Your Team Meetings Might be Leaky

Your Team Meetings Might be Leaky

Do your meetings always start and end on time?

Does everyone join at the exact call time, or do people trickle in?

Do people sometimes need to “hop off early”?

Does all the work on the agenda happen in the meeting, or does the work spill over?

If any of the above feel true, your gatherings might be leaky.

Leakiness can become even more pronounced over the course of a multi-week or multi-month project - Leakiness can look like when a team needs to make an important decision and an important decision maker isn’t there.

Leakiness makes it hard to get things done.

It can be hard, maybe even impossible, to have a proper conversation, to come to a realistic or powerful decision or conclusion when the same people aren't in the conversation from the beginning to the end. 

Throwing Vegetables at the Stove

When you cook, do you gather your ingredients, toss them at your stove, turn up the burner and then walk away… and hope that dinner will be ready in 30 minutes?

No, of course not!  Process matters.

You need to prep your veggies. You need to add the ingredients in a certain order, depending on the results you want. 

And you need to pick the right container and the right temperature for your dish.

And for nearly every recipe, you need to raise and lower the heat at different moments in the process.

Four ways to Tighten up a Leaky Meeting Container

When you have a “leaky” container, things don’t heat up or get “well done” the way you might want them to. If you leave the door to the oven open, your turkey will never really cook. Similarly, if your board meetings are poorly run, or your leadership team gatherings or offsites are haphazard, your company simply will not be able to “cook”, i.e. get things properly done, either.

There are four simple ways to tighten up your container, and I think about them visually, like this:

How do we enter? How do we know we can leave or that we need to stay? How do we act when we’re in the container? And most importantly, how do we know we’re “out of bounds”?

In other words, you need:

1. Clear Invitations

2. Clear Commitments

3. Clear Conversational Rules

4. Consistent Application of Boundaries

1. Clear Invitations

When I was writing my book, Good Talk, about how to design conversations that matter, I was tempted to title it “What the F*CK are we talking about?” since I felt like everyone has, at some point, wanted to ask this very question. 

What is this meeting really about? And are we really talking about the right things?

A clear invitation means the goal, the purpose and outcome of the conversation/meeting/project is clear - clear enough for a person to be able to commit to the conversation.

Powerful invitations tap into powerful sources of motivation. Psychologists generally agree that there are two primary types of motivation: internal (or intrinsic) motivation, and external (or extrinsic) motivation. 

The top Intrinsic motivators, in order of potency, are play, purpose and potential. These three could also be thought of as direct motivations. 

Play is the most direct and durable: Come and play...it’ll be fun! Purpose is next, focusing on near-term impact; while potential is about long-term impact.

The most powerful conversations and tightest containers tap into intrinsic sources of motivation. The more you can connect your invitations to the purpose and potential of each person involved, the better.

If you want to know more about the art of invitation, I wrote a whole chapter about it in my book Good Talk.

The simple way to practice this is by giving your meetings a descriptive name. Don’t call it a budget meeting.  Call it “Collectively decide what we’re going to spend money on for 2023”.  Or “discuss options for budget spend” if you’re going to make the final call.

2. Clear Commitments

Are you in or out? Are you coming or not?!

One of the reasons that a workshop can be such a powerful container for getting work done is that clear amounts of time are blocked out for the work, ideally with all of the right people in the room, for the whole time of the gathering.

In a design sprint, a team commits to five days of focused work. On day five, a team commits to testing an idea with customers, regardless of whether the concept feels fully baked or if the team is really ready or not. 

The commitment from the whole team is to come for five days, and to clear their calendar. If someone wants to leave on day three, it’s possible that you can push back, and remind them of their commitment to be fully present for the whole five days.

A commitment has a start and an end. That commitment could last a week, a month or a year. It can be specific, like agreeing to show up on Wednesdays at 1pm for an hour, every other week for 12 weeks. Commitments can be more general, like “looking over a document.”  The more specific a commitment is, the easier it will be to agree to and the easier it will be to reinforce (#4!).

A challenge I’ve had with clear commitments is in longer-term transformation and leadership development programs. Over weeks and months, people get pulled in many directions, and lose focus…the steam escapes from the container and the pressure drops. Usually, only a small fraction of the people who responded to the challenge and the invitation are still deeply committed at the halfway point. 

So, either ask for shorter commitments…or recruit a smaller group of people. Fewer people means less diffusion of the commitment across the group, sometimes called “social loafing”.

This is why I often share my research on Minimum Viable Transformations with folks leading transformational projects. A big change only needs about 3.5% of a group to be consistently and actively engaged. So…get clear on who that 3.5% is as soon as possible and engage with them to maintain consistent commitment!

