It’s just not comparable to IC work. In each of those meetings as an exec he probably makes 1 important decision. If he didn’t make that decision correctly it could cost his org weeks or millions of dollars. That is work, but exec work is just different.
+1 to this. It's different work - though the problem solving is the same in many ways.
Think about it like this, in many of these meetings you're look at a multivariate problem with very few reference outcomes for any given decision path and you need to come up with a solution that doesn't break the other parts of the system. Sound familiar?
Depending on what kind of decision is made, dozens or hundreds of people will have to change how they work, so the cost is high and in many cases the longer you wait to make a decision the more technical debt you have etc... so time is really a factor because people are already working.
For example we needed to come to some consensus on the RPC format we were going to use because one group used JSON, another Protobuf, another XML and other organizations wanted us to use older complex formats like USMTF and UCI to be interoperable. So do we create anticorruption layers and let everyone just do whatever they want? how do we prioritize our streaming consumers and producers? Should we switch everyone to Avro? Etc... you get the idea.
Right, I completely agree, but him saying that he worked for entitreity of those 4 hours is a bit misleading imo. We all know how "efficient" these meetings are.
I don't think it's fair to suggest he was slacking or something, unless you can show that the norm is to accomplish same job far faster.
Perhaps it would be fair to say, it is easier/more natural to spend 12 hours in a day dealing with people that moving bags of coal or solving differential equations.
Those hour meetings act as a crutch that drain or energize us and falsely trick us into thinking we've done something productive.
Those 12 hours could have been spent differently to acheive the same or better results if optimized time management matters but I don't believe they do matter in this case. This person is fueled by the meeting (he leaves the meeting stronger) and by shortening his day he would never fully be in a zone.
One of the tricks to good leadership in my opinion, is running interference with my leadership or leadership from other parts of the organization, when they try and create new projects or otherwise divert resources to something that isn't a priority. It's a big part of my job to take these meetings so that the core teams delivering value don't get tasked or bogged down with them.
Meetings aren't going away, and in most cases these are requirements coming from outside of me or my team. Part of the trick of leadership is deciding what you can say a hard no to and not even engaging, what you need to do a soft no to by taking meetings (sometimes useless) in order to maintain good relationships, and then for things that are important but would cause new work, to do a lot of work at the leadership level ahead of new tasks impacting teams so that you can help them maintain their velocity.
Sounds like the exec needs less to be in those meetings and more to be aware of the agenda and high level action items from the meeting.
Or more likely to better clarify the expected outcomes with the localized manager or director and get the impactful/abbreviated action items every "Sprint".
