Please, don’t read to me.
I’ve seen this phenomenon a lot over the years, mostly in education, but often enough in other spheres, like government and politics as well.
There’s no feeling of personal fulfillment greater than when you read through documents released in advance, only to have those same documents read back to you, word-for-word, by somebody tasked with giving a report or a presentation.
So if I’m a councillor in a municipal context, I’m going to get my information from the pre-meeting release of the agenda, then attend the meeting to get an in-person report from the officer in charge, whether that’s a manager, or a director, or whatever.
But don’t freaking read to me.
Either know your file or you don’t, and if you can’t talk to me eyes-up, then sorry, but you don’t know your file. Or you don’t know how to communicate your file, which is equally ineffective. What’s the point in knowing your stuff when you can’t get it out of you without your crib notes?
Some Renfrew town administrators do this all the time, while some use their notes for detailed figures that support their presentation. But story time? No thanks.
If I wanted to sit around in a circle and have a story read to me before nap time, there’s other places I can get this. And perhaps I have some of this in my future given my advanced age. But I’m not there yet, and I demand better from somebody making more money in public-funded salary then I ever did. But nobody would ever think, or ever dare, to say anything like what I’m saying right now. It’s impolite. Unprofessional. Not a good team player, which by the way usually means that you’ve been co-opted to accept inadequacies without complaint or comment, just like consensus is often an exercise in group ass-covering.
I read the agenda before meetings. Sometimes I read it twice. And sadly, there are times I need to read it more than that to pull out salient information. So after all that, when I show up and have that same document read to me, it doesn’t put me in the most positive frame of mind.
Back when I was a teacher, we’d get materials in advance of a staff meeting or in advance of a professional development day. When the meeting or the day arrived, it became obvious that most of the people in the room hadn’t read the document, mostly because they couldn’t be bothered and also because there was no real accountability. So in that sense, in that environment of intentional incompetence, it’s probably necessary to read documents to your audience, that is if they even listen to you in the first place. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over many years as a teacher, it’s that they’re often worse than the kids in their class when it comes to homework completion and behaviour. But as they like to say when you criticize them on stuff like this, “we’re all adults here.” That always struck me as an odd defence for poor behaviour, in that being an adult ought to raise the bar, not lower it. But teachers are a breed unto themselves, and they often make no sense, so enough said about them.
So, if it’s not too much, can we get admin staff to have enough confidence in their material that they can speak to the rest of us, rather that read to the rest of us? For $135,000, or more, do you think that’s too much to ask?
It’s bad enough that we often don’t know what the hell they’re saying in the first place, which is another area in need of improvement.
These people know their files, they just suck at communicating, which to my understanding, is a fairly important part of the job.
I’m available all week for communications workshops. We can get a box of donuts and another box of coffee and pretend we’re a working group. Hire me for the job and I might even get the group pizza, unless we have to put out a RFP and pass a by-law, in which case you can all go hungry.
And I can teach you how not to read.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 