Undocumented Features

UF Postings Past: Politics of the Back Room and How to Cope

April 27, 2008 – 8:21 am

Everyone out there in the business world is overly familiar with meetings. You probably have several per week, if not several per day. We hold meetings, in theory, to communicate and to make decisions as a group.  I’m here to tell you that that’s often nonsense.
The fact is, most successful meetings consist of no *real* decisions being made. More likely, decision makers meet over lunch, near the coffee pot in the morning, while on the treadmill at the gym, or some other place outside of the meeting room beforehand. There, they talk over the issues without the trappings of a formal meeting and involving tons of people in the process to dilute the discussion. They make a decision, then spend their prep time before the meeting planning how to use the meeting to bring everyone around to the conclusion that they already made.

This may sound jaded. You may say that things aren’t done that way at your company. You may be right. However, in most places, this is the way things happen. You need to know this for several reasons:

1) Understanding how things work help you function in the political arena of your company.
2) Understanding how things work can help you influence how things happen in your company.
3) If you are having too many meetings where no decisions are made, perhaps you should consider using these tactics yourself. Get the decisions made outside, then leverage the meeting to create agreement.

The third note may sound underhanded and overly political. If you do it well, it isn’t. Talk to everyone on your team individually. Get a feel of what they want. Gather facts from them. Use these facts to answer questions for others. You will find that if you talk to everyone and help them to get a perspective before the meeting happens, everyone will likely have reached a similar conclusion well before the meeting, resulting in a smooth, simple, quick meeting where everyone arrives and reaches quick understanding. If not, they are at least armed with more and better facts to discuss the topic.

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