When a meeting isn't about communication

A "meeting" is where people can talk, discuss, and share ideas. A fundamental aspect of such an event is communication. If you have no opportunity to share in the ideas that impact you, you aren't having a meeting. You are simply being told what to do.

You've never been in a bad meeting until you've been in a meeting where it doesn't take place in your own language. Nothing is as frustrating as sitting with your boss, talking about something that directly impacts you and not having any idea what the hell they are talking about. It can drive people to make some rash decisions based on uninformed opinions or guesses about what is actually going on.

My first and second jobs were doing this to me all the time. I would sit in a meeting, be talked at for a few minutes, then when I would leave I would be told what was actually said by a bilingual staff member. My bosses would expect me to follow whatever they said without much of my own input because we talked about it in "the meeting". The lack of input was a huge reason I had such job dissatisfaction, because anything not brought up in a meeting wasn't taken as seriously. I didn't have the communication skills to understand, they made no attempt to explain. That's not a good place to be.

There has been a shake up at the school, and now the management has gotten meeting happy. Instead of an occasional, "Just popping in to see what you need," sort of approach, we now have official meetings every week and meetings with higher managers each month. In my experience, the amount of meetings you have with Korean bosses is directly related to how poorly the school's situation tends to be. As long as you are making a profit you can operate with very little oversight. As soon as they decide that their bottom line is taking a large enough hit you can spend days in meetings and never get anything accomplished.

Our current manager speaks a moderate amount of English. He's better than all my other managers at previous jobs, but he isn't at the level where all the ideas get across yet. When we have a higher level manager visit, it's his job to translate to us what this person tells us. Luckily for me, I'm much better at catching what is being said in Korean now. I've already caught a few things being translated "selectively" but thankfully they have been in our school's favor. I already know some of what was being talked about before it's even translated now, so it's easier for me to catch them if they aren't being straightforward. If I can catch the tone and the basic ideas before they are translated, I'm much better at being prepared with what they expect as a response.

While these are the best English meetings I've had in Korea, they can still be soul sucking wastes of time where nothing gets accomplished. We've had meetings were the express goal is to go over what everyone already knows for the sake of having a meeting. English or not, this still bothers me. I'm not sure where people get the idea that a managers job is to waste people's time.

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