For ordinary meetings, and in general / on average, men value the explicitly impersonal, while women value the unmentionably personal.
Men like to walk away from a meeting with an answer to the questions, "What did I learn? What was decided? What issue was fixed or avoided?" Women don't mind not having answers, not because there aren't any, but because they are the kind of social factors that are necessarily subliminal.
You can't just come out and say, "this meeting is for human social psychological maintenance, it isn't to improve coordination, to share info that isn't common knowledge, to solve problems, make decisions, or change anything, but to give people some pseudo "face time" with the boss to make them feel a little more special and important than they really are, to vent, complain, whine, and let off steam, to 'feel heard', to jockey for friendship level position in the clique and gossip to help build and strengthen bonds, and, most importantly, so that when things happen later, the boss can CYA by saying, "why didn't you bring that up at the meeting when you had the opportunity?"
For men, time is a key resource which it is rude to waste. If there's something that doesn't involve everyone, it is respectful to say "let's take that offline". For women, the 'Seinfeld Meeting' that is about nothing, only seems to be a total waste to the guys, while the women log off with the subconscious feeling that it was time well spent. A guy that says "this was a total waste of time", "just doesn't get it".
One tension I've seen come up repeatedly is that most men get that personal, social-bond benefit from impersonal-style, minimalist meetings, but not from the personal-style ones, and vice versa for women. These innate incompatibilities cannot be reconciled, they are just another cost of working together.
The "two pizza" approach is really about pushing most decisions down to the leaf nodes. Some decisions need directors and VPs but in most cases that slows things down. Especially in software where it is easy to change your mind and dump what you did for the last two weeks and start over.
My experience of meetings has mostly been in non-profits of various sorts. Absolutely the worst kind of meeting is one in which the person in charge says, “We’ve constructed a plan going forward and we’d like your input.” At which moment everyone in the room thinks, “You don’t want input, you want a pat on the back.” The best meetings are those in which the team has a task to accomplish and brainstorms a solution with the confidence that it won’t be overruled by “the boss.”
I wasn't aware that teams of approx eight people was an Amazon thing -- it's a pretty common ideal in the software world. I also never imagined it was a way of minmizing cross-departmental meetings.
I've been a manager of sub-Dunbar teams in organizations of various sizes, and I think there are better purposes for both meetings and re-orgs. Typically reasonable re-org purposes include:
-- Forcing two teams that have been working at cross-purposes to not do that anymore by putting them under the same exec.
-- Matching the interests and skills of execs to portfolios of teams.
-- Filling holes in the support structure left by the departure of an exec.
A less good but very common purpose is to match the status of execs to company priorities, i.e. give the highest-status person the most important stuff to manage. The virtuous way to do this is to use the existing status of the person to benefit the team. The kind of reorg that makes people cynical is the kind that uses the importance of the team to raise the status of the person.
Intra-organizational >2 person meetings in sub-Dunbar settings serve purposes such as:
-- Making sure people who would ordinarily not talk to their teammates enough get prompted regularly to do so.
-- Making sure that when there is a decision to make that many people have opinions on, everybody has an official opportunity to make their voices heard, in part so they cannot complain later that they were ignored.
-- Giving people an artificial deadline, with social embarrassment as a penalty, to do the work that they have to present at the meeting.
There certainly are people that don't need these kinds of crutches to work productively and collaborate effectively, and you can imagine an organization composed entirely of such people that doesn't need meetings. But they are rare enough that I can't think of an example of such an organization persisting.
"But too often what you see at a meeting is the project manager interacting with each participant one at a time while the other participants tune out."
Ugh. I get a variation this all the time. We have department meetings once a month that can take an hour or more, and usually half the meeting will consist of our department manager talking to each team in turn while the rest of us stare at the walls.
I really appreciate this glimpse into the business world, Arnold!
I spent my career as a public school teacher, and meetings were held because it was the 2nd Tuesday of the month. You can imagine what happened when email came along! Nothing.
