Meeting Bail Tip #1: Identify the Type of Meeting

The first step in getting out of a meeting is to identify what kind of meeting it is. A meeting agenda would help, but as most meetings proceed without one, you’re on your own. Chances are you’re either in an informational meeting or a conflict resolution meeting.

At informational meetings—big surprise coming here, folks—information is passed on. Think your favorite quarterly all-hands meeting. Staff meetings. Any meeting where there’s a standing assumed agenda. There are two kinds of participants in these meetings: talkers and listeners.

Roles and agendas in these meetings are simple. Talkers are talking and listeners are listening. Get it? There is no problem to be solved other than the transmission of information. The quicker it happens, the sooner everyone is back to work.

You can quickly identify those folks who don’t get this. They’re the whack jobs who always ask the same (or random) questions during an all-hands with the hope that simply by asking, they’re going to change something. It’s a noble act, speaking your mind in front of all your peers. But it’s also a waste of time. This is an informational meeting, people. The talkers are here to pass on whatever organizational knowledge they need to so as to prevent a rebellion. Folks are here to nod, not solve problems. When the whack job speaks up, everyone who understands the nature of the meeting is thinking, “OK, another useless question that’s going to keep me here longer. Crap.”

At a conflict resolution meeting, some problem needs to be solved. Apparently, it could not be resolved via e-mail, instant messaging, or hallway conversations, so some bright fellow decided to convene a face-to-face meeting where the bandwidth is high and the time wastage is significant.

Agenda detection in the conflict resolution meeting is more complex. To see it in action, let’s create a meeting.

Tuesday, 4 p.m. List of suspects: You (Joe Senior Engineer), two other random engineers, one product-management person, and a program manager. The program manager called the meeting to solve a problem your team had nothing to do with, so you’re already resentful of being here in the first place. See, the sales folks sold something that your company does not make. You’re here to explain how much it would cost to build this thing that you’ve never built before but that’s already been sold. Been here? Thought so.

Meeting Bail Tip #2: Classify the Participants

Agenda detection starts by first classifying the participants. There are two major types that you need to identify: players and pawns. The simple distinction between the two types is that players want something out of the meeting. This is their incentive to participate. They’ll be leaning forward, actively nodding, barely able to hold themselves back from spilling their agenda all over the table.

Pawns are either silent or instruments of running the meeting. In either case, they’re adding very little to the meeting and can be removed from strategic consideration. The term pawns is not intended to be derogatory, of course. Pawns very well might be running your company, but in meetings, they don’t contribute . . . it’s just not their key skill.

Meeting Bail Tip #3: Identify the Players

The bucketing of players and pawns is simple. You can do it with the attendee list and a bit of organizational knowledge. Let’s try it with our hypothetical meeting mentioned previously.

First, you can assume all the engineers are players. They obviously have technical knowledge they may throw on the table, otherwise why were they invited? The product-management person is also a player as she represents the sales folks in this meeting. Program managers in these meetings are pawns. They’ll make sure action items are recorded and that the meeting ends on time.

If you’re sitting in a meeting where you’re unable to identify any players, get the hell out. This is a waste of your time. These are meetings traditionally called by windbags who like to hear themselves talk, but hold no real influence over the organization/product/whatever. Unfortunately, if you’re new to a group, you need to get burned by the windbags a few times before you learn to avoid these totally fucking useless meetings. It’s tough being the new guy.

Meeting Bail Tip #4: Identify the Pros and Cons

The next step in agenda detection now kicks in as we look at the players. This is when you figure out each player’s position relative to the issue on the table. For whatever that issue is there are two subclasses of players: the pros and the cons.

The pros are the players who are currently on the winning side of the issue. They’re getting what they want and are not incented to negotiate. They don’t even have to be here, and yet, they’re here and appear willing to listen to the cons, right? Maybe. Maybe they’re just here to watch the cons squirm.

The cons, clearly, are the ones who are being screwed. They’re likely the ones who yelled loudly enough to get the meeting set up in the first place. Cons are usually easy to pick out because they’re expressing some degree of pissed-off-ed-ness.

