Wisdom brightens the face

I started my career 19 years back. The only meetings I remember attending were monthly team meetings. Once in a while, we had an ad-hoc meeting called by our manager to figure out whether we were wearing shoes and whether our shirts were tucked in (the ideal team to start a career). But otherwise, we focused a lot of our energy in developing code. We regularly had one on one discussions among peers and the discussions were limited to the topic in hand - “Should I right align this control or left align?” or “Should I validate in the front end or backend?”.

I am sure everyone starts their career in an environment where there are few meetings. But meetings become part of life sooner than later. At some point, we reach a phase where we have 2 or 3 meetings at the same time in our calendar. Articles and even books have been written on the topic of meetings. Everyone knows that inefficient meetings take up a lot of productive time but very few have practically implemented any solution. I am not dreaming of providing a solution for the meeting headaches – simply because I do not have a solution.

Recently I was at an internal event and there were multiple sessions throughout the day. I was just a participant and tried to learn as much as possible from the sessions. Attending a specific session was optional and you can choose the topic of interest to attend. I was attending a session along with a small crowd which can be fed by 2 pizzas quite comfortably. As usual, the highly interested group was in the front rows, the slightly interested group was in the middle rows (I parked myself here) and I-just-need-a-chair-to-sit-in-dim-light sleepy crowd was at the back. 10 minutes into the meeting, the presenter decided to pause to take questions from the audience and I think he will regret this decision for the next 15 minutes.

I have been a presenter in multiple events – within my organization and outside. I have also conducted training to a diverse group of audience – from pure technical topics to functional topics to somewhere-in-the-middle topics like Design Thinking. Handling a diverse audience is a challenge – especially if the diversity is spread across multiple parameters like professional experience, levels of interest, number of emails to check etc. But there is always a person who attends a session or presentation to question the presenter or the idea presented by the presenter. That person will try to prove that he is not only smarter than the presenter but also the entire Executive Board of the company he/she is working in.

The session I was in had one such attendee. He questioned everything the presenter had just discussed and literally questioned the whole strategy of the unit we were in (he was in the same unit). But what struck me most was the poise and grace with which the presenter handled the situation. I am not sure whether I would have maintained my poise because I was fuming even though I was just sitting and listening. The person asking the “questions” was hell bent on proving that he is smarter than half the world. The presenter just stuck to the facts and at no point became personal or lost his cool. The exchange lasted 15 minutes but it felt like forever. Finally, the attendee had to agree to move on – much to the agreement of the rest of the people in the room.

The one thing I learnt during the session was not in the slide deck of the presenter. It was in the way the presenter handled the situation with the “smart guy”. I hope I will be at least half as good as that presenter when faced with a similar situation. Sometimes we learn the right lessons at the wrong place.

“Who is like the wise? Who knows the explanation of things ? A person’s wisdom brightens their face and changes its hard appearance” – Ecclesiastes 8:1