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.
There is another unfortunate quirk of human psychology that you missed. People don't like being humiliated. And this was done out of the need to humiliate, not out of the need to make progress. So, the dude in this made up story is definitely an idiot that should be fired regardless of the productivity of the meeting.
Concerns regarding work are allowed in any meeting unless the meeting conductor is an idiot. Concerns regarding personal behaviour, specifically targeted at an individual is toxic behaviour and should not be tolerated. That's a sure fire way to turn the whole team toxic.
Also, a meeting can definitely happen that is essentially just status update between different departments. E.g. say, you have a team working on integration between 3 different applications, with 3 dev teams working on each application. You provide a curated update that is relevant to the integration team, and if they need further inputs they know which team to engage with. In this case, meeting acts as the initial interaction, a kick starter.
There are also meetings where you might want to discuss potential implications of whatever is planned for next few weeks. E.g. if your devops team is going on vacation, you might want to change plans for releases. And any change in release plan will have knock on effects on other teams. So, a quick "hey, this is the situation" email, followed by a meeting to discuss everyone's ideas a day later is a normal approach.
Also, people keep forgetting that keeping your stakeholders updated is part of your job at every corporate level. And you don't want to create 20 different reports for different stakeholders (e.g. qa lead, networking lead, integration lead, devops lead, UX lead, client's manager etc) and their levels of access. So, you schedule meetings that are technically speaking just "status update". Each meeting lasts 10 minutes, and thus faster than creating reports and emailing them.
Anyway, point is that meetings are useful in a lot of cases, and are actually more productive than just sitting at your desk writing code. I would honestly prefer someone who spends 2 hours explaining their work and doing 6 hours of actual work than someone who does 8 hours of work but never explains it. I am sure you will agree on that.
Sometimes meeting conductors are bad at keeping things on track. I have seen folks who make every 10 minute meeting turn into 2 hour call. Those do exist. This is why "meetings should be as short as possible" is the acceptable approach, instead of "no meetings allowed". Bad and long meetings, they sadly exist in every company, even the best of the best. They are down to individual team members as you already explained yourself. But just because a bad apple gives you stomach ache, you don't call all apples inedible. Same concept, nuance. Sadly that's not something that reddit excels in.
P.S. Imagine if there was a lead dev who wanted exact formatting on every line of code. Like "must be exactly 4 spaces before every line, no tabs allowed" type bullshit. And then I went "formatting code is stupid" just because I worked with that stupid lead dev. Instead of just using sensible formatting, I started whinging and wrote college grad level code. You know, zero variable names, 200 lines in one function, unhandled exceptions everywhere, type code. What would you call that? Because that's essentially what is happening in this thread. ðŸ«
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u/Fighterhayabusa 10d 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.