Clear commitments aren’t just about showing up. Clear commitments can also mean staying engaged *during* a gathering and also *between* gatherings.

Do you have a system to track and follow up on action items? And do you have to chase people to have them do what they said they would? That’s some leakiness, right there. 

This also means that you are not getting the full value out of the meeting.

3. Clear Conversational Rules

This is a rather broad category, but I’ll give you some examples. 

In the documentary Stutz (which is amazing!) Jonah Hill films himself unpacking critical thinking tools with his therapist, Stutz. Hill suggested that we sometimes want our therapist to give us advice and we want our friends to just listen to us. But instead, it’s the other way around…our therapist just listens, and our friends “who are idiots” give us advice.

Conversational Rules can simply look like clear boundaries. 

Show of hands if anybody has ever gotten advice when they just wanted to be listened to? Or gotten advice, but the wrong kind!?

Sharing work for critique with a larger team is a great example of this. Being clear on the challenge you’re solving, what your blockers are and what you do and don’t want help or feedback on is part of the job. Check out my podcast episode on designing a culture of critique here for some insights on designing this crucial conversation.

Setting up clear boundaries is an act of Conversational Leadership. 

In my coaching mastermind group when we share a challenge we make it really really clear:

Do we want coaching on this challenge?

Do we want advice? 

Do we want people to share their own experiences with similar challenges?

Similarly, I regularly pause to set up conversational rules with my wife. If she shares a challenge from work or her life, I ask if she wants empathy, coaching or brainstorming, or something else. 

I learned this approach largely from my men’s group facilitation training. In my men's group we're very clear on boundaries. We only ask questions that help someone go deeper into their own experience of their challenge. We focus on emotions and sensations over stories and enforce that boundary.

We never offer advice. 

Clarifying the rules and boundaries of any conversation is key. 

You can do this with the group or offer guidelines and suggestions to lead the way.

The clearer the invitation, commitments and rules, the tighter (ie, less leaky) the container for the conversation is. 

4. Consistent Application of Boundaries

If you set up a container and never push back or reinforce the boundary when someone breaks a commitment or violates a rule, you wind up with a leaky container. And leaky containers are draining. People see that the boundaries of the container are porous, and things go downhill from there.

If someone misses a meeting and you say nothing, the rest of the group notices this. 

“Do the commitments matter, or do they not?” the team wonders…

If the conversational rule is that each person speaks once in a round, with no cross-talk or advice, and someone breaks that rule, do you let it slide without saying anything? Or do you remind the group of the rules and ask them to continue?

One important rule - consistent application of boundaries isn’t policing. Generally speaking, people don’t like feeling policed, forced or coerced into following rules. Make sure people understand why the rules, boundaries and commitments exist, and reconnect them to the invitation or purpose of the gathering in the first place.

In Harvard’s Negotiation Institute they suggest being “hard on the problem and soft on the people”...so, we’re never faulting a person, or making them wrong…we’re asking everyone to re-engage with the boundaries for the good of the whole group.

Tight Containers Help You Get Things Done

According to Cook’s Illustrated, a cover helps water boil faster, but not by much…a covered pot boils in just over 12 minutes and an uncovered pot boils in 13 minutes and 15 seconds.

But when you lock that lid tight…that’s when you really cook!

Growing up, I knew that my mother loved her pressure cooker and used it for almost everything. Why? Because a pressure cooker has a tight lid.

With that tight lid, the water temperature rises higher and the ingredients cook faster. That’s why instapots were the “it” gift a few years back…they’re not quite instant, but they're faster than your stockpot.

(As with so many other things, the world eventually realized my mom was onto something good!)

In a pressure cooker, instead of boiling at the usual 100 degrees Centigrade, water boils at 121 degrees. That 21-degree increase means a stew that would normally boil for an hour COULD be done in 20 minutes. That’s HUGE.

Locking your container tight gives you a cooking time that's two-thirds shorter.

Getting Things Done Increases Engagement

Disengagement is the biggest issue facing leaders of teams today. Depending on what stats you look at, easily half of employees are disengaged in the workplace. We come to work to offer value, to achieve our goals, and to make progress. Our leaders are there to help make that possible, to remove the barriers to progress. Getting things done, seeing the results of your work, is satisfying, addictive even.

When we feel no progress is being made, it’s an energy suck. When someone walks away from a meeting you’re hosting with a sense of frustration, eventually this becomes burnout, disengagement and churn.

When I run 360s for leaders, one of the key questions I ask their direct reports is “are you able to create extraordinary results with this leader?”

If you’re unsure of how your team would answer, it’s time to start tightening up your leaky containers.

