DEV Community: Zaharenia Atzitzikaki

When Meetings Are the Work

Zaharenia Atzitzikaki — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 15:19:50 +0000

Photo by Benjamin Child on Unsplash

(Disclaimer: In this article, the term “senior employee” refers to an employee with extensive experience, not necessarily an individual of advanced age. Business slang is weird.)

I was recently part of an intriguing discussion on Twitter (I know, I shouldn’t be there). Michael Petychakis, CTO at Orfium, asked in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way:

If you're only doing emails and meetings, is this considered "work"?
— Michael Petychakis (@mpetyx) April 3, 2023

In other words: are meetings real work? The replies were enlightening.

Most commenters asserted that meetings are not real work. “Real” work should be measured in design system components, lines of code and happy customers. Right?

Here’s the issue: there’s a widespread cognitive dissonance about creative work, whether writing, designing, writing code or creating products. The only work we consider valuable is the head-down, nose-on-the-screen work, free of distractions and interruptions.

That is not to undermine the importance of this kind of work. Flow is a coveted state for most knowledge workers. This kind of deep work allows us to practice our craft, hone our skills and solve problems. When we discuss work and productivity, every distraction is the enemy. Research shows it takes 15 to 25 minutes to get back into flow mode after a disruption.

However, the idea that meetings are a mere nuisance meant to sap us of any free time is highly problematic, especially among senior employees.

📈 Mo' Seniority, Mo' Meetings

As knowledge workers grow and advance their careers, they finally have to accept that the number of meetings they’ll be required to attend will increase. There’s just no way around it. Whether they’re senior individual contributors or new people managers, meetings are often a big part of their day-to-day.

As senior contributors, they have to join the following:

project kickoff meetings
progress update meetings
demo/QA meetings
cross-functional meetings

Making the transition to people management, a new crop of meetings enters their day-to-day:

weekly team updates
performance reviews
1:1s
manager meetings

(Coincidentally, this is usually when people get fed up with meetings, act cynical and write bitter messages on social media.)

🎳 Hate the Game or Hate the Player?

The thing is, most of us don’t hate meetings per se. What we do hate is poorly run meetings that are a waste of everyone’s time. You know which ones: where there’s no agenda, a gaggle of random attendees, no set facilitator and a constant feeling of “I shouldn’t be here”.

The problem is that sometimes, senior employees don’t do much to challenge the status quo. They often consider meetings someone else’s burden, so they join them with their laptops, trying to slip in some work while other people drone about things that might or might not interest them. By broadcasting their apathy about the meeting in this way, they do nothing to improve the situation.

And that is not senior employee behaviour.

⛓ Breaking the Chain

Performing a calendar audit every 3 to 6 months can help you unearth valuable insights about how you spend your time in meetings. If you feel like a particular meeting is not working anymore, discuss the following questions with your team:

Do we need this meeting?
Is this meeting the best use of anyone’s time?
Can this meeting be run asynchronously?

Make sure that all meetings are well-prepared and documented. Work with your team to avoid ad hoc, agenda-less meetings as much as possible. Assign the role of the notetaker to people in a round-robin fashion and build a culture of accountability regarding documentation. You can also record meetings for later viewing, but in my experience, people never watch these recordings. They just want to have access to the decisions and next steps.

You don’t need to do this work manually, either. There’s a new crop of meeting tools using AI in transformative ways, eliminating the busywork of documentation. I’ve seen amazing things from Vowel recently, and I know many teams use Otter daily.

As a senior employee, others will look to you for guidance. Junior hires will emulate your behaviour. Avoid perpetuating a problematic meeting culture by being cynical about the value of people getting together to make decisions and move forward.

👨🏾 “This is the Job.”

Peter Merholz, while talking to Hang Xu recently about the impact of senior designers, referred to a scene from the fan-favourite series “The Wire”, starring arguably the coolest person in the show, Lester Freamon. After listening to his younger (and hot-headed) colleagues complain about the minutiae of police work, he contradicts them, exasperated, that this kind of gruelling, soul-crushing work is the job. You cannot expect to produce in your bubble for 8 hours per day, five days per week.

After a while, for individual contributors and people managers alike, meetings are the work. Instead of complaining about the lost hours of productivity, find ways to run them in a way that creates value for everyone.

Your future self and your team will be grateful.

