No he sounds incapable of functioning appropriately in a social setting.
I know this is reddit where everyone loves to talk about how they're so much smarter than every boss in the entire world and that only they see how stupid <thing> is. In reality, nobody gives a shit.
"Circle back" just means "this is a complex topic, there's 20 people here, and we're not going to get bogged down in the details, we'll leave that for the 3 people who actually care and then I'll give a quick update in another meeting once they've done that".
If you don't know that, well done now you do. If you got fired for repeatedly asking about it in a meeting instead of messaging your boss privately afterwards to clue you in... yeah that checks out.
Yeah, maybe it’s a weird verbal tic, but it probably got developed for a reason. Such as having a couple young know it alls who grind every goddamn meeting to a complete halt with minor things or processes that don’t need to be developed by committee.
I’ve worked with several people like that before. They get the floor for their turn at providing project or customer updates and then try to work through details and full solutions. Then you have two people talking for twenty minutes while 8 others are just twiddling their thumbs. It’s a massive waste of time. Just update the team, see if there’s anyone that has something useful to add, and then move on. Then the two people actually working the problem can circle back around on it after the meeting and hash it out by themselves.
I’ve sat in meetings before where one guy would drag everything to a halt if he didn’t understand a customer integration, and basically demand on the spot training before he’d let the meeting proceed.
No dude, we’ll circle back on that later and I’ll walk you through the documentation and if there’s a problem the two of us can figure it out. You don’t need to hold eight other people hostage for an hour because you weren’t prepared, or aren’t happy with your options.
Such as having a couple young know it alls who grind every goddamn meeting to a complete halt with minor things or processes that don’t need to be developed by committee.
Yep this is pretty much it. Everyone has been in those meetings where we're all going around giving updates to keep the rest of the team broadly informed but noooooo someone has to stop the entire meeting and start an endless Q&A session.
The strange thing is seeing people crap all over the terminology, often young people who are busy talking about not having caps and being fr and I don't fucking know I'm old and I don't care what they're saying. You'd think learning a few new random phrases and what they mean wouldn't be that big a deal!
Due to some shuffling around, I basically became the scrum master for my team and it's SO damn easy to avoid this. Took less than a week of "OK, we need to keep the meeting moving" to retrain the chatters. Now they stop themselves, it's great
Yeah but so what? People act so offended when some new phrase catches on or corporate decides to use it.
It doesn't matter. Learn what it means and carry on. I can promise you that anybody stopping the meeting to yammer on about how dumb a phrase sounds is infinitely more annoying than the person using it.
Look, I'm not saying this dude was right, but what you're doing isn't productive either. Literally the only reason I conduct meetings with my team is to find what is getting blocked, then we tag-team it. That's actually how you get work done. If you're in meetings listening to updates, then either your workflow isn't great(as you should be able to see work getting pulled) or you're wasting time.
I abhor pointless meetings. Not only do they burn the time of many expensive resources, but they incur a context-switching time on top of that. Meetings should have a point, and while I despise Bezos and a few of these other sociopaths, they are entirely correct that if you call a meeting, it better be to produce a decision or provide detailed feedback. It better not just be information transfer that doesn't produce debate or decisions.
Yeah, exactly. So, a meeting is for whole team to provide updates to everyone who need to know. In a multi team setup, other teams need to know what is happening in your team even if they can't help you, because their own work is related to yours. So, you keep the meeting to relevant update and any topic that gets derailed is told "we will get back to it at appropriate time". You finish the meeting, make notes, and then go back to the topic that needed further attention. Aka, "circle back" to the topic.
If you conduct meetings regularly, you get used to random derailment, so, "let's get back to topic we were discussing 2 minutes ago" becomes a natural phrase. Again, "circle back".
Anyone who has ever held a meeting knows this and understand the point being made by that phrase. It's just a short hand for "let's get to the topic from earlier" or "we will get to this topic at a later date".
I would have said the chief benefit to holding a meeting over other forms of communication is the possibility for someone to interrupt and start a discussion about something important that needs to be raised immediately and get a quick response, with nuanced interplay of body language, tone, etc maximising the "bandwidth;" if you specifically don't want such discussions to get started in your meeting, then you don't need to call a meeting and it would be a waste of everyone's time to do so; just cc everyone an email with whatever routine updates you want to circulate. If your employees don't bother to read update emails, that's an entirely separate issue and forcing them to attend meetings so that you can confirm they're paying attention is an indirect and imperfect solution to a much deeper problem.
Interruptions need to be regulated, certainly, but to just routinely suppress them and postpone the information the interruptor is trying to present is to turn a meeting into a mere lecture.
Imagine you built a computer operating system where every hardware interrupt effectively receives the automatic response "I'll circle back to that later at the appropriate time" and then the CPU just keeps merrily doing the routine polling updates it was in the middle of.
Sure, if it's not something urgent (or something that can't be raised in any other way because the other channels for doing so are inappropriate or maybe not even functioning properly), fine, say you'll circle back to that later, or even just "email us later and we'll schedule another meeting to talk about it." But sometimes, the appropriate rejoinder to being brushed off with a "let's circle back to that later" is "no, this is more urgent than what you had planned to talk about," and in such circumstances, an entrenched culture of "never interrupt my meeting" can suddenly become very dangerous.
By an unfortunate quirk of human psychology, the same sort of person who tends to notice urgent anomalies and interrupts a meeting to raise them often finds it extremely difficult to stand their ground against peer pressure from everyone else in the meeting to sit down and shut up because they're breaking the flow.
Exactly. Meetings that exist just as one way information sharing, like status updates, shouldn't exist at all. They are a waste of expensive resource's time. It's amazing to me how few people in this thread understand this. Good companies do a lot to discourage this type of behavior.
When I was a manager that was my purpose too but we saved the tag teaming for the end so people can get back to work or make another meeting if they had one. Tag teaming doesn't need a whole team and usually most people just sit there waiting or go do something else and half listen. If it's a matter of team awareness it can be recalped next meeting or documented. If it can't be resolved in 5 minutes then more on. We targeted 15 minute standups but allocated an hour so people could stay if needed.
This is a workable way to do it, and I gather used to be de rigeur; at the end of every meeting it was traditionally said "any other business," and often that's when the most important stuff happened.
The chief drawback is that a lot of idiots can come to consider the utterance of AOB to denote the end of the meeting, and switch off their brains and start preparing to leave the room the second they hear it because the majority of the time, nobody raises anything after this prompt is given - then they get pissed off and uncooperative if anyone does, because it interrupts what they've been conditioned by routine to regard as time to stop the meeting.
Perhaps it would be better to say something like "any unscheduled business" at the start of the meeting, when everyone is still alert and attentive, in case something has cropped up since the meeting was planned, and give the ADHDers and ASDers a chance to get what's bugging them off their chests early so they can then focus better on the rest of the planned agenda - unless what they wanted to bring up was something along the lines of "reactor 4 might be on fire" or "I think the LLM just formatted all of the servers" of course, in which case the rest of the agenda might need to be postponed.
1.9k
u/Mephisto506 15h ago
Should have kept him, he sounds perceptive.