Since we’re all back at some form of work (in office, remote, or a combination of the two), meetings are back.

Notice that I didn’t say ‘in style’. They’re not.

One of our clients, PADT in Tempe, run by Eric Miller, wrote a good article published by the Phoenix Business Journal, entitled ‘A Word About Those Annoying Questions’. Eric runs a civil engineering firm, staffed with a bunch of engineers, who have all sorts of ideas on how a particular project should be run or a client should be handled, so he’s used to annoying meetings.

What makes the meetings annoying is that some staffers, in Eric’s opinion, and we think he’s right, delight in asking annoying ‘challenge’ questions of whoever’s running the meeting, or even some other meeting participants.

Discussion is good, but only to a point. And the annoying questions may not have anything to do with the subject. Since all Eric’s staff is probably highly paid and he doesn’t want unhappy employees and wants to foster creativity, he probably tolerates annoying questions in meetings.

In fact, about halfway through his article, Eric admits that challenge questions, which might be initially annoying, aren’t really that bad and usually lead to better solutions.

So, bottom line, don’t worry about whether a meeting was annoying. So your ego got a dent and a bruise. Did you get to a better solution?