", "I think we all know what this meeting is about", or some variation, while everyone in the room has no idea what he's talking about.
This is especially true when the meeting invite just said "Meeting", or even better, was called 45 minutes ago with the header of "Mandatory Meeting - Urgent".
My personal favourite is when the manager then puts a three day old client email on the projector for all to see, demands to know why no one in the team has given him estimates for a fix time, and then says "oh, you're not on the email chain... you haven't seen any of this, have you?"
It would make for interesting meeting minutes, if, you know, they ever bothered to take notes of the meeting.
I actually had one manager who didn't make meeting minutes, so a different team member recorded everything, wrote them up as meeting minutes, and put them in the project archive. The manager ordered him to stop because "it's making me [sic] look bad"...
I have encouraged everyone on my team to prompt the meeting owner to put the agenda in the meeting information. I also support them no attending meetings that don't have agendas.
There were a few people who came to me to complain that my team was not attending their meeting. I asked if they had an agenda that outlined the purpose. They never did, but they do now.
It does sount like a wonderful idea, especially when you're invited on a regular basis to meetings with your international colleagues from all over Europe, to discuss how they're handling the really brand new service the company is selling in each country. Unfortunately, the international group was based (and originated) in France....... So, this how it went at the first of those meetings, held in the office in Paris (of course) : first arrived the managers who had to fly in the night before and had hotel reservations nearby, then the ones who arrived by train + taxi, and when they all had had some breakfast (croissants, you're in Paris, after all), by +/- 10:30, the HQ 'head' colleague / boss finally showed up. After a 2-hour session of complaints and rants about the pressure to get the required monthly reporting in from all the international subsidiaries (i.e. we, the 'invited colleagues'), lunch is served. We each get a big carton box with a sandwich, a salad, etc., even with a small bottle of red wine (France, what did you expect?), the 'meeting' is 'on' again. This time, it's us, the colleagues from all the international subsidiaries, who complain about how hard it is to get the reporting out on time, because HQ is late on giving us the numbers we need to get our reports completed.....
By then, it's about 16:30, and some people start to leave, they have to get to their train, or airport on time.
And around 17:00, the HQ organising 'boss' tells us (the ones who haven't already left, that is), what he really wanted to discuss that day (the procedures we all had 'invented' on our own to handle the administration on the new service). But, alas, that would now have to wait for another 2 months, when we would meet again, this time in the Spanish office, in Barcelona.
So, off to Barcelona we all went +!- 60 days later. Only to have the same scenario play all over again (no kidding, this really happened).
So, two months later, I respectfully declined the invitation for a third meeting. My local managing director backed me up on this decision, declaring : unless there's an agenda for the meeting, there is no point to go and waste the company's budget or your own time. Honest as I was (I really felt that meeting face to face with my international colleagues could bring some order in our diverging methods), I mentioned the lack of an agenda as my main reason for not coming.
Lo and behold, the next day, Paris HQ sent all of us a real agenda, with for each topic when we'd start it and who would lead the conversation; we were even invited to send in questions or remarks beforehand. So, I had to go again. Paris again (after the spanish debacle, no other subsidiary had volunteered to host).
Need I say, that the first item on the agenda was mentioned at around 17:00PM?
My response every time a coworker would try to loop me into a meeting while giving me no details was, "What's the agenda?" Funny how my attendance turned out not to be needed after all.
How many meetings have we had where the meeting organizer glares at everyone and says "why are we all here", "I think we all know what this meeting is about", or some variation, while everyone in the room has no idea what he's talking about.
This is especially true when the meeting invite just said "Meeting", or even better, was called 45 minutes ago with the header of "Mandatory Meeting - Urgent".
My personal favourite is when the manager then puts a three day old client email on the projector for all to see, demands to know why no one in the team has given him estimates for a fix time, and then says "oh, you're not on the email chain... you haven't seen any of this, have you?"
It would make for interesting meeting minutes, if, you know, they ever bothered to take notes of the meeting.
I actually had one manager who didn't make meeting minutes, so a different team member recorded everything, wrote them up as meeting minutes, and put them in the project archive. The manager ordered him to stop because "it's making me [sic] look bad"...
Oh dear! Actually telling the employees why they're meeting!! The horror 😱
It's amazing. I rarely get invited to a meeting with a Purpose and Agenda. And I'm in meetings all day everyday!
My favorite is when you get a meeting invite titled "Touchpoint" with no agenda
Laugh out loud yet again!
I have encouraged everyone on my team to prompt the meeting owner to put the agenda in the meeting information. I also support them no attending meetings that don't have agendas.
There were a few people who came to me to complain that my team was not attending their meeting. I asked if they had an agenda that outlined the purpose. They never did, but they do now.
It does sount like a wonderful idea, especially when you're invited on a regular basis to meetings with your international colleagues from all over Europe, to discuss how they're handling the really brand new service the company is selling in each country. Unfortunately, the international group was based (and originated) in France....... So, this how it went at the first of those meetings, held in the office in Paris (of course) : first arrived the managers who had to fly in the night before and had hotel reservations nearby, then the ones who arrived by train + taxi, and when they all had had some breakfast (croissants, you're in Paris, after all), by +/- 10:30, the HQ 'head' colleague / boss finally showed up. After a 2-hour session of complaints and rants about the pressure to get the required monthly reporting in from all the international subsidiaries (i.e. we, the 'invited colleagues'), lunch is served. We each get a big carton box with a sandwich, a salad, etc., even with a small bottle of red wine (France, what did you expect?), the 'meeting' is 'on' again. This time, it's us, the colleagues from all the international subsidiaries, who complain about how hard it is to get the reporting out on time, because HQ is late on giving us the numbers we need to get our reports completed.....
By then, it's about 16:30, and some people start to leave, they have to get to their train, or airport on time.
And around 17:00, the HQ organising 'boss' tells us (the ones who haven't already left, that is), what he really wanted to discuss that day (the procedures we all had 'invented' on our own to handle the administration on the new service). But, alas, that would now have to wait for another 2 months, when we would meet again, this time in the Spanish office, in Barcelona.
So, off to Barcelona we all went +!- 60 days later. Only to have the same scenario play all over again (no kidding, this really happened).
So, two months later, I respectfully declined the invitation for a third meeting. My local managing director backed me up on this decision, declaring : unless there's an agenda for the meeting, there is no point to go and waste the company's budget or your own time. Honest as I was (I really felt that meeting face to face with my international colleagues could bring some order in our diverging methods), I mentioned the lack of an agenda as my main reason for not coming.
Lo and behold, the next day, Paris HQ sent all of us a real agenda, with for each topic when we'd start it and who would lead the conversation; we were even invited to send in questions or remarks beforehand. So, I had to go again. Paris again (after the spanish debacle, no other subsidiary had volunteered to host).
Need I say, that the first item on the agenda was mentioned at around 17:00PM?
My response every time a coworker would try to loop me into a meeting while giving me no details was, "What's the agenda?" Funny how my attendance turned out not to be needed after all.