Meetings, And The Pure, Clean, Unbridled Hatred Thereof

Photo by Fearless 0004 via Wikimedia Commons

Show me an organization’s meetings and I’ll tell you what kind of leadership they have.

Full disclosure: I hate meetings. I hated them as a worker, I hated them when I was in management, I hated them as a supervisor, I hated them as an employee. Nothing gets done in a meeting, and the failure is force multiplied by the time wasted preparing, being in, and reacting to the meeting. Time that, almost without exception, could be better spent being productive. In the age of email, messaging, and a dozen ways to communicate with your coworkers instantaneously, meetings are even more deserving of all the possible scorn we can pile upon them.

I break out my loathing of meetings because after reading this particular piece from Business Insider written by Hugh Langley and Grace Kay triggered those mostly dormant convictions that an at-home writer and media person rarely has to deal with, thank you Lord for your blessings and favor. The piece is shot through with a theme of my anti-meeting hatelore — meetings for the sake of having a meeting so the bosses can have a meeting about how many meetings they are having.

I’m not joking:

While the pandemic’s boom and bust brought the issue into stark relief, the various types of fake work have been growing within tech companies for years. Many of these issues come down to one fundamental problem: managers trying to get ahead.

At almost all tech companies, current and former employees said, bosses were rewarded for overhiring since it made them look important. Bloated org charts resulted in too many people fighting for work, a poor understanding of what each segment of the company was doing, and a rise in projects spun up merely to help managers get themselves promoted.

“People are often measured not in contribution but in head count.” Moran said.

“The bigger your team you have, the more qualified people you have in your team, the more weight you have in the company,” Graham, the former Amazon employee, said. “It’s what we call empire building. You’re not focused on building a product; you’re focused on building an empire. That leads to fake work and unnecessary bloating.”

The more people who report to you, the higher your prestige, the more your power in the organization.
To create an empire, managers simply add employees underneath them with little sense of what they should be doing. “Instead of planning in the most efficient way, they just say, ‘I need a head count,'” Anna Tavis, a clinical professor of human-capital management at New York University’s School of Professional Studies, said.

The former Meta employee who joined the company in 2022 felt that stuffing teams was a byproduct of middle managers looking for a promotion, leading to employees having less to do. One of his managers hired so many people that within three months, there became four levels between him and the person who was supposed to be managing him. “A lot of the time, my managers had no idea what I was doing,” he said.

In addition to the incentive structure encouraging projects to nowhere, there’s a lack of oversight from the top into how these miniature empires are being run, employees said. And in many cases, executives are oblivious to the value of the work that’s presented to them. Some executives have even admitted that there seems to be little incentive to address company bloat. Former Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told Bloomberg’s “Odd Lots” podcast that without financial hurdles, managers had every reason to keep hiring.

“The more people who report to you, the higher your prestige, the more your power in the organization,” he said.

To secure their fiefdoms, managers often pitch projects they created that are sometimes referred to as “vanity projects” or “promo projects.” These may ultimately contribute zero to a company’s top line, but the flashy presentations and demos associated with the projects often lead to a promotion and nice pay bump for the person leading the work. One Google manager who recently left the company said the head-count process at Google “rewards bad behavior” by promoting people based on “having a bigger team and creating decks.” Google had “dozens” of teams, he said, that did “think tank-like strategy work with no real practical way of impacting the business or a customer or user.”

“I do think that process favored the people who were better at bullshitting and storytelling,” he told us.

Companies, like anything else, rise and fall on leadership. If the leadership is out for their own gains, that is going to permeate throughout the organization. There are also a lot of cultural byproducts to the “empire building” leadership style the piece refers to, as you quickly get a two-tiered system of folks working their way up, and the folks who quickly realize they aren’t going anywhere fast.

There has been an arc to the big tech companies over the last 15-odd years of the smart phone era; the tech is so revolutionarily good and so popular that the profits band aided the lack of corporate structure and business culture. Now that the meteoric rise has tapered off and the big tech companies are as institutionalized as the big companies of old, those failures to tighten up the ship need correcting. Thus, massive waves of layoffs, tightening of budgets, rearranging of priorities, and so forth. In short, reality set in and smart businesspeople started to adapt. And as we’ve seen from some of the superstar founders and leaders of those big tech companies, what made them great innovators and disruptors doesn’t always translate to running multi-billion dollar international companies that are no longer the hot new thing fighting the establishment, but are now the establishment.

There is no version of “fake work” or “lazy work” that doesn’t have blame in management and leadership. Tolerating it, or worse designing a system to incentivize it for the optics of that same leadership’s own self-aggrandizement, is a failure of leadership no matter how you look at it. As with many things in the work world, the worker gets the blame, but the management above them did nothing to improve, avoid, or correct the problem.

Everything rises and falls on leadership. Anytime a think piece or op-ed goes after workers, our first reflex should be to question the management and leadership situation that worker is functioning in for proper context. Things don’t happen in a vacuum, they happen in a sequence, and it is rare indeed for a company to have chronic worker problems without there being chronic leadership problems running parallel. It is a fixable problem, if you focus on quality people committed to the goals of being quality employees and supervisors. But the one way you will never fix it? By having a meeting.