Like our player requirement, both pros and cons must be represented for any progress to occur, otherwise you’re just going to talk and talk and talk. You’re guaranteed the cons are going to be present because they’re the ones screaming and shouting. If you want the meeting to produce something useful, the pros must be represented. The specific pro does not need to be in the building, but they must have a designated proxy, or the cons will bitch, heads will nod, and nothing will happen.

Let’s take a stab at identifying the pros and cons in our hypothetical meeting.

In the previous example, it’s clearly engineering that is being asked to build a product that does not exist. They’re pissed and they’ve called this meeting to quantify this frustration. Hello, cons.

As we’ve already identified our program manager as a pawn, we can only assume that our product manager is the pro. But wait, now you’re in this meeting and she sounds like an engineer. “Those goddamned sales folks. What the hell were they thinking? This is the last time, blah, blah, blah . . .” She trails off into everyone’s frustrations, and you’re back to square one trying to figure out who’s who in this mess.

Our product manager suddenly appears to be a con. Does this mean I think you should pull the ripcord and get the hell out? No, your product manager’s the pro, all right; she’s just bright enough not to let anyone know it. A common tactic of a good pro is to not acknowledge that they’re the pro. This means that they don’t actually have to take the heat for whatever the conflict is. The real pros, in this example, the sales folks who cut our brilliant impossible deal, aren’t in the room, they’re out in the field, cutting more unachievable deals. The product manager is attempting to fake out the engineers in the room by saying, “Hey, this is a tough problem that they have put us in. What are we going to do?” Brilliant bait-and-switch, no? Don’t sweat it. They make less than you.

The stage is set. Our pawns have been filtered out; our sneaky pro is nodding, placating cons with her feigned commiseration; the cons are yelling; and yes, you’re still in the meeting.

Believe it or not, the hard part is done.

Meeting Bail Tip #5: Figure Out the Issue

If you’ve paid attention, you’ve got a pretty good map of who’s who, and where the whos are, so now all you need to do is figure out what the whos want. The pawns don’t want anything; they were just happy to be invited. The pros are there to show off their complete and utter ownership of the issue. They’ll leave whenever, and the sooner the better.

So the reason you’re sitting there is the cons. What do they want? I’m convinced that the majority of meetings on this planet go long and do little because the people sitting around the table simply do not figure out who the hell they’re talking to and what they want.

Stop. You’ve got a meeting in mind, some horrible meeting where the issue is so complex that there’s no way the simple identification process I described could apply. Wrong. You’re jumping to solve the issue and that’s where everyone fucks this up. Who cares about the issue? Do you know who matters in whatever horrible meeting you’re sitting in? Did you take the time to identify the people who actually care—the ones who can make a difference? If you didn’t, you deserve every useless minute of that meeting.

Meeting Bail Tip #6: Give the Cons What They Want

So yes, the cons do want something here. You’re going to meet their needs in order to get out the door and their needs are simple—so simple you’re going to laugh. The cons need a plan, some assurance that will somehow address whatever the issue is. Doesn’t matter if that plan comes from the pawn, the player, the pro, or the con. Someone needs to synthesize everything into constructive next steps and communicate that to the cons, and then you’re done. You’re out the door.

Doesn’t need to be a great plan, or an honest plan, or even a complete plan. Cons will not let you out of that meeting until there is the perception of forward progress. If you’ve scheduled an hour and that hour is up, you’re thinking, “Well, that’s one way out.” Again, incorrect, because the cons are returning to their desks and scheduling a follow-up meeting where the organizational ineptitude is going to continue.

Meeting Bail Tip #7: Figure Out the Issue

You might very well have the requisite players, pros, and cons , but then again, you might have too many. If it’s 30 minutes in and you still can’t figure out what the issue is, it’s time to go: too many issues. Someone who cares more than you needs to distill this chaos down to a coherent statement so the pros and cons can argue about one thing.

Conclusion

Meetings are always going to be inefficient because language is hard. Getting folks in the same group, with the same organizational accent, to talk coherently to each other is hard enough. Meetings give us the opportunity to include other organizations with other accents. This makes the language chaos complete. Now, you don’t care. You don’t need to know what they’re saying because with agenda detection, you can figure out who they are, what they want, get it for them, and get the hell out.