May 17, 2013
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Too Many Committees Holding Too Many Meetings?
As some of you know, I spent quite a few years working as a Security Police Officer on an Air National Guard training base, also known as a Combat Readiness Training Center, or CRTC. The base was owned and operated by the State, but both State and Federal Government agencies played their part. Enter bureaucracy at its finest.
Projects to be completed and issues to be resolved often meant the creation of committees which would study the subject at hand and form ideas and proposals on how to deal with it. That, of course, meant meetings. I hate meetings, and avoid them when possible, although some are necessary and important.
Eventually, at our base, we saw an item in the news letter voicing concern that, due to the large number of committees, so many meetings were being held that it was interfering with day-to-day business. I half-jokingly said they would probably form a committee to meet and study how to reduce the number of committees, and thus reduce the number of meetings being held.
They did exactly that.
Comments (5)
At least you didn’t have to travel across country to your meetings — that adds immensely to the time and stress of meetings!
Haha! Gotta love the last 2 sentences. When I worked on Wall Street our department had a meeting every Friday, attendance mandatory no matter what we were in the middle of working on, no matter how time sensitive what we were working on was. I’d say 90% of the meetings were unnecessary with nothing of importance to discuss. Worse still was watching the department VPs and AVPs running off to meetings twice a day. Heaven knows what they discussed for 4 hours a day but I often saw them emerge from a conference room laughing. At least they had fun. In October, 2008 the firm filed for bankruptcy.
I’m not fond of weekly meetings because they are held whether or not there is a reason to hold one.
@TheSutraDude - With ya on the meetings biz. At my last company we had a sales meeting in the moring with the VP then the sales manager held another meeting after lunch. This was every Monday and this shot the whole day. The Sales Manager loved to hear himself talk and we would have usually two more meeting during the week.
Waste of everyones time and it was annoying because SM just wanted an audience.
@tendollar4ways - Ha! I worked in sales for a couple of years. You couldn’t schedule an appointment with a decision maker if the only time slot the decision maker had conflicted with our weekly sales meetings. Frustrating as hell and counter productive. There were times when a meeting was called spontaneously. I’d say, but I have an appointment with a client and was told I had to attend the meeting. I’m sure you know the worst thing you can do in sales is show up an hour late for an appointment with a potential buyer.
lol, its good that they listened to you. I agree about too many commtees and meetings!