After reading a Forbes article 15 Surprising Things Productive People Do Differently, I felt justified and ready to be proactive in response to #8 in particular: “They avoid meetings at all costs.”
I’ve been a team leader at school for years, which means I coordinate a group of about 8 teachers whose classes are drawn from the same pool of students. We’re called the Incredibles.
That position also means I go to team leaders monthly meetings, an after school affair sometimes with snacks or soda the principal has kept stashed away for us, most often with a big bucket of candy, and sometimes with nothing.
At the start of this month’s meeting, he said, “No snacks today, so I owe you a short meeting.”
Nice, right?
It used to be, under previous administrators, team leaders dealt with the day-to-day details like how to pull off reward day activities, coordinating end-of-year awards assemblies, and lunchtime hallway traffic patterns. Meetings took about an hour, maybe a bit more. However, while I like many of the things this principal has done for our school, his meetings take f-o-r-e-v-e-r. He likes to talk, says things three times over, and then talks some more.
And it doesn’t help that he unilaterally designated us team leaders, the details-of-duty crew, as the school improvement committee, a formal role necessary to meet the requirements of being a school in improvement (a few years ago our school didn’t measure up, test-wise).
Never mind that none of us had signed up for–or even been asked if we’d like to be part of–that committee, which has doubled the length of our meetings, or that we are asked for very little authentic input related to school improvement, mainly because he’s talking some more.
So when he mentions having a short meeting, I’ve learned just to take a deep breath and expect the usual lack of brevity.
But I’ve realized that those meetings right now are the most predictably disgruntling scenarios of my life.
I’d completely bow out of the team leader role pretty quickly, except that it has its perks: I get a nice stipend for doing the job, and actually probably save myself time since, if someone else was filling team leader responsibilities, I’d still likely end up doing a lot of the organizational things I do now. My teammates have also been affirming of my organizational role, and frankly, I don’t think any of them would want it if I resigned.
But as this month’s meeting approached, I had to do something, which turned out to be sending a simple email ahead of time asking if I could slip away from the meeting around 4:30. I didn’t give–nor did he request–a reason. So a bit after 4:30 I nodded at him, he nodded back, and I fled the scene, only an hour into the meeting.
I felt a bit like I was neglecting my job, but Maria assured me that it was just “the guilt of a highly productive person.”
In retrospect, I feel zero guilt. After all, the reality is that the absence of my main contribution–a pained look of impatient listening–probably wasn’t missed.
More importantly, though, I learned the next day that the meeting had continued for another hour after I left.
This gives me a feeling of relieved panic, like I escaped the jaws of a shark once, but am pretty damn sure it’s going to circle around for me again, like next month.
I’m guessing that perpetually leaving at 4:30 isn’t viable, but even considering the alternative–actually staying for whole meetings–is about enough to give me repeated asthma attacks. And I don’t have asthma.
I also doubt the merits of requesting a one-on-one meeting with the principal. I could say, “I really have difficulty staying for meetings beyond 4:30,” but even if he acknowledges this and promises to do better, I don’t trust that his verbal self control and time management abilities would enable him to change. A more likely scenario is that he’ll feel threatened, and my cut-and-paste lesson plans might fall under heightened scrutiny, or I might be dismissed from the leadership position. If that sounds extreme, sorry–it’s not.
I have four weeks to figure this out before the next meeting. That’s a lot of time to be productive in surprising and different ways.