> I also know that in each and every company I have ever worked for, none of this is going to fly.
My favourite part of climbing the corporate ladder is finally having enough clout to just say "no".
> I have been asking for agendas; I have asked for clarification on what to do to prepare; I have even suggested
Try "I am unable to attend meeting without an agenda. Let me know when one has been posted." in your decline message. Do you sound like a dick? Yes. Does it work? Also yes, unless you weren't actually required in that meeting, in which case it becomes a self-solving problem.
I echo the parents sentiment - I don’t need to be there for a one hour meeting while 12 people give a perspective on a topic, but if you make the wrong decision I will say no.
My job as a higher level manager is to ensure that whoever is there on our behalf avoids stupid decisions being made, and if I can’t delegate that then I need to go myself. Sometimes its unavoidable, and sometimes politics prevail but 95% of the time making my priorities clear to my team and being consistent in my them has the correct outcome.
This can lead to weird dynamics. A lot of workplaces, no one seems to have direct power (or incentive!) to say "yes" to anything but lots of people (including 3 teams you weren't even aware existed) are able to "provide feedback" or say no.
This leads to all progress being achieved very slowly if at all, or by using the element of surprise and then seeking forgiveness.
While I know your heart is in the right place, as someone with a reporting structure on both sides, I can tell you that this kind of handholding is the entire reason they keep making bad decisions. You must let people fail, and from there your entire job is ensuring that winding back that decision is the responsibility of the people who made it. Few decisions are irreversible, and everything will almost always work out in the end despite how it feels at the time -- but letting people fail, then making them clean up after themselves, is possibly the absolute best teaching method out there.
I think you’re reading into a hip fire comment here - I’m not saying I’ll override any decision you make that i disagree with. Simply that if push comes to shove my team should feel empowered to make a decision and bring it to me for “ass covering” knowing that I will challenge them on it if I disagree, but also feeling confident that they know how I’ll feel about it before they make that call. I trust them to do this without me there.
Blindly allowing someone to make a bad call without questioning it is as bad as overruling their call without any explanation!
> And then you risk people making stupid decisions, which you have to fix later on, because you didn't attend the meeting.
If you are the one responsible for the work to fix something, you need to be the one driving the meetings or pushing alternative communication.
This is why all of the generic “just say no to meetings” advice is useless: It’s all dependent on the context. You can’t just decline meetings from your boss’s boss without good reason, for example.
A lot of snarky internet advice about saying “no” at the office is just people venting or doing imaginary role play. In a real office you have to push for communication, pull details out of people, identify who you need to report to and who you can safely decline.
If you get in a situation where you’re declining meetings and the responsibility for content of that meeting lands in your lap, you have made a severe misjudgment. These things are easy to clarify with a little proactive communication, but you get nowhere if you just say “no” or send off a singular “agenda plz” email and then forget about it. People are busy. You have to push and make it clear what you need from them, following up if it doesn’t come.
I’m not sure if this is more bad advice, but it seems like we’d all be better off if people just shared their experiences, rather than trying to proscribe them for others: you telling me to decline meetings is worthless, but you describing how you did, and what the effects were has value.
> Your head might not be, but you might find yourself being unhappily cleaning up a mess for months
From my experience it is going to happen regardless of whether you pay attention or not. People will fuck up, period. Compulsively being hypervigilant will drive you insane.
As a manager or even a technical leader, your head IS on the line, it just might not seem so obvious.
Rollout delays, customer debacles, etc all shape your image to promo panels.
If you’re just a junior engineer, it’s not like it will be held against you, but you certainly missed an opportunity to demonstrate ownership and make a name for yourself as one of the 1 in 20 people who aren’t NPCs.
Someone explicitely asked for your input, you refused and they fucked up. Your head might nor roll, but you won't be unscaved either. If it's not as your responsibility, it will be by the size and impact of the fuckup.
IMHO it'l should be the same approach as any other human communication: not everything can be fixed, and at some point you'll need to compromise.
Some people talk slowly, will you refuse to listen to them if they don't speed up to some given wpm ? Some take time to come to their actual point. It might be utterly uncomfortable, but if they actually tend to have very good points, you'll probably bear with it.
You are correct that caring is important - but it also isn't your responsibility at the end of the day. If you don't care you're doing it wrong - if you let it eat you up inside whenever anything goes wrong you're also doing it wrong.
Work-life balance is mostly talked about in terms of time commitments but there is also an emotional commitment you need to balance. It's unhealthy to be too far in either extreme and, especially folks that are naturally empathetic, should be more wary of falling into the trap of overinvesting in a workplace and suffering mentally for it.
> Try "I am unable to attend meeting without an agenda. Let me know when one has been posted." in your decline message.
If you have a good manager you can often CC them or quote them in your response as well "Sorry, I'm busy with project work and Sarah wants me to stay focused to hit our deadlines. If we're going to need to budget time outside of it I'll need a clear agenda to offer as a rationale to my stakeholders."
I think it really helps to sell this if you've got casual impromptu voice calls as a norm in the company. If it was really just a quick thing then throw up a hangout for us to chat - if it's worth scheduling a meeting for it's certainly worth actually putting together an agenda.
As an aside - my company recentlyish switched from google to ms for calendar management and (among many things MS is terrible at) the fact that agendas aren't immediately visible in meetings on your calendar is the absolute worst UX decision.
> My favourite part of climbing the corporate ladder is finally having enough clout to just say "no".
But the thing is, in big companies, you can keep climbing all your life and never reach that level. You can be a VP and it still doesn't matter, because you're one of several hundred VPs in a company that values lawsuit-proof consistency over giving executives infinite latitude. You're still dealing with the same spreadsheets, processes, and meetings as everyone else. At best, you might be able to send your minions to some, but that doesn't solve the issue, it just messes up someone else's day.
In a company of several hundred people, on the other hand, you don't really need to climb far because relatively little is set in stone. So to folks who are at Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, and who're waiting for the day when they're finally free to say "no" to overhead, I have bad news.
I’m a Senior Director. I can and do say no. But, let me tell you, it doesn’t go over well—especially for declining meetings.
Sure; they can go to my boss and he’ll largely cover, but it’s still not enough. I imagine unless you’re the CEO/equiv, this isn’t a thing you can do without fallout.
Worked at Sonos for several years. Was an IC4. My boss empowered me to say no to meetings whenever I wanted, and she was a new manager!
Sometimes all it takes is someone with a tiny bit of courage.
Literally nobody but people who want to waste their time and not do work or PMs who don’t know how to communicate want to have all these meetings.
I zealously avoid meetings and now that I’m a team lead at my new job, I’ll be encouraging my team to do the same and covering their asses when needed.
I assume this works nice to get you out of any meeting they didn't want you to attend, but couldn't just remove you from.
If they plan to move resources out of your team but need highers approval, having a meeting that you refused to attend sounds like a good first step. You might be there on the next one, but the terrain is already prepared. And as it's a sensitive subject, a vague agenda would also be natural enough.
"Go to every meeting that has a vague agenda just in case it's the one where they talk about their plan to downsize your team" is not a good strategy. (And probably by the time it's come to a meeting that you're invited to there's already nothing you can do)
My favourite part of climbing the corporate ladder is finally having enough clout to just say "no".
> I have been asking for agendas; I have asked for clarification on what to do to prepare; I have even suggested
Try "I am unable to attend meeting without an agenda. Let me know when one has been posted." in your decline message. Do you sound like a dick? Yes. Does it work? Also yes, unless you weren't actually required in that meeting, in which case it becomes a self-solving problem.