Six Reader Questions About Meetings, Feedback, Communication, and Ideas

I regularly receive questions over email and in comments on my newsletter. I decided to answer a few of them in detail.

Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.

Hey all! I’m in the middle of my annual trip to Wisconsin to visit my family. I hope you’re all having a fantastic summer!

Below are a bunch of questions I’ve received from readers. I’ve reworded them as best I can to make the question clear. I figured it would be a fun change to answer some of these in a newsletter. I hope you enjoy it!

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1. “I’d like to leave meetings on time, but our meetings are always running over. How do I leave meetings without being rude?”

Why would you want to leave meetings on time, even if the rest of the group seems comfortable continuing to talk?

1. It forces each meeting (and meeting organizers) to be more efficient with your time.

2. Makes it possible for you to attend your next meetings on time (which is polite, and respectful).

3. As a leader, it helps others by setting behavior expectations. It encourages them to protect their own time, respect meeting time boundaries, etc.

First, let me mention that a lot of my advice goes out the window if you have someone ultra-senior in the room. If my manager is in the room, I might walk out of a meeting on time (when everyone else is hanging out) because my manager will respect my decision. This is partially because I’ve built strong relationships with my managers. But if my manager’s manager was there (or even more senior), it’s likely to be a bad idea. Always know when to be flexible with your plans.

Here are the few things I suggest.

1. At the beginning of the meeting, tell people that you will be leaving on time (this might not be needed once you’ve said this a dozen times). “I have a hard stop at 3:30 FYI if we’re not done with our business by then.”

2. As needed during the meeting, you can use that to keep things moving. “I feel we’ve discussed this topic enough, and we’re on a tight timeline, can we please move on?”

3. 5 minutes before the end of the meeting, advise people that you need to leave the meeting on time, and wrap things up. “We’re out of time for discussion. If we need further discussion, someone will need to schedule time for a follow up.”

4. Similarly or alternatively, you can talk about action items as a way of transitioning out of the meeting. “Looks like we’re out of time. Can we go over what action items we have, and who owns each one?” - this is a healthy way to end meetings anyway, so it’s a double win.

This behavior is certainly easiest if you’re the most senior person in the room. Then you have the added benefit of teaching everyone that meetings end on time, and as the most senior person, you’re likely to end the meeting by leaving.

Even without being the most senior person, I’ve certainly had engineers explain to the room that we needed to take some careful action items before we all left the room. Anyone can be a leader.

2. “My team has a culture of being always available after hours & weekends. It’s stressing me out. How can I deal with this without appearing lazy?”

That’s a good one. Even within Amazon, there was great inconsistency around this. Some teams had great work/life balance, others were working themselves to the bone. Some managers were absolutely fine with their team unplugging, other managers viewed it as a sign of dedication if you replied within 30 minutes to emails on Saturday.

There’s nothing I can do about a terrible manager or team culture, but I have some experience with ways people have navigated this issue.

Here’s the key difference in how you should position yourself.

Make contacting you an explicit interruption act by them, instead of you interrupting yourself. What I mean is that you should be able to relax and not think about work. If you’re constantly checking your phone, it’ll bother you. If you’re looking at emails in the evening, you might see a nasty email from that jerk Salvador, and it’ll break your mood for the rest of the weekend. Instead, you are “available” but “disconnected”.

Don’t make yourself impossible to find.

If you’re an important person (a good thing for your career), I understand that your team may need to be able to reach you. I’ve certainly had a minor panic when I couldn’t find the key engineer on a project which just blew up.

But being available is wildly different from being online. Make certain anyone who needs to know understands the difference by setting clear expectations.

“I’m spending time with family this weekend, I won’t be checking email regularly. If you need me in an emergency, please call me at ###-###-####.”

And yes, I put the word “emergency” there very purposefully.

Another decent way of doing this (instead of broadcasting your cell number to everyone), is to create a contact point. They have your number. In many cases, your contact point is the on-call, as they’re already on the hook to respond to emergencies.

“…If you need me in an emergency, please contact our on-call Daisy, they know how to reach me.”

Set expectations clearly.

Try to figure out clear expectations which suit the needs of your team, with the least amount of impact to your personal life.

In one example, I remember a co-worker explaining that their manager needed them always online, that they were constantly checking messages at restaurants or at birthday parties, and it was unbearable.

I asked them to clarify exactly what their manager needed, and how they explained expectations. They showed me a message from their manager.

It essentially said, “Employee, I messaged you a question on Friday, and you got back to me on Monday. If it’s an emergency, I’ll call you, but I’d like an answer sometime that day if I message you.”

That didn’t sound terrible. It certainly wasn’t the “always available, checking messages at a restaurant” level of paranoid the employee was feeling. They had overreacted.

I said that their main issue was not setting expectations clearly with the manager. If you’re paid $250k to manage projects, I don’t feel it’s horribly unfair to say “Hey, respond to my messages within 24-hours.” To be clear, not all messages, just messages from their boss.

In this case, I’d agree with the manager, and set firm expectations. “To avoid interrupting my family time, I try not to check work messages or emails frequently. I’ll check messages and emails in the morning and evening each day, and will respond to anything you have, or any current emergencies. Does that work?”

Sounds fair to me, and probably would have suited that manager just fine.

In situations where you’re absolutely unavailable, be clear and careful.

Many of us enjoy backpacking in the woods, and you can certainly set those expectations as needed.

Criteria to allow you to do this.

1. You need to be extra clear with your hand-off emails/documents, as you can’t clear up any confusion with a cell call.

2. You can’t do this all the time. At least in jobs where you’re potentially the only one with critical knowledge or skill, I don’t think being frequently unavailable is an option. I’m sure some people disagree, but I think tech workers should assume that they’re responsible for live businesses, and this sometimes means being available for emergencies.

3. Nothing critical happened recently in your area of expertise. If you’re the expert on Tech Y, and Tech Y had a major release on Thursday, you can’t go backpacking on Friday. I’ve held off releases before because a major team member was not going to be around. Similarly, I’ve had to explain to (junior) team members why scheduling a 2-week vacation immediately following a huge release is a career mistake. Life is life, but you can plan these things better.

Example of how to disappear for a period of time.

“I’m in the woods hiking this weekend. I expect to have zero cell signal from Friday afternoon through Sunday evening.
For help with Project C status, please contact Devin. She has all status update information.
For any bugs with Tech X or Y, please contact Sheila. She is our on-call, and is familiar with these systems.
For any other issues, please contact my manager Lucille.”

I’d plan on leaving a slightly more detailed list of who can cover what with Lucille, in the event of an emergency.

No one is ever upset about you being extra careful when taking time away. The opposite has happened repeatedly.