Meetings and the Law of Diminishing Returns

On any given day I am involved with at least three meetings, and other days my Outlook calendar is a solid wall with me having to eat lunch at my desk. All of these meetings have one thing in common: They have too many people attending.

Corporations are a collection of competing groups, and each group thinks they are the most important group in the room. Once a group gets wind of something, they feel compelled to get their representatives in the room to have their two cents heard. This causes even an hour long meeting to end up being far too short to have everyone's opinion heard and cataloged.

When I am the meeting organizer I corner the project sponsor's representative and get the list of people who's areas will be impacted by the project. Those are the only people I want in the room when the details are being discussed. It's amazing how fast the details get worked out when a small group of experts come together. Once a good set of requirements is worked out, the announcement goes out about what's changing.

This is where the big meeting is required, but only the one. Get the requirements into everyone's hands with the expectation that it will have been reviewed before the big meeting. Keep the agenda to a Q & A session, and you'll find that most questions are just simple clarification questions. Everyone gets their two cents and the project gets to stay on track.

This of course doesn't always work. Some people are tenacious, and will find a way to weasel into every meeting. If you keep with it though, even eventually the most tenacious person will get the hint.

What Happens When the Next Rung is Management?

As a young professional I often ponder where my career is going. Can I guide it? If so, where should I attempt to guide it to? Is management the only real path in climbing the corporate ladder? There are always questions and uncertainty, and sometimes it feels like I'm trapped on a path. In the last year or so I have found other paths that I didn't think were available to me, and in following these new paths I have found ways t climb the ladder without having to become the dreaded middle manager.

Years ago I was in retail banking. Like now, my main goal was to climb up the ladder. My reasons then mostly centered around money. The things I wanted to do costed more than I could afford at the time (mostly travel). Over the years I worked up from a front line teller to a lead sales person, and then I jumped into management. Eventually I found myself one step away from being the head manager of a branch, and that's when my self-reflections began. That kind of leadership role was not something for me. Using my experience I was able to jump-ship and get a corporate operations job with the same salary.

The new job was something more akin to my early days as a teller. The field users would call in, and I would process their requests. It was mind numbing on the best days, but it afforded me the mental bandwidth to learn a lot about my employer and quickly make myself far more useful than my job description would suggest. Within a year I had earned a promotion into my first individual contributor role.

Unlike every job I had ever occupied up to this point, there was no customer service aspect. days would go by without even a phone call or e-mail, I just produced results. I earned a reputation as a producer, but found my satisfaction with the job lacking. Total freedom sounded interesting, but I felt disconnected from the world. After a year I took a Business Analyst position at the same company.

This is where I found my sweet spot. While still an individual contributor in some aspects of my job, there was now a new large social aspect of my position. On any given day I would spend several hours in analysis mode, then switch into social mode as meetings were held to discuss the project. I had found a path that didn't require management, and a lucrative one at that.

Once more I stand at the edge of the career path cliff. I can no longer see the path to the next rung that doesn't involve management, and I'm still as uncertain about it today as I was all those years ago. While I enjoy business analysis, I have no intention of doing this for the rest of my career. Is there something more interesting out there? I hope so.