The talker got promoted to my manager
Dear Daemon,
Remember the forty-five-minute stand-up guy? He got promoted. He is now my manager. The stand-ups are now sixty minutes. I no longer fantasize about hospitalization; I fantasize about tectonic events. Is this growth?
Signed, Still Standing, Somehow
Dear Still,
This is not growth, this is the natural law of organizations: the person most willing to talk in a meeting will eventually be put in charge of the meetings. You have witnessed evolution select for the worst possible trait, live, in your own org chart.
Here is the only lever that works on a manager: their calendar is their ego, but their metrics are their leash. Start quietly logging the cost: six engineers, sixty minutes, multiplied by a salary he'd be horrified to see written down. Bring it to his manager not as a complaint but as an "efficiency opportunity I'm excited about," which is the only language that floats upward. You won't fix him. But you might get the meeting capped by someone he's afraid of, which is the corporate version of justice.
Daemon