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Stopping Point

Reading this article reminded me of all the days at work when some conversations were so tiring and unending that once done, I had felt totally wiped out. The only thing I was good for at that point was a nap. For me there has been a theme to these discussions or meetings. Usually three or more people (including me) were involved it. It ran well over time because everyone wanted to talk rather than do the job at hand even though doing would be a lot easier and take up a lot less time. The whole game was about how to spend time not doing. 

The driver for this behavior is usually a misguided notion of what being a leader is about - a person who visions things but has no need to deliver or perform. When a person has been a leader for couple of decades, they are at the peak of their incompetence so it falls on those who are not wed to such a distorted world-view to do their work for them. 

That person who felt most like a leader always ended up the one who needed a tremendous amount of hand-holding, coaching, corralling or some such. The whole situation created an energy sink that seemed to draw out all my reserves. As I think about those events, in every one of them I knew when I needed to bail and could have found a way to do so. Each time, I did not thinking resolution would arrive in the next few minutes and people would wise up to the absurdity of what was going on of their own volition. In all cases, nothing was resolved and no such epiphany occurred.cMaybe like the author says neither side in my situation when to stop talking. 

Mastroianni and his colleagues found that only 2 percent of conversations ended at the time both parties desired, and only 30 percent of them finished when one of the pair wanted them to. In about half of the conversations, both people wanted to talk less, but their cutoff point was usually different. Participants in both studies reported, on average, that the desired length of their conversation was about half of its actual length.

If we had put ourselves out of our misery half the way through maybe we would have all come out ahead.

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