Boardroom BS

“Get ready to have the next 90 minutes of your life wasted,” a colleague said to me as she stopped by my cubicle before a boardroom meeting. It was my first boardroom meeting with a few big name stakeholders and no one seemed excited about what I felt was an exceptionally long time block on my calendar. I locked my computer, picked up a notepad, and walked with her to the boardroom where I noticed something almost instantly -

There was an unspoken seating arrangement here.

Those deemed most important sat in one area, those actually running the meeting in another area, the peons in another. We were grouped by importance without being told so, and we complied without objection.

The chairs and tables were in stadium style seating which made the seating arrangement that much more crucial.

The 90 minute meeting became a blueprint for hundreds, no, thousands of boardroom meetings I’ve been in.

People who have prepared present what they think is “relevant.” “Important” people either interrupt or disengage, or both. Peons scramble to make themselves known and useful. Presenters always ask and use way more time than is needed. Phones are checked, emails are responded to, people ask questions that were already answered because they weren’t paying attention. Tensions rise but no one talks about it. Presenters talk at you, not with you. We all say this was “helpful” and we “look forward to an update during the next meeting.” Then we gossip about how that could have been an email. Repeat.

As my career and the boardrooms I sat in changed, the dynamics of this first encounter and these unspoken boardroom dynamics didn’t. I did start to change though…

And I’m calling bullshit.

As someone that’s sat in almost every seat at that boardroom, someone that’s presented in the boardroom, and someone that’s behaved in every disappointing way I’ve described, I’m calling BS on the whole gig.

The dynamics we’ve become accustomed to in Corporate America are robbing us of fulfilling and meaningful careers.

Let’s take a moment to throw the high school cafeteria-like pressures of the boardroom away for the remainder of this post and consider the following: the boardroom can, and should be, your safest place.

During a process engineering meeting I was facilitating between Accounting and HR (just imagine that tension for half a second) the anger in the room became palpable, but not spoken. Like true Corporate America boardroom robots, everyone was attempting to play the role they always did, in the pre-decided and unspoken seating arrangement and everyone was pissed as hell.

I stopped the meeting. What we were working on was crucial, and it couldn’t be solved in an email, and I decided that we couldn’t get shit done because no one was safe enough to say they were pissed off. Because that’s not what we do in boardrooms.

So I stopped the meeting and I took off my shoes. My Nordstrom black velvet heels that cost more than I’m willing to admit to spending, I kicked them off and everyone froze.

I vividly remember saying, “I don’t like how it feels in here. I’m angry, and it seems like some of you might be angry too, but I don’t think we can talk about it in here but I don’t know why. Can anyone place it?”

Crickets. No one, not even my own team, willing to meet the vulnerability. I stood there barefoot and bare-hearted realizing how shackled the boardroom had become for two departments and probably so many others.

And then I made everyone get up and move the chairs and tables in a circle, which was an absolute nightmare and everyone complained. It took 10 full minutes and I thought people would walk out, but they stayed.

When everyone took their seats again I sat on the floor in the middle and watched all 20+ people look at their colleagues in the eye for the first time that day and I realized we would get somewhere. I knew we were a step closer to vulnerable, to safety, to creativity, to solutions.

Barefoot, sitting on the carpet in the center of pissed off employees, I said, “Can we go around the circle and say why YOU hate this meeting? I won’t take it personal, and if you don’t want to say something that’s okay. I’ll go first. I hate this meeting because I’m scared we won’t find a solution that will make both departments happy. If we can’t find that solution, I’ll feel like I failed, and failure scares the hell out of someone like me.”

The new process was established 15 minutes after we went around the circle and is still in place today.

Boardrooms have become a coffin-like experience for our workforce and in order to exchange the coffin for a safe space that produces creativity we have to take a hard look in the mirror.

Why do our employees naturally sit in the boardroom this way? Is it classism, racism, elitism? Are we chalking it up to who they’re “comfortable” with instead of wanting the team to sit with who will bring out the best in them?

Why are we sitting in this seating shape? Is it because the previous group had the chairs this way? Is it because you’re running from meeting to meeting and you don’t have time to change up the room? Is it because you’ve never thought of the psychological impacts seating makes on your teams? Psychological safety can be rooted in physical placement and we must be willing to change things up even if it takes up time. Kick off your shoes and get it done.

When was the last time we said what the feeling in the room was? When content and time constraints and deadlines become more important than the emotions of the team we’re stuffing creativity and safety right back into the coffin and we’ll never get the best out of each other. Be courageous enough to stop the conversation to start a better one.

Do we really need this meeting? The “this meeting could have been an email” has become such a joke it’s printed on a coffee mug and given as a gift around the globe but the relevance is literally killing the safety of our boardrooms. If the content of the boardroom is not engaging, requiring participation from everyone, and doesn’t demand that every person put their technology down for a reasonable amount of time willingly, get the hell out of the room.

When my team can’t find me during the day they almost always assume I’m tucked away in a board room with my shoes kicked off, hair up, music on, safety at it’s highest level. My safe place isn’t my office anymore, it’s the boardroom - and I hope we can make that the case for all our employees.

During this COVID19 time where there’s so much content on having virtual meetings be effective it felt important for me to start the conversation about the boardroom with all of you so that when we get to return to our employees we’re ready to make that very first meeting the safest, most vulnerable. No BS, not even once.