“Managing people is hard. More often than not, you’ll be asked to make decisions. These decisions will have to be passed onto the team. Your job is to make them acceptable by the team.

If you have a decision to make, set up one-one-one meetings with every person involved. If no decision is to be made, relax, nobody is expecting anything from you. Instead of just slacking during these downtimes, however, I advise you try and motivated the troops: set up a team meeting.

• Team Meeting

The goal here is not to actually make any kind of decision, but to create the illusion of progress being made. Stand at the door, be real friendly to everyone and shake all hands.

A few PowerPoint slides into the presentation, The Enquirer will have a question.  Answering it will probably put you in an awkward position, so don’t. While he’s exposing his beef, scan the audience for another person talking. If there are more than 3 or 4 people in the room, you can expect a pair to be chatting: that’s your Involuntary Attention Deflector. If they’re taking too long, make non-committal sounds to buy some time. When they’re done, laugh loudly and crack a joke: it need not be witty or funny, its sole purpose is to signal The Enquirer he’s lost your attention. By now, chances are a colleague cut off the bewildered Enquirer with a question of his own.

Repeat the process and slide from question to question until the meeting is over. Either be the first one to leave or find yourself extremely busy with your laptop or projector. If you’ve done your job and confused them enough, they might just go away.

• One-on-one Meeting(s)

The bewitching upside of one-on-one meetings is that you can tell one person one thing, turn around, tell the opposite to the next and get away with it. When perfectly executed, this “Divide and Conquer” tactic will have everyone back to their desks promptly. Hearing what they wish to hear is what they really want; the situation itself can then silently drag on for some time.

Beware: every now and then, those two might actually know each other. If you weren’t paying too much attention, they might even be on the same team; in this case, applying this technique won’t buy you much time. Hopefully, it’ll still be enough for you to just happen to be on vacation when the shit hits the fan.”