Research paper compares LLM responses based on politeness of requests and finds quality difference

"That's a good question," is how I'd open to buy myself time if this was an all-hands meeting. "That's hard, give me a moment," is how I'd respond in a small trusted team meeting.

In an all-hands meeting, there are generally a small number of important goals' otherwise, you wouldn't incur the expense of every person on payroll listening to you for an hour. Generally, you are communicating the broad strategy to enable individuals and teams to proactively align efforts, build a sense of accomplishment based on how we have done overall to sustain momentum, or you are breaking hard news. Given the size of the meeting, you are generally talking about something important but at a very superficial level. You don't personally know the majority of people in the audience, and you have to assume everything you say will be repeated, often incorrectly. So, in those situations, I think about the harm that could be caused by something incorrect being repeated, balanced against the harm done by withholding relevant information.

In an all-hands meeting, you need to go the extra mile in the delivery of your message if you actually want it to land with the intended effect. Because you don't have an individual rapport with the audience members, you need to come across as sincere and engaged to convey any meaning. Generally, you want to use conjunctive as opposed to disjunctive communication and style. Look at people as you talk, focus on them as they speak, don't multi-task, and use owned and inclusive language. "I made this hard decision," or "we accomplished this," or "you all did great work." To do this well generally requires experience leading without constantly relying on the use of hierarchical authority. If you are able to build trust in your direct teams consistently, you will have the skills to deliver a powerful all-hands meeting. If you rely on any variation of "because I said so," it's going to bomb.

A big part of success in an all-hands is also in your planning. Identifying what can and can't be shared is key, but also having specific plans in place to explain what you are doing and when it will happen. For example, announcing budget cuts might have to happen before you know exactly how much and where. But you should explain to people how those decisions are being made and give dates for future follow-up communication. Anticipate what concerns people will have, and address them as best you can. A sincere and proactive message about minimizing layoffs, how you will go about it, and when you will have more information will go a whole lot farther than waiting for the question and responding "obviously we want to minimize job losses, but I can't comment now on any details."

In contrast, small team meetings could require you to talk about almost anything to almost any depth. Personally, small team meetings are more mentally challenging because I have them more often and because you can't really demure. Often there is a moment, and you rise to it and build trust with your team, or you don't. Unlike an all-hands where people will cut you a break if you don't have time to answer in-depth, given the size of the audience, you don't get any slack in a team meeting. One of the most important things you accomplish in a team meeting, aside from helping guide the work, is helping your team understand where they fit in the org, why the things that are happening are happening, do we really have to do <insert customer request here>, and generally doing the hygiene part of the dual management theory. Obviously, the more plugged in and savvy you are, the easier it will be. You are often asked to answer questions that touch on fairness, dissatisfaction, concerns, etc, and quickly separate out what is venting vs what needs a solution.

I was in an IT engineering team all-hands (all the engineering teams in the org reported to me, and all had a close personal rapport), and I was asked whether we would take on a request from outside of our division. Specifically, I had reformulated our direction and services to the wider organization, and we had just received a request to take over the management of boundary and core networking at dozens of remote sites we hadn't previously managed. The network engineers didn't want to, for various reasons, which was at odds with our current focus to eliminate sprawl and centralize management. The engineers were on board with minimizing sprawl but saw this use case as outside of the normal campus-plant type operation they were used to designing and being responsible for; despite managing many large remote campus networks, it raised questions they didn't have an answer to.

I wanted this to happen, because it further centralized our services across all divisions, but knew they had real concerns. It meant more work, and could we continue our trend of being more efficient and absorb it; it meant dealing with a few difficult customers; and it just generally had this feeling of the unknown and do not want. I didn't want to just say, yes, we're doing it. Back to, don't lean on hierarchical authority. I also wanted to let them drive as much as possible. So I told them something like:

"I'm not going to say that we have to do this or we don't. We have changed a lot over the last year, and our focus and scope have really grown, and we've accomplished a lot of really cool things. I think what we need to do is think about what we want to be in this organization as a team. Up to now, we've taken on all boundary and core management requests, and have pushed for most of them, because we want to be THE enterprise network, architecture, and security teams. If we decline those responsibilities in some cases, I think we need to think about the confusion that might cause within our customers and realize that either we own it all, good and bad alike, or we accept that there will be exceptions and other parties making decisions around WAN, LAN, firewall standards, etc. So let's not rush to a decision now, but think about what you want this team to be to the wider organization, and I'll support us becoming that."

After that, it never came up again. The team ran forward without a second thought. They wanted to be THE team, and I had built enough trust that they trusted me to manage the workload and bring in the resources.

I've also had things come up like, "what do I do about this other team members alcoholism? Also, yeah, they are totally an alcoholic."

So yeah, it's tiring but important. When I was director of engineering, I had 45 minute team meetings with each team, back to back, that took most of Monday, and the rest of customer meetings. Wednesday, I had 30-minute 1-1s back-to-back with all my direct reports from 8 am to 5 pm. We also had an optional social at noon on Friday. Being mentally and emotionally engaged, discerning what people hopes and fears are, and allaying concerns, is very taxing. But doing the hard people work is how I built the best division in that area.

I don't know how well I actually answered your questions, so please feel free to ask any follow-up questions.

Have a great day!