My working day used to be stuffed with meetings. Many who worked with me may blame me as the cause. I went through my working life complaining about meetings & yet calling for them all the time.
Research shows that while there was a 20% decrease in the average length of meetings during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of meetings attended on average rose by 13.5%. So the villain of this piece is not going away anywhere soon! If your calendar looks like this, read on!
Despite my anger towards meetings, a recent prompt in my writing group got me to reflect and think again. And surprisingly, I realized that I have learned a lot through this much-vilified corporate device. Could I even dare to call my working experience a “meetings-rich” life? What richness could meetings bring for me? Read on to hear my story! The story below is about one such surprising meeting in my work life that left me with lifelong lessons.
Meeting pe charcha
Most days were chaotic and unpredictable. Meetings expanded to fill up the time, and even when I could drive the agenda, a series of meetings often drove me, and I didn’t have control over time. What I remember about the chaos is the constant need I seemed to have to control things, get stuff done, and drive the agenda.
Maybe that’s how you end up creating things where none existed, or that was the only way I knew how to make something happen. Creation was important to me, and I was willing to sacrifice a lot for it. I am not sure if I introspected about what I was creating as much. Creation happened in the moment, and every gram of new stuff produced satisfied me. We weren’t craftsmen or women, and so what we were producing were ideas. The pain of creation was the need to go through these unending meetings, which started almost as soon as I hit the office and would often threaten to eat my lunch too.
It was around that time that Rakesh joined us as a senior partner. Initial days left him bemused about the war through meetings that we ran every day. He sat through the meetings but did not engage in the war that we inadvertently set off, almost as if we loved it! It was Tuesday, and the day was going as usual, with meetings taking every available second. It was a small conference room, and the view outside the room was pretty nice. It was on a tree-lined street in a less-crowded part of Kurla. There were lovely Gulmohar trees and even the faint sound of birds, but I was at war and didn’t pause to take all this in.
It was already 145 p.m., and the meeting was nowhere close to ending. We were trying to solve an urgent problem, and the client was constantly breathing down our neck with umpteen phone calls. From time to time, Rakesh would take to the whiteboard to try and sketch out a possible solution. I was prone to fast-talking and even faster pacing, and within the confines of that small conference room, I did both. Suddenly, the client called me on my mobile.
I paused the meeting and went out of the room to take the call. Many years ago, I left the corporate world to become my boss. Who knew that I would have umpteen bosses with each client I had? Anyway, the client gave me an ultimatum, and lit a fire under my ass! I went back to the room and shared the misery in no uncertain terms. And that is when Rakesh said, “Chal lunch karte hain, yeh papi pet soch nahi sakta."
I responded, “Let’s get our lunch in here; we don’t step out of this room till we have solved this problem." I could sense everyone’s "dagger eyes" as I took my obstinate position, despite my acidity killing me softly. Anyway, everyone trooped out and came back in a few minutes with their lunch boxes. Rakesh had a huge lunch box and multiple levels of containers, each packed tightly with a rubber band. Slowly, he untangled the rubber bands and brought out a newspaper to cover the table, as some curries were leaking. I was about to take off, driving the group into another round of solutions, when Rakesh spoke, “Boss, can I pray for 2 minutes? I never start eating without a prayer." I was floored.
Here we were about to lose a client, and just when the energy in the room was peaking and we might get a solution, here was Rakesh’s strange request. Anyway, I mumbled OK and made my frustration clear for all to see. Rakesh didn’t seem flustered; he suddenly looked at his lunch box, folded his hands, closed his eyes, and recited a prayer in Marathi for the next minute or so.
By now, my energy had been controlled, and the prayer had even quietened me in that rampaging mood. And just as Rakesh finished his prayer and we all started to eat, one of our junior colleagues looked at Rakesh and said in all honesty, “Rakesh sir, itna aapke liye kaun banata hai khana,meri bai to mera kam chod de gi." The room full of people burst out laughing, and the tension in the air was removed like a punctured balloon.
It took us less than half an hour to come up with a solution that saved our client relationship. Rakesh’s lunch box and his prayers taught me that sometimes solutions are already within us, and our high-pressure personalities may be locking them in. And that’s how I learned to “check-in” with the energy of others in the room and not circulate my tension around. For the record, we kept the client, who contributed more than 30% to our revenue. I still didn’t pray, but I began to respect others who did!
I wrote the story in this post as a part of the wonderful writing workshop run by https://natashabadhwar.substack.com/s/ochre-sky-stories
Natasha Badhwa and
Stepping back has helped me solve a lot of issues. The main problem is when authority os more interested in seeing action rather than waiting on solution.
It is such a lovely story, Ajay! I always relate to pause. Thank you for writing this, Ajay.