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Originally Posted by ratbastid
People like to dominate other people by making them wait. It's a common thing in business--at say a 2:00 meeting, you'll have people sticking their head into the room at 2:05 to see if everyone else is there yet. If not, they'll go away and try again in a few minutes so they can look like the important one everyone else was waiting on.
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Many of the teachers I've worked with are notoroiusly tardy coming to meetings, and off-site development conferences never start at the scheduled time. It's an isidious process. If there's a five minute grade period, then the real starting time becomes five minutes after the scheduled time, and people start showing up a couple of minutes after that, and the starting time is adjusted to accommodate. Soon, people get the idea that the meeting never starts until 5 minutes after, so they don't even bother trying to show up until then, and so on. It's really, really annoying, as some of these same people are sticklers for being on time to their classes.
My current principal is wonderful, though. The weekly meeting is schduled for after school Friday at 3:15, and she starts the meeting at precisely 3:15 according to the school clock system (all the clocks are sychronized to the second, I have no idea how). Early in the school year, we occasionally would have meetings that lasted maybe 5 minutes and had stragglers showing up for the meeting after it ended.
Students in my classes learn very quickly not to be late. It's not just tardies, which I give out very consistently. We sometimes have a two minute quiz; a paper left on their desks before classes begin, timed beginning with the tardy bell and over precisely two minutes later. When it's a lecture day, the lecture begins the moment the tardy bell finishes ringing. I tend not to get any late students after about the first two to three weeks of school.
My comics discussion group is always on time. It starts at 4:30 Wednesday afternoon, and the last to arrive is usually some 5 minutes early. Partly that's because it's my group and I run it like one of my classes, starting at 4:30 even if someone's running late.
The point is that, yes, the person who is habitually late is most responsible on the individual level, but in a professional/formal setting, whoever is running things has to hold people accountable for being on time or they will be the ones determining when things start. By not expecting and enforcing a reasonable standard, the leader is abdicating some of his power and responsibility.