This happens far, far too often: I’m considering working or partnering with someone in some regard. We have a meeting. It goes well. At the end of the meeting, we discuss the next steps—see the other chapter on that best practice—and what’s the most common next step people recommend? Let’s have another meeting!
A variation of this just happened to me yesterday. A potential partner wants to do something with me. We emailed but didn’t meet. And he emailed me, “let’s have a call to see what we can do together.”
While this sounds nice on the surface, the frustration here is on a few levels.
First, for non-urgent matters, meetings are usually spaced once per week or two or three. So, a few meetings and bam–suddenly a month has gone by.
Secondly, it is removing responsibility from yourself to “the group” to figure out what to do. But the power of seizing responsibility is in seizing responsibility.
Third, it clearly conveys the message that you just don’t have any ideas on what to do next. That may or may not be true, but that’s the implication.
In the case of the potential partner above, here is what I would have recommended that he tell me instead:
“Morgan, I’d love to work with you. I don’t quite know what we can do together. So, I’m going to throw together a document with a few ideas of what we could do—most of which will probably be bad ideas! And the ideas will probably be just rough concepts, not fleshed out, and then send it to you to review. Feel free to add other ideas to the doc as well. And then we can jump on a call to brainstorm around them. Sound good?”
See the difference between their response and mine—a world of difference. The documentation of brainstorms and ideas (one of my favorite and oft-mentioned themes.) Sharing the meeting agenda beforehand, the warning that it’s just a draft. But the end result of these is that it lets me understand what they’re thinking about, and prepare and think about what they’re looking for, so we can have a much better meeting. A win in all directions.
