The Question

From a reader · introduced by Priya Chandhok

A reader wrote in last week. She is a chief operating officer at a mid-sized firm and she has inherited a Tuesday morning meeting from her predecessor. Six people, ninety minutes, every week, for the last four years. She has tried to cancel it twice and twice the most senior person in the room has politely declined to let it go. The meeting is not bad. It is not even badly run. The complaint is sharper than that. The meeting is not the right format for the work it is doing.

The Answer

By Priya Chandhok

There is a particular kind of standing meeting that exists because it once solved a problem that has since resolved itself, but whose original sponsors are still in the room and still attached. The right move is to stop asking whether the meeting should continue and start asking who the meeting belongs to. In nine cases out of ten it belongs to one person. The other five are guests, and have been guests for so long they have stopped noticing. The fix is to write to the one person and ask whether they would prefer to keep the meeting as is, or replace it with a Friday memo from them which the rest of you would read on Monday morning. Most of the time they will be relieved. Occasionally they will be hurt and you will need to handle that. Either way you will get your Tuesday morning back, and the work will get clearer because one person will be writing what they actually think rather than performing it in front of an audience that hasn’t asked them to.

The Margin

By Olusegun Adetokunbo

Two notes in the margin. The first is that this is not, strictly, a meeting problem. It is an attachment problem. The meeting is doing emotional work for someone who has not yet learned to do that work alone. Be kind. The second is that the Friday memo is not always the right answer. Sometimes the right answer is to keep the meeting and move the participants. Sometimes it is to keep the meeting and shorten it to twenty minutes with a fixed agenda. Sometimes it is to admit that this is a community, not a working group, and to schedule it once a quarter as lunch. The judgement is yours.

The Week

• The Lex column on Wednesday on Vodafone’s UK strategy is the clearest single page of corporate writing we read all week. Annotated copy on file.
• Two of you wrote in about the executive search firm that has started providing transcripts of all interviews to its clients. We are not sure this is an improvement. The interview is supposed to be the thing the candidate does not say.
• A

---