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Be active!
Dec. 13th, 2012 11:14 amRecently I was in a discussion about some future conference call logistics. We were trying to get a list of ppl to invite. After we identified a list of experts in relevant technologies, combined with the list of stakeholders of related projects and those who know the customers projects status we got a list of 11 ppl.
Then the most senior guy in a call told us: we have to shrink a list from 11 to 5. 11 is too many, everyone will be speaking at the same time and we will not get a meaningful result in an hour. I was trying to recall conf calls with more than 10 ppl that were productive, and if memory serves me right, it only works when most of ppl were engineers from Europe. The more marketing folks or anybody from US you have on a call, the longer it takes to get to consensus. And at my job you have to invite marketing ppl, even to some technical calls, because best of them really do bring value.
I think there are two reasons why having ppl from marketing or from US on a call makes it longer:
1. If there is a decision to make, they will have an opinion and be loud with it regardless of if the matter is important for them or not.
2. When they feel like they have something to say, they never hesitate to say.
To summarize, they are always active, often without bringing real value. May be that way was just rewarded when they were in school?
I'll try to quantify. In a typical phone meeting, I am measuring usefulness of my potential input on the scale 0 to 5. If it is 4 or 5, I speak up. If it is 2 or 3, I note it just for myself, and either try to refine it to 4-5, or wait if new data would improve usefulness to 4-5 so I speak up (or reduce to 0-1 so I discard). I think this makes sense, does it? Apparently most of my colleagues (engineers from Europe and Russia) use similar algorithm. This behavior allows bringing everyone who can provide useful input on calls, while keeping it short.
Some times the strategy to speak up if you have anything in the range of 1-5 works better than mine for the meeting cause: that happens in a rare cases when self-assessment did not work right: the perceived value was "1" because e.g. you think the point is apparent for everyone on the call, while in fact it is not.
Then the most senior guy in a call told us: we have to shrink a list from 11 to 5. 11 is too many, everyone will be speaking at the same time and we will not get a meaningful result in an hour. I was trying to recall conf calls with more than 10 ppl that were productive, and if memory serves me right, it only works when most of ppl were engineers from Europe. The more marketing folks or anybody from US you have on a call, the longer it takes to get to consensus. And at my job you have to invite marketing ppl, even to some technical calls, because best of them really do bring value.
I think there are two reasons why having ppl from marketing or from US on a call makes it longer:
1. If there is a decision to make, they will have an opinion and be loud with it regardless of if the matter is important for them or not.
2. When they feel like they have something to say, they never hesitate to say.
To summarize, they are always active, often without bringing real value. May be that way was just rewarded when they were in school?
I'll try to quantify. In a typical phone meeting, I am measuring usefulness of my potential input on the scale 0 to 5. If it is 4 or 5, I speak up. If it is 2 or 3, I note it just for myself, and either try to refine it to 4-5, or wait if new data would improve usefulness to 4-5 so I speak up (or reduce to 0-1 so I discard). I think this makes sense, does it? Apparently most of my colleagues (engineers from Europe and Russia) use similar algorithm. This behavior allows bringing everyone who can provide useful input on calls, while keeping it short.
Some times the strategy to speak up if you have anything in the range of 1-5 works better than mine for the meeting cause: that happens in a rare cases when self-assessment did not work right: the perceived value was "1" because e.g. you think the point is apparent for everyone on the call, while in fact it is not.
