Comment by bjackman
1 day ago
> The biggest predictor for people who prefer starting late is how crowded their schedules are. Managers tend to have very crowded schedules which means they want a break between meetings, while ICs prefer not having to waste time waiting.
I have had a few senior managers (at Google) who ask for all the meetings _they_ attend to start 5 minutes late.
This seems 100% reasonable to me. No need for it to be an org policy. Just a affordance for the people who spend 95% of their working hours in meetings.
I've also had several senior managers at Google who _don't_ do this, but are 5 minutes late for every meeting anyway. This alternative is pretty annoying!
Or they can just drop off 5 minutes before their next meeting and avoid having everyone else adapt to their preferred start time??
Even better is they only need to use that method when meetings actually run full time rather than every single meeting they are in
The problem is that final decisions tend to be made in the last 30 seconds of a meeting. If you're a manager with a stake in the outcome, you can't leave the meeting until you've ensured that the outcome works for you. Leaving 5 min early is often simply not an option. While arriving 5 minutes late is. It's not an ego thing -- it's the fact that meeting leaders often let meetings run long.