It's Okay To Be The Office Lingerer
As in-house counsel, lingering after a meeting is an excellent time for you to earn your salary.
We have all been there before. Trapped in a meeting that seemingly will not end.
The same question has been asked, debated, and answered nearly a dozen times. New hypotheticals are posed that are little different than the ones that came. But finally, as if by divine intervention, the meeting comes to a close.
Your first instinct? Bolt for the door. Don’t look back. And pray no one calls your name on the way out. For if there is one thing worse than sitting through a torturous meeting, it is making small talk with colleagues after.
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However, over time I began to notice that it is after meetings end when the real work often gets done.
Think about it: how many times have you been in a meeting where you thought a decision or path forward had been finalized, only to have the boss change course seemingly out of thin air?
Did they sleep on it and change their mind? Possibly, but much more likely is a colleague bent their ear on the way out the door and offered up a different solution.
A solution so simple and great, they may have even been scared to offer it during the meeting for fear of being too obvious. But alas, your boss loved it, changed course, and the rest is history.
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If you are asking yourself what is wrong with such an outcome, sometimes nothing at all. Colleagues who are shy by nature need to have an environment in which to safely offer their ideas as well.
But every once in a while, it is not the shy colleague that takes advantage of the calm after the storm of a meeting to offer their thoughts. Rather, other colleagues may use it as a chance to offer an idea that may have been too controversial or radical to be offered during the larger meeting.
As in-house counsel, lingering after a meeting to hear these radical ideas pitched is an excellent time for you to earn your salary. Before the idea has a glimmer of hope, you have the opportunity to shoot it down — and look smart in front of our boss.
I was in a recent meeting where our financial team presented on our mid-year budget, our projected path forward, and some ideas for cost savings. Like most hospital networks, budgets are tight and executives are generally receptive to any idea that could trim costs.
After the meeting as the room was clearing, one of the financial team members cornered our CFO and casually suggested we could bring in additional revenue and trim costs if we sent our uninsured patients to a collections agency after sending one bill instead of the current three.
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His theory was someone who was really going to pay their bill would do so after receiving one bill, and we were just wasting time and money sending the second two bills.
Perhaps this is a defensible argument. But the moment I heard it, the hair on the back of my neck shot up, and I practically dove between them before our CFO could give it a thought.
You see, as a non-profit hospital we are bound by certain federal regulations that govern precisely just how many bills we have to send and how long we must wait before we send an uninsured patient to a collections agency.
Had I opted to bolt for the door after the meeting, I likely would have missed this pitch to our CFO, our CFO could have gotten excited about the prospect, possibly spending time and resources looking into changing our current business practice, only to have me kill it on the back end. Instead, lingering allowed me to dive on the proverbial grenade from the outset before it gained any traction.
Will lingering after a meeting always allow you to catch an issue at its outset? No.
Will lingering earn you the reputation as the officer creeper? Maybe.
But is it worth it to save your organization at the infancy of a bad idea? Absolutely.
Stephen R. Williams is in-house counsel with a multi-facility hospital network in the Midwest. His column focuses on a little talked about area of the in-house life, management. You can reach Stephen at [email protected].
