I stopped doing that because people take it the wrong way. Initially, I was just trying to be helpful with the notes (so people wouldn't forget what was discussed, people who could participate could catch up, etc). But I started noticing some people were looking at the meeting notes as if I was holding a gun at their heads for what they said during the meetings.

>But I started noticing some people were looking at the meeting notes as if I was holding a gun at their heads for what they said during the meetings.

My experience (as technical resource/lead and project manager) has been to make sure that meeting notes include all agenda items and the action items associated with them.

However, I always make explicit that this is my understanding and request feedback from all participants as to the accuracy, schedule and scope of action items.

I suppose that comes from long experience where you're given responsibility for ensuring the success of an effort/project but not given the concomitant authority to compel action.

That requires consensus building and buy in from all stakeholders.

Often, that's not an issue when the entire organization is focused on a singular product/service. But in large organizations, building consensus among the stakeholders is absolutely necessary for success.

In smaller organizations this is less of an issue, as someone with authority over all aspects of cross-functional efforts is likely directly involved.

As such, the metaphorical "this is going to be done. Do it now." coming from a person who can directly affect your compensation and continued employment is extremely effective.

That's not so in large organizations where authority is more broadly distributed.

It occurs to me that differences in the size and structure of an organization can have significant impact on how such processes evolve and either thrive or die.

> some people were looking at the meeting notes as if I was holding a gun at their heads

Ok, so… I’m usually super cynical, but how do you know you’re not projecting here? I know people that do this and as far as I can tell, they’re always appreciated. More commonly I see people ignoring those summaries than being threatened by them.

It doesn't have to be "in your face" but it has to have the main points and especially the future action items people are taking

It helps to screen share your notes so everyone is on the same page of what is written down which keeps everyone from "exaggerating" in the meeting and being later on surprised about that what they said is in your shared notes.

I like it. I can’t be in all meetings all the time, but I can read all the meeting notes and follow up if I have to.

Unfortunately, nobody sents any meeting notes, and they decide things that later get cited as ‘it was decided’, and I have to track back through history (and a lot of unwilling people) to figure out that ‘it’ was decided by two PM’s having a meeting at 12am with nobody relevant present.

Who then tell me to be in meetings if I want to have any influence on their decisions.

Meeting notes can easily become noise. One of the big dangers of meetings is spending lots of time talking and not making specific actions to make something happen. Instead of minutes, it would be better in my opinion to put any relevant points into the relevant tool: Trello, Jira, Teams Tasks or whatever gets used.

It's then easy to continue working with, if you are a bit wrong, you don't need another email with corrections, someone can just edit the task details or add more to it.

If I meet with people over a jira ticket, the notes will go in a comment on that ticket, etc. this is not a contradiction.

Also, I don't think that most meeting notes will or should be read in the far future, but I think they are invaluable to keep the bullshitting at bay.

Probably also depends a lot on your work context. I work in a large corporation, so a lot of time is spent negotiating between departments and the culture isn't very much trust based which is totally different from my previous job in a very small company where essentially social control to be honest was a lot higher.