Techie Pointed Out Meetings Are Pointless, And Was Punished For It

Who, Me? Welcome to a fresh Monday, and therefore a new installment of "Who, Me?", our reader-contributed column that shares your stories of making workplace mistakes and scraping your way to safety afterwards.

This week, we venture into the realm of office politics with a reader we'll Regomize as "Palmer." Palmer once worked under a newly minted manager who considered Dilbert comics as useful training, and the Pointy-Haired Boss as an inspiration.

His big managerial innovation was to stage a weekly meeting during which all members of the IT team were required to share what they had done in the past week.

"Most of us were specialists," Palmer told Who, Me? "I did mainframe performance, someone else did network configuration, a couple of people did Linux. I knew no one else would understand what I had done, so I kept it short and said things like 'I am working on two customer problems.'"

But others would describe their recent work in great detail, and even squabble about it.

These meetings were scheduled to occupy a single hour but often stretched to 120 minutes or more.

Palmer thought that was a waste of time and shared that opinion with his manager. But the meetings continued in the same format.

An opportunity eventually arose to mention the long meetings to a more senior manager, who shared Palmer's concerns and promised to look into it.

The newbie manager seemed to get the message because at the following week's meeting, he mentioned it might be time to freshen up the format to make it shorter and more interesting. He then asked for ideas on how to do so.

Nobody answered, and an uneasy silence fell over the meeting.

Which was when the junior manager asked Palmer if he had any ideas.

"Who, me?" he asked.

"Yes," came the reply, tinged with enough aggression that Palmer felt he was being dared to back down.

He didn't and offered his forthright view that the meeting should be limited to 30 minutes, speakers should not hold the floor for longer than two minutes, and the manager should also schedule one-to-one meetings because some people would not share difficult news in a public forum.

Then he kept going, suggesting technical arguments must be conducted elsewhere, and that minutes should be taken and issues tracked because the meeting often covered old ground.

Those ideas went down very well indeed with the IT team and the meetings subsequently improved.

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But the manager's opinion of Palmer did not.

"At my annual assessment a few weeks later, my rating went from 'Outstanding performer' to 'Needs to improve.'"

The manager also said he did not feel Palmer was a supportive team member.

"My boss had decided to forget all the global customers whose mission-critical problems I solved on short notice," Palmer told Who, Me?

Readers may think that an organization willing to tolerate such a poor manager would have universally lousy HR. Thankfully, that wasn't the case as it also operated a mentoring program.

Palmer shared this story with his mentor, who let other teams know a very fine mainframe techie was looking for a change of scenery. The next day, Palmer had three new job offers!

A year later, the team he left was reorganized.

"It just wasn't delivering," he told Who, Me?

Have you made mistakes while wading through the miasma that is office politics? If so, the correct course of action is to click here and send this column an email so we can immortalize your escape in a future installment of Who, Me? ®