For ordinary meetings, and in general / on average, men value the explicitly impersonal, while women value the unmentionably personal.
Men like to walk away from a meeting with an answer to the questions, "What did I learn? What was decided? What issue was fixed or avoided?" Women don't mind not having answers, not because there aren't any, but because they are the kind of social factors that are necessarily subliminal.
You can't just come out and say, "this meeting is for human social psychological maintenance, it isn't to improve coordination, to share info that isn't common knowledge, to solve problems, make decisions, or change anything, but to give people some pseudo "face time" with the boss to make them feel a little more special and important than they really are, to vent, complain, whine, and let off steam, to 'feel heard', to jockey for friendship level position in the clique and gossip to help build and strengthen bonds, and, most importantly, so that when things happen later, the boss can CYA by saying, "why didn't you bring that up at the meeting when you had the opportunity?"
For men, time is a key resource which it is rude to waste. If there's something that doesn't involve everyone, it is respectful to say "let's take that offline". For women, the 'Seinfeld Meeting' that is about nothing, only seems to be a total waste to the guys, while the women log off with the subconscious feeling that it was time well spent. A guy that says "this was a total waste of time", "just doesn't get it".
One tension I've seen come up repeatedly is that most men get that personal, social-bond benefit from impersonal-style, minimalist meetings, but not from the personal-style ones, and vice versa for women. These innate incompatibilities cannot be reconciled, they are just another cost of working together.
The "two pizza" approach is really about pushing most decisions down to the leaf nodes. Some decisions need directors and VPs but in most cases that slows things down. Especially in software where it is easy to change your mind and dump what you did for the last two weeks and start over.
My experience of meetings has mostly been in non-profits of various sorts. Absolutely the worst kind of meeting is one in which the person in charge says, “We’ve constructed a plan going forward and we’d like your input.” At which moment everyone in the room thinks, “You don’t want input, you want a pat on the back.” The best meetings are those in which the team has a task to accomplish and brainstorms a solution with the confidence that it won’t be overruled by “the boss.”
I wasn't aware that teams of approx eight people was an Amazon thing -- it's a pretty common ideal in the software world. I also never imagined it was a way of minmizing cross-departmental meetings.
I've been a manager of sub-Dunbar teams in organizations of various sizes, and I think there are better purposes for both meetings and re-orgs. Typically reasonable re-org purposes include:
-- Forcing two teams that have been working at cross-purposes to not do that anymore by putting them under the same exec.
-- Matching the interests and skills of execs to portfolios of teams.
-- Filling holes in the support structure left by the departure of an exec.
A less good but very common purpose is to match the status of execs to company priorities, i.e. give the highest-status person the most important stuff to manage. The virtuous way to do this is to use the existing status of the person to benefit the team. The kind of reorg that makes people cynical is the kind that uses the importance of the team to raise the status of the person.
Intra-organizational >2 person meetings in sub-Dunbar settings serve purposes such as:
-- Making sure people who would ordinarily not talk to their teammates enough get prompted regularly to do so.
-- Making sure that when there is a decision to make that many people have opinions on, everybody has an official opportunity to make their voices heard, in part so they cannot complain later that they were ignored.
-- Giving people an artificial deadline, with social embarrassment as a penalty, to do the work that they have to present at the meeting.
There certainly are people that don't need these kinds of crutches to work productively and collaborate effectively, and you can imagine an organization composed entirely of such people that doesn't need meetings. But they are rare enough that I can't think of an example of such an organization persisting.
"But too often what you see at a meeting is the project manager interacting with each participant one at a time while the other participants tune out."
Ugh. I get a variation this all the time. We have department meetings once a month that can take an hour or more, and usually half the meeting will consist of our department manager talking to each team in turn while the rest of us stare at the walls.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Neanderthals_at_Work.html?id=UXINAAAACAAJ
I really appreciate this glimpse into the business world, Arnold!
I spent my career as a public school teacher, and meetings were held because it was the 2nd Tuesday of the month. You can imagine what happened when email came along! Nothing.