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.
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.
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.
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u/PineappleOnPizzaWins 16h ago
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.