Going After That Management Position

Zaharenia Atzitzikaki — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 19:07:34 +0000

For most companies, the path from an individual contributor to a people manager is not straightforward. More often than not, there are no clear end goals in sight that you have to achieve before becoming a manager. People can be promoted either by working hard and proving their worth or by purely coincidental reasons like the resignation of a senior member.

Regardless of your company’s career ladder, what can you do to make sure you’re considered for a managerial position during the next promotion period?

First, let’s clear up the confusion about what it means to be a leader versus a manager.

Leadership ≠ Management

In most people’s minds, leadership ranks higher than management. We tend to think that a CEO is a leader, while the word “manager” brings an Office Space-esque image of an annoying middle manager holding a mug to mind. But leadership and management are not different ranks of the same set of skills. One can exist without requiring the presence of the other.

We made a note in the previous issue that leadership is a mindset and that it’s not tied to a position. Employees can be leaders without having the role power to get people to act. They just need to persuade people to follow them, without waiting for permission before putting their problem-solving skills to work.

On the other hand, managers have specific tasks: they have to make their team as effective as possible. They provide them with all the tools to get their work done and they act as breakwaters to shield them from distractions. Managers can sometimes be leaders, but it’s not always the case since their workload is already heavy enough. It’s the job of a good manager to cultivate leaders in their team.

Leaders emerge naturally in a company. Managers are promoted.

Aim to be a leader first

The first step is to find the cause you’re most passionate about and rally people around it. This could be a new workflow you think will benefit the whole team, or a new tool, or a new way of thinking about your day-to-day. Make the time to advocate for your cause to whoever listens and make sure to get executives on board whenever possible, as they’re those who can provide visibility and support.

When an executive gives public support to a leader’s project, they are providing that leader valuable air cover.
— Jared Spool

Finding a cause shouldn’t be disparate from the organization’s end goals, or it will never gain traction. Have in mind that companies care about increasing revenues, reducing costs, increasing new customer business (also known as market share), increasing existing customer business, or increasing shareholder value. How does your cause relate to that?

Don’t be fooled - acting as a leader is hard, thankless work. You’ll have to pursue it on top of your normal individual contributor workload and you can’t expect to be rewarded for it immediately. But this is the conundrum of being promoted: you have to act on the next level of the career ladder you are right now to be considered for promotion. If not, the Peter principle comes into play and organizations stagnate.

Some ideas you can use today

These are some specific ideas you can use to showcase your leadership skills and work towards a promotion to a managerial position:

👩‍🏫 Educate others on a topic you’re passionate about

Find a new tool, a new service, and share that knowledge with your wider team, preferably with your tribe. Make sure you’re highly invested in it, and that it solves a real problem for the team. As passion is contagious, people will naturally rally after you if you’re convincing enough.

🙋‍♀️ Offer to mentor a new team member

There’s no better way to try out the manager hat than to be responsible for onboarding a new member to the team. Focus on providing them with all the tools they need to get as productive as fast as possible while practicing your communication and project management skills.

⁉️ Spot miscommunication and solve it

Most teams have at least one hairy, annoying communication problem that everybody avoids. Step in and offer to help - send that difficult email, set up that stakeholder meeting that will clear things up. Be proactive and bring your problem-solving mentality to the table.

💬 Talk with people outside your team about business

Improve your business sense by regularly taking the time to talk with people you don’t usually work with. If you’re a developer, pair up with a salesperson and have a casual conversation over coffee. If you’re a salesperson, connect with a project manager and learn about their day-to-day. Connect the dots of how your work ties into the bigger picture.

😅 Ask for it

Eventually, people will start to notice the shift in your work ethic. They’ll know that you value knowledge sharing, that you have good coaching skills, a problem-solving attitude, and a good business sense.

This is when you have to ask for a promotion. Prepare a list of concrete examples of your leadership skills and ask your manager for a stretch goal that will lead to a managerial position. Be courteous but firm and direct - you don’t beg or extort, you just want to take the next step in your career!

Even if it doesn’t work out right away, your manager will know about your aspirations and will look out for your interests in a future promotion round or reorg. And if not, that’s probably the sign that you have to switch teams or to start looking for a new job.

🙋‍♀️ This is a cross-post from my newsletter, Leading by Design. If you liked the post, consider subscribing! I post one issue per month.