Meet Mr Endless Problems
The employee assessment of that employee who loves to schedule meeting after meeting about problems
Corporate America offers some fascinating wildlife that you seldom see in the world of entrepreneurship and results-oriented work. In the Meet Mr Series, we meet some of these corporate creatures and their challenges for talent management. One of the more dreaded creatures in corporate America is Mr Endless Problems. Never actually interested in a solution, but always willing to talk about a problem, Mr Endless Problems is a person you want to identify and restrict (and possibly terminate) quickly.
But first, a fictional story. Because I'm creating a fictional stories as examples in this series, I'll call Mr Endless Problems in my story Gary. As a reminder, our fictional company is ABCZ Corporation.
Story
Gary worked as a contractor with John at ABCZ Corporation. Paid hourly, Gary lacked the technical abilities of John and others but presented himself as if he was an architect capable of understanding problems and designing technical solutions. Gary loved scheduling meetings under the guise of planning, gathering requirements, solutioning, or other meeting titles that implied he was getting results for the business. Yet if one was actually focused in every meeting, none of the meetings ever achieved their objectives and resulted in more meetings and planning over time without any delivery. Sometimes, when Gary would gather requirements, he would phrase and repeat questions in a manner to get the stakeholder to do the work. He would ask the business stakeholders what tables needed to be queried, what joins needed to be made, and what filters and transformations needed to be applied. Even though these questions were literally his job to research, he would consume stakeholder time to get them to answer his questions so that he could avoid research.
He would also schedule meetings over the same issue repetitively. For instance, if data were missing and the business stakeholders told him this, he would schedule 10 different meetings about why this was a problem over a month. He also devised a technique where he would schedule meetings with different departments about the same issue when he knew no solution existed. In this way, everyone at the company thought he was working on a solution to a problem, but in reality he was talking to different stakeholders in isolated meetings with each of them reiterating the problem over and over again.
In one particular meeting, he accidentally revealed to multiple business stakeholders Levi, Lara and Maria that he had no idea what he was doing:
"The problem we're facing," Gary began the meeting, "is that our inventory table has products by a product id column which is only a number." He shared his screen and showed a spreadsheet with column of product ids with numbers in the column. "As you see, these product ids from the inventory table are all numbers, 1 through 100. But the product id column we find in the sales table is a column with the leading letter 'n' and the numbers 1 through 100." Gary moved his mouse cursor over the next column in the spreadsheet that were exactly identical by numbers except one column had an "n" character before the number.
"I don't see what the problem is here," Levi interrupted. "We provided you with the inventory table so that you could do the join to the sales table. We mentioned that only the leading character differed. The number is exactly the same and that is how you would tie out the data. You now have the data you need, so what's the issue?"
As if Gary didn't hear what Levi said, he continued, "How can we join the inventory table with numbers to the sales table that starts with the letter 'n'?"
"Like I said a second ago, the number is always the same between the tables - only the leading character exists on the sales table, but the number is still the same," Levi replied.
"Yeah, I'm confused why this is an issue," Lara agreed. "I don't know how to write any code, but even I can solve that."
Gary insisted further, "But I don't see how we can combine these since the sales table has all the records starting with the 'n' along with a number while the inventory table has only numbers." This moment should have made it extremely clear to Levi, Lara and Maria that Gary wasn't a technical person because this is a very elementary problem that technical people solve daily. But they had miscalculated the due diligence that their company had done with hiring people. In addition, they hadn't realized that Gary was Mr Endless Problems. So Gary took out a line from the best skill he had, "I think we need to schedule another meeting about how we can tie these records out across the two tables," Gary said, pulling up a calendar on his screen. "Maybe, we could even have you guys fix the table by deleting the 'n' on every record."
"I can't believe I'm saying this," Levi started. He paused and everyone heard him breathing frustration into his microphone. "All you need to do is remove the leading 'n' off the product id column in the sales table and you will get a 1-to-1 match on the product id column for the inventory table." Even a business stakeholder like Levi knew the technical solution to the problem and his frustration was becoming more apparent to everyone in the call, except Gary. "Again, we've given you everything you need here, I don't see what the issue is."
The meeting continued for a while. Since this is an entirely fictional story, I'll create a fictional ending. Gary wasn't interested in an actual solution because Gary was Mr Endless Problems. Gary needed this meeting to schedule another 5-10 meetings about the problem so that he could extend this problem and create new ones. For instance, even if the business had done Gary's work and removed the "n", Gary would have come back claiming there was a blank space in a number or some other problem. Ultimately, Gary needed more meetings with the stakeholders and if there was a solution, there would be less need for meetings. Plus, people might expect him to get results! As long as he could highlight problems, he could schedule more meetings.
What the Research Shows
Over the past few years, I've researched corporate meetings using observational and polling methods. I've found that 81% of employees reported or observed that they had attended at least one unproductive meeting in the past week. The response increases to over 90% when I ask if the meeting was productive but was not prepared well. Mr Endless Problems can be a part of why we see this response in corporate America.
In his book Connecting the Future, Mohammed Alardhi discusses mindsets for growth and observes how all employees thought they were star employees when he started his leadership. He correctly observes that very few people fall into the category of star employees, yet everyone thought they were. In my research I've noted a similar pattern with meetings: people tend to be more honest about other people's meetings, but less honest about their own meetings. We all tend to think that we're prepared for our own meetings and that our meetings have importance. As Alardhi suggests in his book, we all need to be open to feedback when this isn't the case.
In Mr Endless Problems' case, he's not trying to be a star employee - it's not getting work done that excites him.
Costs
If you notice, Gary scheduled a meeting with several business stakeholders about a very basic problem. In addition to the cost of the meeting - as everyone was getting paid to be there - the company is paying an opportunity cost. During the time of the meeting, other problems which actually needed solutions could have been solved. Yet Gary had wasted everyone's time on a solvable problem. Gary wasn't only billing the company for the meeting; Gary was billing the company by delaying future solutions to other problems. On the point of delaying solutions to actual problems, you want to avoid Mr Endless Problems as much as possible.
Another cost not mentioned in our story is that Mr Endless Problems results in talented employees leaving. Talented employees despise lazy employees. Remember the college projects where you did all the work and the rest of the team did nothing? How did you feel about those other classmates? Multiply those feelings by ten and you can sense how much a talented employee despises a lazy employee because the work always will end up falling on the talented employee. Mr Endless Problems can schedule an indefinite amount of meetings and never get anything done. Meanwhile a talented employee feels energized by getting tasks done; procrastination de-energizes and de-motivates a talented employee, whereas this is exactly what Mr Endless Problems wants to achieve (nothing)!
Unfortunately, the loss of time and talent aren't the only costs in some cases. Some companies have created entire positions that only exist to highlight problems (ie: "complainers"). While this can be useful to identify weaknesses and improve companies, if you're not careful then these positions can turn into Mr Endless Problems. You no longer have someone identifying a problem and correcting it, but coming up with new problems that may not even need to exist in the first place.
The Meet Mr Series
All images are either sourced from Pixabay or created unless explicity stated. All written content and created images are copyright, all rights reserved. None of the content may be shared with any artificial intelligence.
Great concept for a blog and (hopefully) podcast. How about Mr. Non-transparent, Ms. NeverWrong, and Mr. ReliesOnPastAccomplishments?