newspaper - 09/15/2008

Bored Room Why 'Let's Meet' is the Most Dreaded Phrase in the Office

By BRIAN MOORE

September 15, 2008-- Decades ago in his corporate career, Gordon Hagler learned that ducking projectiles can be as important as effective communication when navigating a meeting.

His Monday morning conclave had gotten heated. The company's CEO was "ranting and railing and throwing his arms around," says Hagler, who's now the president of the DentalEZ Group, a manufacturer.

This being the good ol' days when smoking was allowed at work, the CEO happened to be holding a pack of Marlboros instead of a BlackBerry during his tantrum. In his ire, the butts accidentally flew out of his hand and straight towards Hagler's head. Hagler dodged the death sticks with cobra-like reflexes.

The CEO walked the length of the table and fetched his smokes off the carpet. "Never let intensity be miscued for anger," he told everyone. "Let's take a break."

The general sentiment among workers toward meetings could well be "let's take a break - forever." Given the number of endless, meandering conference-room gatherings the average office worker is forced to endure, "let's have a meeting" is among the most dreaded phrases in the workplace lexicon.

So why do people hate meetings so much?

"Because most of them suck," says Adrian Miller, head of Adrian Miller Sales Training, a Port Washington consulting firm, before rattling off a long list of reasons why.

When they're not coma-inducing drudgery, meetings are often nothing more than opportunities for relentless showboating, battlefields in annoying turf wars or anxious reunions of mildly dysfunctional corporate families.

"People have been abused by meetings. They're conditioned to hate them, and nine times out of 10, those conditions are met," says Karissa Thacker, a management psychologist with offices in Delaware and New York City. She adds that the "aggressive collaboration" - the give and take inherent in meetings - is unnatural for people. Still, they're ubiquitous, unavoidable and universal.

In a 2005 Microsoft survey, American workers reported spending 5½ hours a week in meetings, with a whopping 71 percent of them saying the meetings were unproductive. In another survey, by Accountemps, executives estimated wasting close to 8 hours a week in unnecessary meetings. Indeed, the sheer number of meetings workers are forced to attend has created a meeting glut. "It becomes so ludicrous that sometimes the biggest challenge of meetings is to find a time when everyone can meet," says Charlie Hawkins, author of "Making Meetings Matter."

One big problem, says James Hazy, a professor of management and entrepreneurship at Adelphi University's School of Business, is that meetings are often viewed as an end in themselves rather than the means to the end that they ought to be. In other words, they're a good way to look like you're achieving something when you're just blowing hot air on some inconsequential issue that could have been settled with 90 seconds of e-mailing. "Having a meeting is not an accomplishment," he says. "'We've had five meetings' is a lousy way to answer, 'What have you achieved?' " Flying blind There are a number of reasons why meetings seem nothing more than a collection of people failing to get anything done at torturous length. A big problem is haziness about a meeting's purpose, say many workers and workplace experts. A boss will call a meeting with a vaguely stated reason instead of a concrete goal or a set agenda.

"Ambiguity is the real cause of all meeting problems," says Cy Wakeman, president of an organizational development consulting firm. "When you have a clear goal, people can behave up to it." Meanwhile, she says, "a lack of clarity clearly causes meetings to get personalized." Wakeman knows from experience after refereeing a Crips vs. Bloods-like meeting between physicians and lab workers at a health care firm. The vague aim was to streamline the working relationship between the two groups. But with no stated, unifying goal, the meeting degenerated into a slugfest. The doctors accused the lab workers of putting money ahead of patient care, while the lab workers countered that the only care doctors were interested in was their own pay and having their butts caressed. "If you walked into that meeting, you'd never let a surgeon touch you again," says Wakeman, who solved the problem by getting everyone to focus on common ground - serving patients better, but with an eye toward being cost-effective - rather than conflicting turf. DO WE AGREE YET?: In addition to provoking brain-blasting boredom, meeting can become a battlefield for turf wars.

Page 1 of 2 BORED ROOM By BRIAN MOORE - Jobs - New York Post Online Edition - New York... 12/2/2005 http://www.nypost.com/seven/09152008/jobs/bored_room_129130.htm