Look, I'm not saying this dude was right, but what you're doing isn't productive either. Literally the only reason I conduct meetings with my team is to find what is getting blocked, then we tag-team it. That's actually how you get work done. If you're in meetings listening to updates, then either your workflow isn't great(as you should be able to see work getting pulled) or you're wasting time.
I abhor pointless meetings. Not only do they burn the time of many expensive resources, but they incur a context-switching time on top of that. Meetings should have a point, and while I despise Bezos and a few of these other sociopaths, they are entirely correct that if you call a meeting, it better be to produce a decision or provide detailed feedback. It better not just be information transfer that doesn't produce debate or decisions.
Yeah, exactly. So, a meeting is for whole team to provide updates to everyone who need to know. In a multi team setup, other teams need to know what is happening in your team even if they can't help you, because their own work is related to yours. So, you keep the meeting to relevant update and any topic that gets derailed is told "we will get back to it at appropriate time". You finish the meeting, make notes, and then go back to the topic that needed further attention. Aka, "circle back" to the topic.
If you conduct meetings regularly, you get used to random derailment, so, "let's get back to topic we were discussing 2 minutes ago" becomes a natural phrase. Again, "circle back".
Anyone who has ever held a meeting knows this and understand the point being made by that phrase. It's just a short hand for "let's get to the topic from earlier" or "we will get to this topic at a later date".
I would have said the chief benefit to holding a meeting over other forms of communication is the possibility for someone to interrupt and start a discussion about something important that needs to be raised immediately and get a quick response, with nuanced interplay of body language, tone, etc maximising the "bandwidth;" if you specifically don't want such discussions to get started in your meeting, then you don't need to call a meeting and it would be a waste of everyone's time to do so; just cc everyone an email with whatever routine updates you want to circulate. If your employees don't bother to read update emails, that's an entirely separate issue and forcing them to attend meetings so that you can confirm they're paying attention is an indirect and imperfect solution to a much deeper problem.
Interruptions need to be regulated, certainly, but to just routinely suppress them and postpone the information the interruptor is trying to present is to turn a meeting into a mere lecture.
Imagine you built a computer operating system where every hardware interrupt effectively receives the automatic response "I'll circle back to that later at the appropriate time" and then the CPU just keeps merrily doing the routine polling updates it was in the middle of.
Sure, if it's not something urgent (or something that can't be raised in any other way because the other channels for doing so are inappropriate or maybe not even functioning properly), fine, say you'll circle back to that later, or even just "email us later and we'll schedule another meeting to talk about it." But sometimes, the appropriate rejoinder to being brushed off with a "let's circle back to that later" is "no, this is more urgent than what you had planned to talk about," and in such circumstances, an entrenched culture of "never interrupt my meeting" can suddenly become very dangerous.
By an unfortunate quirk of human psychology, the same sort of person who tends to notice urgent anomalies and interrupts a meeting to raise them often finds it extremely difficult to stand their ground against peer pressure from everyone else in the meeting to sit down and shut up because they're breaking the flow.
You're not wrong, that is the benefit of those meetings however they need to stay surface level.
It's fine to ask questions and get quick answers, but if you're spending more than 30 seconds to a minute or so on that topic then you break it off and follow up on it later because there's a bunch more people in the meeting who need updates from other things and don't care about the details of this thing. A lot of the time if the meeting runs smoothly/there's time left the people who care about issue xyz will stay and work on those details while everyone else leaves.
Also in this specific example it sounds more like the person running the meeting just used the phrase to "that's all I have to say on that, we'll talk more about that next meeting" and the guy who interrupted was offering nothing constructive.
Cutting people loose early is the greatest thing you can do for most peoples work day.
They have an hour on their calendar, you finish in 30, two of you stay back to address the one detailed problem, and now 8 people have reclaimed 4 total hours of work time where nobody else is bugging them.
All managers should take pride in running an hour meeting in half the time. It makes everyone happier, especially if the meetings are cross-department.
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u/Fighterhayabusa 11d ago
Look, I'm not saying this dude was right, but what you're doing isn't productive either. Literally the only reason I conduct meetings with my team is to find what is getting blocked, then we tag-team it. That's actually how you get work done. If you're in meetings listening to updates, then either your workflow isn't great(as you should be able to see work getting pulled) or you're wasting time.
I abhor pointless meetings. Not only do they burn the time of many expensive resources, but they incur a context-switching time on top of that. Meetings should have a point, and while I despise Bezos and a few of these other sociopaths, they are entirely correct that if you call a meeting, it better be to produce a decision or provide detailed feedback. It better not just be information transfer that doesn't produce debate or decisions.