The seven habits of highly defective conference call leaders

June 9, 5:21 PMLife in the Cubicle ExaminerDudley B. Dawson

Previous Next

12 comments Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Life in the Cubicle Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

The conference call triangle of death.

If you're a member of a large corporation that has employees spanning across multiple geographic areas, you are no stranger to the conference call.  Convenient, yes.  Productive, no.

Beyond the fact that 75% of the participants are not listening, it seems quite obvious why conference calls are unproductive: There seems to be a large number of people that have no idea how to lead a conference call.

To help these people know where they've went wrong, I present to you the seven habits of highly defective conference call leaders:

1. Sending out the wrong conference call code.
Whether it's the conference call number, or the participant code, technotards can't seem to figure out the whole conference call thing.  It's a rather simple concept that involves a meeting code and a leader code, yet this seems to be far too much to comprehend for senior leaders that also need help logging into Windows in the morning.

2. Calling into the conference call late which enables hold music for everyone on time.
There are very few things more annoying than having to listen to the same conference call hold music all day long.  If you work at an organization heavy on conference calls, you likely hear this same song at least six times a day.  It's usually a fusion of smooth jazz, Caribbean, and acoustic rock.  The first time you heard the music it sounded kind of cool.  Three days later you wanted to break your phone.

3. Omitting a simple introduction to inform participants of who is on the call.
Bad conference call leaders always forget to introduce everyone on the phone.  This usually leads to unfortunate conversations like:

Todd: Hey Bob, did you get that document done yet?
Bob: No, I thought Karen was doing it.
Todd: I have no idea, I thought you were buddies with Karen (while laughing).
Bob: Are you kidding me, who likes Karen?
Leader: Ahh, guys...Karen is on the call. 

4. Allowing silence to continue for over over ten seconds.
Until I became involved in multiple conference calls per day, I was always under the impression that loud stomach rumblings in a quiet yet busy elevator was about as uncomfortable as ten seconds can be.  But, I was wrong.  Long periods of silence on conference calls are as bad as it gets outside of actual torture.  A dysfunctional conference call leader will allow these moments of silence to drag on longer than a humorous drawn out scene from Family Guy.  After 10 seconds you begin to wonder if the leader is still on the line.  After 15 seconds you wonder if they're on mute.  After 20 seconds you're fairly certain your phone is broken.  In the rare cases where the silence lasts over 25 seconds, they're usually waiting for you to ask a question that you missed while browsing the internet and discovered a great new article on The Onion.

5. Inability to stop nonsensical ramblings.
You're conference call is scheduled to last 30 minutes.  You're now 25 minutes into the call and one person controlled the entire meeting.  You stopped paying attention five minutes in, and you thought about hanging up at the 15 minute mark.  If you could only figure out a way to silence the beep that occurs when you hang up.

6. Tolerating callers talking over one another.
A weak conference call leader is unable to control the loud talker.  They give full control to the person that can talk the loudest and it results in 30-60 minutes of scrambled radio nonsense.

7. Ending calls abruptly with no conclusion.
The end of a horrible conference call is actually no conclusion at all.  A worthless conference call leader will typically run their time up to the end of the hour with no transition into finalizing the meeting.  This leaves 50% of the audience chiming in "Ooh, gotta drop off and run. Thanks!" with a series of 25 beeps because everyone else decided to hang up and end the misery.
 

---
'Seven Habits' is a recurring article appearing in Dudley B. Dawson's Life in the Cubicle column at completely random moments.
View the Seven Habits of: Highly Effective Slackers | Highly Annoying Emailers | Disrespectful Work Poopers | Morbidly Obese Coworkers | Typical Bad Managers | Highly Effective Interns | Defective Conference Call Leaders | Incapable Technotards | Highly Anal Employees | Highly Arrogant Employees | Highly Disengaged Employees

Follow Dudley via:  Facebook | Twitter | MySpace | LinkedIn | Email | RSS
Read more Dudley: All stories | Most read stories | Seven Habits | Dear Dudley | Awkward Office Moments