🪑 Always Count the Chairs 🪑

Thursday, March 16, 2023

We have semi-regular manager summit meetings at my agency. My role has been to co-coordinate them with a small team.

At the last one, I stopped in to the large conference room first thing in the morning to make sure it was set up for that afternoon’s meeting. I glanced around quickly and thought to myself, “This looks fine. No messes, nothing to rearrange, I know how to work the projector in here, the tables are all lined up classroom style, it looks like some tables were removed from the back, but I’m not worried; this afternoon will be good to go.”

I went about the rest of my day and headed upstairs when it was time for the meeting. The managers started pouring in as we were handing out papers and agendas and training materials and I felt a pain in the pit of my stomach. Slowly I realized there were more managers coming into the room than there were going to be places to sit.

Well, shit.

I started scrambling and pulling chairs from the side of the room, hurling them towards tables as fast as I could, breaking into a heavy sweat, feeling panic rising, feeling my boss look at me, becoming certain my credibility had just taken a massive hit. More managers, more chairs, more managers, more chairs.

It felt like we were 52 chairs short even though we only had 51 people coming to the meeting.

I ran out of table space, and so set up a short row of chairs in the back of the room. I knew the people sitting there wouldn’t have the best experience because they wouldn’t have a surface to write on, but I didn’t have any other ideas so into a row against the back wall they went.

The last person walked into the room just as I was finishing up that last row.

The last person happened to be our agency director.

Well shit.

“Mortified” only begins to describe how I felt. But by some corporate miracle I wasn’t fired on the spot and the meeting continued as planned, with only a short delay at the beginning.

The lesson I learned that day? ALWAYS count the chairs, Matthew. Always count the chairs.

Today we have another manager summit meeting. The topic of the summit is motivation.

My colleague and I stopped in this morning to set up the room. Not only did we count the chairs, but we set up the tables in Ts so that we could fit 6 managers to each T. Because of this setup we ended up with one EXTRA chair (yes!). We set up 10 flip chart stations for the 10 groups of managers who will be participating in an activity on motivation. We numbered the flip charts using letters. The letters we used?

M-O-T-I-V-A-T-I-O-N.

This will be my final manager summit meeting at this agency. I’ll post more details later, but I’m transferring to a different agency at the end of this month. I’m excited and nervous and daunted and happy and sad and all the things you are when you start a new chapter. I’ve learned a lot during my time at this agency. But the one lesson above all other lessons that I’ll carry forward forever?

Always count the chairs.

#Photos