End your meetings early. Actively listen vs. pour in
Meetings can drain most of us. New leaders tasked with connecting and growing their teams endure endless 1:1’s with their team and peer leaders. Without blocked off time for thinking and tasking, empty slots on shared calendars attract invitations like mosquitoes at a nudist beach.
Data from Zippia, a career expert site, shares startling market research on meetings which may make you never wanting to go to one again. Around 55 million meetings exist each week in the U.S. Workers spend an average of 31 hours per month in unproductive meetings.
How to make meetings run better? Experts suggest standing up, writing a memo everyone reads prior, tossing a ball to each other to deter extroverts from dominating and to encourage introverts to speak up. But if you’re the host (as many of my clients are), how to ensure you’re not pouring in? The query feels more vital when the meeting’s designed to solve a problem or decide which way to go. Leaders feel the burden to solve and fix, when that’s not always true.
Many find that active listening can help; meaning, listening with all of our senses. Removing distractions and resisting the desire to solve or direct. Also, ensuring we give space for others to think, contemplate, and unlock the answers within. (I’ve written on the role that coaching training can have on our leadership presence in an earlier post you can read here.) In this week’s post, consider a handful of questions and approaches to build clarity and potency in every meeting from here on.
Listening to distill a problem
If the team comes to you to make a decision, resist sharing your ideas too quickly (despite time pressures to solve things). Instead, ask them to come to the meeting with something to recommend. In the meeting, ask a handful of questions to laser focus and distill what they need to decide upon — and why. For instance:
- What’s the main issue you’re/we’re solving for?
- Why? Why now?
- What’s the best possible outcome you/we seek?
- How will you know when you’ve gotten there?
- What’s the worse case scenario if you/we don’t get there? Meaning: What’s at stake?
Listening to solve (and reveal any blockers)
You’ll likely notice, through this line of open-ended questioning, minimal jargon and clear, comprehensive language in its place. (The questions themselves give little wiggle room for much else.) With the problem now concise and clear, you can continue on your path asking more questions to help solve. A sampler of questions follow:
- What’s your/our underlying fear or discomfort (if any) on this issue?
- What’s the credibility of that fear?
- What’s feeling hardest — and why?
- What have you/we tried so far? What worked? What did not?
- What become the biggest blockers — and why these blockers over others?
- What’s becoming clearer now — if anything? What do you recommend we do?
- How can I help the most?
Notice omitting the “how can I help?” question until the end and then qualifying the question to “the most?” Both language choices feel intentional to me as I coach. As the coachee/employee answers these questions, chances are they’ll answer: “Airing this much has helped me clarify so much. I guess all I need now is your endorsement this is the right path?” Answering this much takes far less time and mental real estate than jumping in endlessly to solve.
A coach approach to negative emotions
Meetings often invite charged emotions, especially 1:1’s with a leaders direct reports. The field tells me their team comes to them in all kinds of negative emotions including frustration, annoyance, impatience, even despair. The coach approach to this leadership moment?
- Resist trying to fix. (These emotions belong to your team, not you)
- Hold your team as capable, competent, and resourceful. Meaning: Trust that they can figure out their own life issues. They are in charge.
- Know that listening to someone wholly, without interrupting, and without directing helps them empty their buckets and reveal the answers within.
- Drive insights through active listening questions to help move from negative to more positive emotions instead, which we get to next.
Moving from negative to positive through pointed active listening questions
With negative emotions, many of us feel uncomfortable. When I ask leaders why, most reply because they think they must solve. Resist and stay centered on questions, which can include:
- What are all the negative emotions coming up about X?
- Which of our values (if any) may feel compromised?
- What’s the situation/feeling here to teach or remind you/us?
- What are three gifts or opportunities here?
Coaching tools also exist to help move from negative to more positive. For instance, asking about opposites. If the direct report says (several times), “I feel stuck — so stuck!” You can ask: What’s the opposite of “stuck?” Or, If not stuck, how do you want to feel? And then: What are three new things to try to help you get “unstuck?”
You can also:
- Ask them to describe the feeling and what it reminds them of (to evoke awareness).
- Ask them to come up with a metaphor for the feeling to evoke awareness and also bring light to the dark.
- Move them to problem solving and empowerment through asking: What’s a new way to be with this feeling?
- Introduce them to inner critical awareness through Positive Intelligence and other mental fitness trainings, which I’ve written on before here. Understand the role that our inner Judge and other critics have in these moments to help empower your direct report and ease your load.
It takes several years to formally train to become a coach. (I know. That’s how long it took me.) But the sample of questions and approaches here any well-intentioned leader can try and experiment with. If you’re feeling a bit wobbly on trying a coach approach when not yet certified, fret not. A small story illustrates my case.
When asking coachees what helped the most in each session, it’s sometimes the tactics we co-created but mostly, I hear this one phrase the most: “It felt wonderful — sacred even — just feeling truly listened to. Hearing myself say things aloud helped me see most my annoyances/fears were unfounded, and that actually, I know a lot.”
Debbi Gardiner McCullough coaches and trains foreign-born leaders to become more confident, concise, and mentally fit communicators. From Wisconsin, she owns and runs Hanging Rock Coaching and coaches worldwide with BetterUp.