Games for Meetings: III

When we complain that meetings are boring, time-wasting, maddening, or frustrating, it might help to check first about the roles we play ourselves. There are dozens of tactics and ploys, which I've been collecting over the years. Here's the third installment of a little catalog of the more common ones. See "Games for Meetings: II," Point Lookout for February 19, 2003, and "Games for Meetings: IV," Point Lookout for April 16, 2003, for more.

Rewriting History

Let's recast this enterprise-scale disaster into a near-miraculous feat of strategic planning.

When we all want to see things from a particular perspective, we sometimes re-enforce each other. We support each other in denying the obvious. And smart people are especially vulnerable, because they can create more elaborately plausible pseudo-explanations. If your team has these tendencies, invite one or two observers. Their mere presence can be a deterrent.

Piling On

Someone is declared "it," and many of us attack. Much more interesting if designee is actually present.

When several people attack another, they can cause permanent damage to the team, because afterwards, everyone knows that anyone can be a target. When an attack occurs, the chair is in the best position to intervene immediately to end it, adjourning the meeting if necessary, to deal privately with the problem of piling on. If you're present when an attack occurs, and the chair doesn't intervene, either raise the issue, or object, or excuse yourself from the room.

I'm Finally Here

I always arrive late, proving my importance.

Late arrivals, at best, disrupt the flow of the meeting, and might even delay its start. Tolerating this pattern is an expensive habit. If many people are often late, it's possible that everyone is overloaded, or that the pattern is so well-established that it doesn't pay to arrive on time. Whatever the case, this problem is one that management is best able to address.

I'm Rarely Here

I'm too important for this, but please schedule these meetings to fit my downtime in case I can make it.

Making allowances for someone who rarely shows up degrades the importance of the effort and demoralizes the team. Schedule the meeting for the convenience of the people who attend it.

Approving the Minutes

We always approve the minutes, no matter what they don't say.

Minutes are useful as records of what was decided and why. An organization in which people are afraid to write down this information eventually pays a high price — it cannot learn from its mistakes.

Cellular Escape

Have someone (or some device) page you.

Tricky, tricky. This one used to work, maybe in 1999. No longer — now people who excuse themselves this way have been heard to exclaim, "It's real! Honest!"

Which of these do you do? Which can you stop doing? What can you do instead? Keep track of what you see in your meetings, and talk about their costs. More coming in future issues — send me descriptions of your more delightful discoveries.   First issue in this series    Next issue in this series   Top    Next Issue

Do you spend your days scurrying from meeting to meeting? Do you ever wonder if all these meetings are really necessary? (They aren't) Or whether there isn't some better way to get this work done? (There is) Read 101 Tips for Effective Meetings to learn how to make meetings much more productive and less stressful — and a lot more rare. Order Now!

For more on telephonic deceptions, see "Telephonic Deceptions: I," Point Lookout for September 14, 2011.

Your comments are welcome

About Point Lookout

Thank you for reading this article. I hope you enjoyed it and found it useful, and that you'll consider recommending it to a friend.

This article in its entirety was written by a human being. No machine intelligence was involved in any way.

Point Lookout is a free weekly email newsletter. Browse the archive of past issues. Subscribe for free.

Support Point Lookout by joining the Friends of Point Lookout, as an individual or as an organization.

Do you face a complex interpersonal situation? Send it in, anonymously if you like, and I'll give you my two cents.

Related articles

More articles on Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness:

Take Regular Temperature Readings

Team interactions are unimaginably complex. To avoid misunderstandings, offenses, omissions, and mistaken suppositions, teams need open communications. But no one has a full picture of everything that's happening. The Temperature Reading is a tool for surfacing hidden and invisible information, puzzles, appreciations, frustrations, and feelings.

Team-Building Travails

Team-building is one of the most common forms of team "training." If only it were the most effective, we'd be in a lot better shape than we are. How can we get more out of the effort we spend building teams?

Our Last Meeting Together

You can find lots of tips for making meetings more effective — many at my own Web site. Most are directed toward the chair, or the facilitator if you have one. Here are some suggestions for everybody.

Symbolic Self-Completion and Projects

The theory of symbolic self-completion holds that to define themselves, humans sometimes assert indicators of achievement that either they do not have, or that do not mean what they seem to mean. This behavior has consequences for managing project-oriented organizations.

Anticipating Absence: Internal Consulting

Most consultants are advisors from outside the organization. But when many employees are unavailable because of the Coronavirus pandemic, we need to find ways to access the knowledge that remains inside the organization. Internal consulting can help.

See also Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness and Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness for more related articles.

Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout

Coming May 14: Working with the Overconfident

A cognitive bias known as the Overconfidence Effect causes us to overestimate the reliability of our judgments. Decisions we make based on those judgments are therefore suspect. But there are steps we can take to make our confidence levels more realistic, and thus make our decisions more reliable. Available here and by RSS on May 14.

And on May 21: Mismanaging Project Managers

Most organizations hold project managers accountable for project performance. But they don't grant those project managers control of needed resources. Nor do they hold project sponsors or other senior managers accountable for the consequences of their actions when they interfere with project work. Here's a catalog of behaviors worth looking at. Available here and by RSS on May 21.

Coaching services

I offer email and telephone coaching at both corporate and individual rates. Contact Rick for details at rbrenDJpmhgyaDTwBQXkhner@ChacmGoYuzfZpOvDQdRkoCanyon.com or (650) 787-6475, or toll-free in the continental US at (866) 378-5470.

Get the ebook!

Past issues of Point Lookout are available in six ebooks:

• Get 2001-2 in Geese Don't Land on Twigs (PDF, )
• Get 2003-4 in Why Dogs Wag (PDF, )
• Get 2005-6 in Loopy Things We Do (PDF, )
• Get 2007-8 in Things We Believe That Maybe Aren't So True (PDF, )
• Get 2009-10 in The Questions Not Asked (PDF, )
• Get all of the first twelve years (2001-2012) in The Collected Issues of Point Lookout (PDF, )

Are you a writer, editor or publisher on deadline? Are you looking for an article that will get people talking and get compliments flying your way? You can have 500-1000 words in your inbox in one hour. License any article from this Web site. More info