#1 🤐 Listening
In today's blindspot: 🧠 The monologues of Captain James Kirk ⚙️ W.A.I.T. 📚 More Time to Think.
I love team meetings - they are my favorite part of the work week. It feels like I’m on the bridge of the USS Enterprise: “Mr. Sulu: how’s our pipeline looking?” “Spock: what’s the word on that product launch?”
For years, I came to every meeting with ten topics, a dozen new ideas, and a hundred questions I wanted to run by the team. Sometimes, there were discussions - someone who had already been thinking about the same topic, idea or question, or perhaps had a competing idea - but, for the most part, the meetings inevitably devolved into a check-in or a monologue; monotonous tasks where one person spoke and the others gave the courtesy of listening without pretending to be interested.
I’ve iterated a lot over the years; mostly failed experiments in changing how I speak, what I speak about, the way I present, my cadence, when & how I involve other team members. Despite a few anecdotal successes, for the most part, I wasn’t getting anywhere.
In order for other people to talk more, you have to talk less.
I got stuck in a false dilemma similar to the one that 📚Crucial Conversations so eloquently describes - when I spoke, everyone was engaged in listening to me, but when I didn’t speak, nobody did. So would I rather be the only one speaking or have no one speaking? A false dilemma.
Like in Crucial Conversations, the dilemma is masking the fact that you don’t have to choose between the two, you just need to change something you’ve taken as a constant to be variable - in my case, the notion that in order to get people to talk, I had to talk. That is, I believed that my role was to be a catalyst for the conversation. I thought that I mattered. I thought that mattering mattered.
🔨The System: W.A.I.T. - Why am I talking?
⚙️ How it works: Whenever you catch yourself speaking without knowing why, stop and ask yourself “Why am I talking?”
There’s nothing fancy to this system - at some point I would write down the answers in Notion in the middle of a meeting as a way of forcing myself to stop talking for long enough to understand why I was talking in the first place - what’s valuable is learning to stop and reflect before moving forward when you catch yourself caught up in a monologue.
These days, I take a minute before every meeting to ask myself three questions: How am I feeling? What’s needed from me in this meeting? What would make this meeting a success? - the time it takes me to get in the zone, I shake off whatever I’ve been thinking about up until then and come with a clean slate.
This also means that when I start a meeting, I remember that my ultimate definition of success is to generate new ideas with my team - everything else could be done via a 1:1 or an async update.
📚 More Time To Think: The Power of Independent Thinking
One of the more compelling books that changed how I approach group meetings as a whole isMore Time to Think: The Power of Independent Thinking. This book positions the leader as a Listener, and the team as Thinkers, with some very powerful byproducts of that approach, distilled into 10 disciplines. I’ll share my takeaways from the first three, which I refer to often:
👀 Attention - Fall in love with their yet unthought thoughts: You can't multitask attention. It's love. It's gold. You can't go back later and "listen before." There is no alchemy for attention.
“You matter because you don’t matter at all.”
☮️ Ease - Slow down your internal state: say how long you have at the start of each meeting. Ease inside allows us to deal with emergencies outside. Ease isn’t easy, it’s uncomplicated.
🙏 Appreciation - Maintain a 5:1 ratio of appreciation to criticism: Appreciation stimulates the heart and stimulates thinking.In the face of criticism,people stop thinking.
If these sound obvious, that’s great. If they sound lofty or a distraction from the meeting’s agenda, I encourage you to read More Time To Think. And be ready to take notes.
Start / Stop / Continue:
The only way to conquer a blindspot is to change our behavior. Here are some changes you can make if you’re struggling to involve everyone in your team meetings:
🟢 Start: asking "What else?" until you get an explicit "that's everything" response from your team.
🟢 Start: listening to meeting recordings to see what % of the meeting you spend talking.
🟢 Start: Resisting the impulse to get in and solve problems immediately (don’t “boil the ocean”)
🔴 Stop: assuming that people saying nothing means they have nothing to contribute
🔴 Stop: bringing topics to your team for the first time during a meeting. If you haven’t had time to share something in advance async, they probably won’t have time to contribute anything during the meeting.
🟡 Continue: creating a welcoming environment by hearing from everyone in the first five minutes of the meeting.
🟡 Continue: allowing time for discussion by reducing the number of topics in a meeting to as few as possible.