Jeff couldn't believe what he wasn't hearing. "One more time," he said, "does anyone know how Michelle's doing on the variance report?" She'd circulated a draft yesterday, but Jeff hadn't looked at it yet. The silence puzzled him — surely someone had read the report by now.
Aha, he thought. Maybe Michelle was reporting bad news, and nobody wanted to speak up, because Nan, Jeff's boss, was sitting in on the meeting. "OK, let's move on. Maybe Michelle will show up later," he said, knowing that she probably wouldn't.
Most meetings have an owner who chairs the meeting, devises the agenda, invites attendees and so on. When the owner's boss "sits in," everything changes, especially if visits are rare. The meeting can become awkward, tense, and ineffective. Permanent harm can result.
Rarely is visiting a
subordinate's meeting
a good idea.
The risk of
disruption is high.Rarely is visiting a subordinate's meeting a good idea. The risk of disruption is high, due to a form of the Hawthorne effect. And if attendees misinterpret the meaning of the visit, it can even disrupt relationships among them.
Here are just some of the risks when power attends the meeting:
- The chair freezes
- In fear of being overruled or corrected, the chair can become tentative, avoiding issues that would normally be pursued or resolved. This is what happened to Jeff.
- Everyone else freezes
- If the visitor rarely attends, attendees might assume the worst — that the chair is in some kind of trouble. Unsure about their own status, they restrict their comments to safe topics. Truth goes underground.
- The visitor hijacks the meeting
- Almost anything the visitor says can give everyone pause, but some visitors actually try to manipulate decisions, or worse, they seize control of the meeting.
- The visitor takes notes
- Since no one in the room can make out what the visitor is writing down, people tend to imagine the worst.
- The visitor leaves the meeting early
- In the absence of real evidence, when the visitor leaves early, many wonder whether someone said something that caused anger or disgust.
- Ambition takes over
- Some ambitious attendees might try to impress the visitor, possibly at the expense of the chair or of other attendees.
- Trouble for all to see
- Attendees imagine, or believe they see, evidence of tension between the visitor and the chair, which afterwards complicates their own relationships with the chair.
Unless your purpose is to shower the chair with honor, find a different approach to accomplish your goal. If it's information you seek, ask for a briefing. If the meeting owner's performance is at issue, have a consultant observe the meeting and work with the meeting owner on any issues that surface.
If you doubt these risks, do this imaginary experiment. Imagine your boss sitting in on one of your meetings — a juicy one, perhaps, where you're investigating a troubled project. How do you think it would go? Top
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Related articles
More articles on Workplace Politics:
When Leaders Fight
- Organizations often pretend that feuds between leaders do not exist. But when the two most powerful
people in your organization go head-to-head, everyone in the organization suffers. How can you survive
a feud between people above you in the org chart?
Communication Traps for Virtual Teams: I
- Virtual teams encounter difficulties that rarely confront face-to-face teams. What special challenges
do they face, and what can we do about them?
Projects as Proxy Targets: II
- Most projects have both supporters and detractors. When a project has been approved and execution begins,
some detractors don't give up. Here's Part II of a catalog of tactics detractors use to sow chaos.
Embarrassment, Shame, and Guilt at Work: Creation
- Three feelings are often confused with each other: embarrassment, shame, and guilt. To understand how
to cope with these feelings, begin by understanding what different kinds of situations we use when we
create these feelings.
Exploitation and Conversational Narcissism at Work: II
- Exploitation of others is one of four themes of conversational narcissism. Knowing how to recognize
the patterns of conversational narcissism is a fundamental skill needed for controlling it. Here are
six examples that emphasize exploitation of others.
See also Workplace Politics for more related articles.
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And on August 20: Earned Value and Goodhart's Law
- Earned Value Management, widely used approach to project management, is most useful in contexts in which estimators are familiar with the Tasks, the Technologies, and the Teams. But even then, it is vulnerable to the tactics of those who game the metrics. Available here and by RSS on August 20.
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Beware any resource that speaks of "winning" at workplace politics or "defeating" it. You can benefit or not, but there is no score-keeping, and it isn't a game.
- Wikipedia has a nice article with a list of additional resources
- Some public libraries offer collections. Here's an example from Saskatoon.
- Check my own links collection
- LinkedIn's Office Politics discussion group