This meeting was avoidable |
Leadership
This meeting was avoidable
Meetings are the price we pay for unclear thinking and ambiguous communication. Writing — clear, thoughtful writing — has become a leadership power skill
ByMatthew Fray
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Published 17 hours ago|Updated 8 hours ago
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We have Slack $WORK 0.00%, Zoom $ZM -0.42%, Teams, Google $GOOGL -1.77% Meet, and AI summaries, all of which helped us work together in a more asynchronous, post-COVID-lockdowns world.
The hope? Maybe even the promise? A reduction in meetings. But everyone’s calendars are as full as ever.
The reality is that meetings are the price we pay for unclear thinking and ambiguous written communication.
Think about all of the times you’re in the middle of something or hard at work on a timely project when out of nowhere someone pings you for a “quick” phone call, or a half-hour meeting to “get aligned”?
Maybe this is why every office in the 1960s Mad Men era seemed to have decanters full of booze — to help everyone cope with another dogshit meeting that will probably delay project completion another day.
Writing — clear, thoughtful writing — has become a leadership power skill. It is simply the cheapest way to align teams, communicate intent, establish constraints, and reduce or eliminate rework.
What do meetings cost?
New research from Otter.ai, which analyzed 20 million meetings across 15,000 companies concluded that the average knowledge worker costs their employer $80,000 per year in meeting-related........