The Ice-Breaker is the Meeting

Like many people I've read and thought a lot about Zoom fatigue over the past year. It's a real thing. Zoom fatigue, along with my general impatience with long or desultory meetings means that I'm always keen to keep meetings very short, targeted and efficient. Let's have a clear checklist, get through it, get some action-items, and get the hell out of here. Some of my favorite writing on this topic is from the 37 Signals group (see Rework, or their podcast). They take a pretty hard line on meetings: no recurring meetings, no one hour meetings just because that's your calendar's default, no status meetings, no people in the meeting who might not need to be there.

I mostly agree with all of this. And my hard stance has led me to be fairly impatient with things like ice breakers and purely social catch-up conversations. When meetings are efficient and focused, and distractions are minimized, remote work can be an absolute dream as far as productivity is concerned. Why would anyone ever want to work in an office?

But.. lately, and much to my surprise, I've really started to feel the flip side of that arrangement – the downside of all of that autonomy and isolation. Introvert and homebody that I am, I regret the lack of connection. I've found myself going to staff social events and really looking forward to them. I've enjoyed the increase in meetings that training a new hire has required of me.

Yesterday I was on a call for my volunteer group and Don, who was running the meeting, started off asking question of the volunteers, "what do you like about being a group leader?" Alright, I thought, standard ice-breaker type of introduction. But then he just kept going, "what are you currently struggling with?", "if you could accomplish anything over the next year what would it be?" And so on, for the entire meeting. And it was refreshing, and uplifting, and informative. It felt natural.

Soon the hour was up, and people kept thanking him for that meeting and those questions. It was clear that what was needed was the connection that this format afforded, much more so than business. With so much going on with our organization and with current legislation in Congress there were potentially hundreds of things we could have covered, the fact that Don chose to open the floor like that was brilliant.

The whole thing made me reflect on my approach to meetings – made it seem a bit cold and stodgy. Zoom fatigue is real but so is isolation and detachment. I know that this is a well-worn topic at this point, and that lots of people are and have been thinking about this tricky balance, but a meeting made up entirely of open questions really struck me. The idea would have horrified me not so long ago.

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