I have a tendency to scrutinize authority. Growing up with unstable parents taught me to doubt titles. A mostly public school education and over a decade of work experience taught me to trust my doubts. More often than not, I’ve learned, the emperors have no clothes.
People I work with often tell me they feel it’s valuable to attend review meetings with senior leaders, executives, whatever you call them, despite the fact that these meetings are incredibly long and almost never provide the value you’d hope to get out of such a time-consuming session.
These comments represent, for me, an imbalance of obligation. In this system, the lower level employee must make an extraneous and inconvenient effort to understand the higher-level one using a time-consuming, low-tech custom that occupies a significant percentage of the work week. In doing so, a person sacrifices their own productivity, growth, and work-life balance for the sole purpose of keeping high ranking people “informed” and gleaning a few kernels of information about how supposedly more important people think and feel. If you did an honest accounting of hours and wages, I think you’d find that a lot of tech companies pay really smart, successful people an inordinate amount of money to sit on the phone and listen to other, more successful people talk. We call this doing work.
If leadership means thinking least and last of yourself, then isn’t the onus on the leader to put an efficient system in place for staying informed that doesn’t require nearly half a day’s time multiple days a week? Wouldn’t that be a great problem for a so-called super senior leader to tackle and solve? Build a system for doing work, a workflow, if you will, that provides the same output — “informedness” — as the long meeting, but in a fraction of the time.
Perhaps it’s just my distaste for long meetings. I don’t think people should have to attend an hours-long sessions that primarily serves one person’s awareness, and I’d rather be working on something of real value for this broken world than listening to other people talk in an inefficient forum for nearly half a day.
The #1 justification I get for the absurd amount of time that we spend showing leadership work is that they need to find out what’s going on, somehow. These meetings are simply the best way…
The best way? Really? In the age of information, at a time in human history when you can send data across the globe in seconds, when you hold immense computing power in the palm of your hand, the only way our so-called innovative industry can develop to confidently move ideas through to completion is by way of the marathon meeting?
I know we can do better.