Signs You’re in a Bad Meeting
Signs you are in a bad meeting
Recently I was sitting on Zoom and I wondered if I had any new emails. I checked but didn’t have any. I went back to my meeting. Then I wondered if anyone had messaged me on my work place chat system. I checked, but none! How could I escape this… wait.. this is a BAD meeting!! This is not my fault. This is the fault of the facilitator!!! I decided to pay attention to see if I could help move it forward using some of my techniques from my recent post, or if I should give some feedback using the template from the last post.
In this post I’ll share some signs that you are a in a boring meeting - I would say boring = bad meeting. You can use these signs to stay engaged so you can leverage some of the techniques to move the meeting along or at least give some feedback to the facilitator and #endboringmeetings.
Sign #5
Sign 5: You don’t know what the meeting is for. You’ve been in the meeting for a while but you aren’t really sure what the meeting is about. You feel like you should leave, but maybe something interesting might happen, so you stick in there.
Sign #4
Sign 4: You have a lot to say about the subject being discussed but the extraverts are SO loud that you can’t fit a word in edgewise. You keep trying to raise your hand but no one seems to notice. The facilitator doesn’t give you any space so that you can share your insights. You get more and more frustrated till you decide you won’t share your wisdom. Forget them!
Sign #3
Sign 3: The meeting seems to be one random red-herring after the next. You are trying to keep track of the take-a-ways on each, but you really aren’t in charge and are starting to lose your mind.
Sign #2
Sign 2: The meeting keeps referring to an expert or manager not present. People say things like, “Joy knows about this. We should ask her.” or “James has made a decision on that point, but he hasn’t shared it with anyone yet.”
Sign #1
Sign 1: You realize that the world would have been better if this meeting wasn’t happening. Often we have a meeting because its a weekly scheduled meeting. It’s helpful to ask ourselves, “Does this meeting need to be happening?” If the answer is no, then that’s a sure sign that this meeting is a bad meeting.
If you see any of these signs, you should ask the facilitator if the meeting should be rescheduled when Joy and James can attend. Use my tips on how to give feedback on meetings to your facilitator to help them gently improve.
The next obvious question is, why do we have meetings? I want to really get to the reasons why we need synchronous communication. What can we do in meetings that we can’t do via a google document?
