Meeting rooms often have feelings or conversations going on that are not fully in the open. Yet, paying attention to the cues can reveal where there is tension, fear or even recalcitrant participation. Rebecca Knight offers these principles to remember that any meeting attendee, presenter or salesperson can use to keep a group headed toward the positives:
DO:
- Consider the people in the room more broadly and reflect on the possible reasons for their individual and collective emotional states.
- Look for micro expressions such as fleeting smiles or raised eyebrows. These offer clues to group dynamics and individual emotions.
- Isolate the behaviors that your socially aware role model exhibits and try to emulate them.
DON’T:
- Be distracted. Maintain eye contact and be present and engaged in conversations with others.
- Make it all about you. Ask open-ended questions to help you uncover what’s really going on.
- Allow yourself to be hijacked by a room’s negative energy. Keep your emotions in check and do what you can to shift the emotional reality of the room.
Source: Harvard Business Review, May 10, 2018. Link.
Keep an eye out “for any positive signals” — the executive in the corner who’s smiling, for instance — and concentrate on those. Importantly, continue to pay attention to what’s not being said. “Most people are just waiting to talk,” Annie McKee says. As a result, “we may catch most of the words, but we miss the music.”
INSIGHTS:
You can’t observe if you’re spending most of your time talking. Listen and be conscious of how much you are saying.