Conversations with Carolyn

It’s astonishing how often people are in the same conversation but hear completely different things. The potential for misunderstanding, feeling disrespected and disempowered is huge. Whether you’re leading a team of one (yourself), or a team of hundreds the quality of your listening hugely affects the quality and impact of your leadership.

Life often ends up having you arrive at destinations you never knew were on your itinerary. Asking “Am I there yet?” is a question a lot of grown-ups I know, myself included, are asking these days too.

Unexpected roadblocks, uncooperative team members, misunderstandings in communications and vision abound in the real world and you need to stay nimble to navigate them.

Running effective hybrid meetings can feel confronting and even overwhelming. Unless you are well prepared, the logistics of organizing a Conversation that Counts can swamp your sense of confidence and presence.
Here are a few tips to help you handle those hybrid meetings in your future with greater confidence and clarity!

.Before the pandemic, opportunities for employees to work remotely were more the exception than the rule. The current challenge facing busy managers is how to effectively lead hybrid meetings, conversations or gatherings where some attendees are co-located in the same physical space while others participate using conferencing technology.
The pandemic has fundamentally shifted how and where we work together. Some businesses  have decided that employees can work from home permanently.

We’ve all been in meetings that felt like a total waste of time. Endless, back-to-back meetings that clutter up the calendar and leave the real work to pile up. You know how they go
When you’re the Conversation Leader, these kinds of problems fall on your shoulders.
How do you handle things when people get unruly? Or is it you who talks endlessly, leaving no space for back-and-forth dialogue in your meeting?

Teams get out of alignment when they lack clarity about the decision they are asked to make. It’s essential to be upfront about whether their input is for information-sharing, brainstorming, or actual decision- making. Don’t confuse people’s attendance with acceptance. Silence doesn’t mean people agree with what is being discussed.

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen is creating an agenda that doesn’t allow enough time or mental bandwidth to consider the next steps. Without attention and planning for action steps, the impact of your conversation will evaporate shortly after its conclusion. When you don’t make a plan for action and nothing changes as a result of the discussion, is it any wonder so many people feel like meetings are a waste of their time?

The purpose of a meeting isn’t just to have one. It’s about taking the energy from the meeting conversation and bringing it out into the workplace in some tangible and measurable way. The meeting is a means to an end for accomplishing a set of specific objectives. Whether the work is solving a problem, launching a product, or setting new priorities, the conversation is in service of something being different from the status quo.

Setting an intention for how you were going to show up in the room, so that you could support the collective process of discovery and discussion is so important. Our energy and presence has a powerful impact on others, so it’s crucial to think about how you are showing up. Are you holding the space with certainty and confidence, or are you in the space pulling focus to some individual discomfort or challenge you may be feeling?