One of the most common complaints that engineers often make is that their days are broken up with too many meetings that fragment their work and keep them from their optimal flow state.
As a leader of engineers, you want to help. But before you look at meetings as a problem to be solved, try seeing them as a symptom of a deeper system problem.
Scheduling a meeting on the calendar is sort of a blunt instrument you can use to brute-force a specific desired outcome that you’re not getting some other way, such as clarity, alignment, ownership, or trust.
When communication is unclear, meetings are often necessary for real-time dialog, reframing, and confirmation. But if these clarity-creating meetings are frequent, they may be a symptom of larger misalignment on scope, vision, or even values.
If you find yourselves revisiting the same questions in recurring meetings, you may be seeing symptoms of misalignment that results from artificial harmony. Underneath that misalignment may be an unwillingness to voice dissent and confront disagreements.
Real-time meetings use primarily for status reporting may reveal a lack of ownership. What may really be missing is a clear accounting of who is responsible for each decision by when, and an asynchronous system for making that accountability visible.
Ultimately, what most of these symptoms reveal is an underlying lack of trust. It’s tempting to use the fear of the spotlight and attention of a real-time meeting to almost bully colleagues into doing what you need them to do.
If any of these underlying symptoms sound familiar to you and you’d like to explore how to overcome them, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
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