We Meet to Meet

"When an organization has more of its decisions made by committees, that gives more influence to those who have more time available to attend committee meetings and to drag out each meeting longer. In other words, it reduces the influence of those who have work to do, and are doing it, while making those who are less productive more influential." - Thomas Sowell

I have found this to be incredibly true.

If you look around your company, you can probably identify several people who seem to be on all sorts of project teams or committees or groups or whatever they may be called at your place of employment.

The natural response to recognizing this fact is usually "How do they have time for all of that?".

The answer to that question is quite simple: they either don't have enough work to do or they don't do the work they are supposed to do, usually pushing it off onto other people.

The sad thing is that managers love to see people who are "great team members" running from meeting to meeting to meeting and are so busy. Although they might never accomplish a single thing of significant value, the effort and time involved in those meetings is valued far greater than the value of the person with his head down in the cubicle cranking out work that adds to the bottom line of the company. In fact, more often times than not, the person in the cube is also carrying the workload of the meeting monster next door.

It's a shame that managers who love to meet for the sake of meeting breed people who meet for the same reason. Meetings do not get work done. While it is useful to pull groups together from time to time to strategize how the workload will get completed, most meetings that are on the schedules of many employees are not helpful and add little, if any, value to the bottom line of the company.

So managers - Kill the meetings and get back to allowing your employees to do some real work. Hold your employees equally accountable for the work that they are accomplishing, not the work they are talking about doing someday.

That is what the employee in the cubicle would love to tell you.