The most powerful way to tighten up any container is to come into the present moment and feel the energy in the room, whether it’s virtual or physical. Does the group feel coherent, clear and energized? If not, slow down, and have the conversation about Invitations, Commitments and Conversational rules. It can take a few moments to tighten up the lid on the container, but it’s always worth the effort to really get things cooking.

Three Questions to Ask Yourself before taking on a new Project

A few weeks ago I stumbled on the lovely diagram below on twitter. It’s a simple flowchart to help answer that extremely essential and very common question:

“Should I take on this new project?”

The basic answer is: NO. You just don’t have enough time. You already have enough on your plate!!!

Delighted with the profound and straightforward wisdom of the original post, I shared the image on LinkedIn…where the conversation got a bit more complex and nuanced. (feel free to add more nuance!)

Many people offered comments to the effect of:

“But!”

and

“But!!!”

And we’ve all been there.

Something glittering comes across your path, all shiny and alluring and we start to think.

There is always an inner conversation that rolls in our heads ( in fact, in writing my book about designing conversations, Good Talk, I explored the power of inner dialogue much more than I expected) and it’s those inner conversations that rule our lives!

Maybe you’ve told yourself the same things when a new project presented itself:

“I should do this, the financial payoff could be enormous!” 

“I should do this…opportunities like this don’t come along all the time.”

“I should do this…if I pull it off it will make me look amazing!”

One commenter on LinkedIn pointed out that a more interesting question is,

“Should you make time to do this?”

They went on to offer that this question shifts our attention towards reprioritizing your time. Are we spending our time where we have the most heart and provide the most value?

This perspective is also in the spirit of my friend and mentor Allan Chochinov who once told me:

“Everything new you take on makes it harder to do everything else you’ve already taken on”.

So, taking on a new project should always give us pause.

With my head spinning from the comments, I took a hard look at the original diagram and reworked it with some new perspectives.

Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation

There are two types of motivations for doing a thing — intrinsic and extrinsic. 

Intrinsic motivation is driven by internal factors. 

Extrinsic motivation is driven by external factors. 

Extrinsic motivations can include economic pressure, emotional pressure and just good old plain inertia…we keep doing something just because that’s the way it’s always been done.

Extrinsic motivation is weaker than intrinsic in at least one sense — when the external pressure is off, the motivation disappears. So, if we’re trying to get someone else to do something, it can be a high-energy endeavor to keep the pressure on.Leading a team or an organization through extrinsic motivation is a poor choice, because we never get the best, juiciest parts of a person to show up through these approaches (more n that in a second).

Yet we try to leverage extrinsic motivation on ourselves!

Extrinsic motivation expressed as inner speech could look like the first three questions above. Also:

“I should do this, I really need the money!” (economic pressure)

“I should do this…otherwise I’ll let everyone down if I don’t!” (emotional pressure)

Intrinsic motivation points the way to three more interesting questions we could ask ourselves as we consider taking on a project.

Invitation is how we bring others (and ourselves) into the conversation. 

The Power of Intrinsic Motivation

Intrinsic motivation is described as having the qualities of autonomy, mastery and purpose in Daniel Pink’s book Drive. But I prefer the description co-authors Lindsay McGregor and Neel Doshi offer in their book Primed to Perform. They point to play as the most deeply intrinsic motivator.

After all, inside of every adult is a kid, who just loves what they love.

 Turning work into play is the best way to get the best out of others…and it’s also the way to get the best out of ourselves.

McGregor and Doshi offer two other levers of intrinsic motivation: Purpose and Potential. Purpose is motivating, but not as deeply motivating as pure fun. Play is still the peak motivator, even if it’s hard for us adults to tap into.

Potential is a powerful motivator, but less so than Purpose, because potential is in the future. We’re still animals underneath the clothes we wear, and the future exerts a weaker pull than the present. 

The Three Intrinsic Motivation Questions: Play, Purpose and Potential

When someone comes to me for coaching, if they are at a big fork in the road, I’d suggest three questions. Each can help us to reflect on the three levers of intrinsic motivation. The diagram is a bit more convoluted than the original…but it reflects the complexity of life and the journey towards creating a life we love..

should you take on that new project? Yes…if it connects with your deepest sense of intrinsic motivation

Play: Will this project create pure joy for me, right now?

Purpose: Does this project connect to my unique zone of genius or my biggest, hairiest, audacious goals?

Potential: Will this project help create a life I love?

An Inner-Work Checklist for reflection on that shiny project

Being able to answer the play, purpose and potential questions above requires us to do a few things:

1. Know how our whole body responds when we consider the project. Getting out of our heads and into our present-tense embodied experience call tell us a lot… if we pay attention.

2. Do we know where our zone of genius lies? Coined by Gay Hendricks in his book The Big Leap, he suggests that there are many things we can do with our time and our talent. Our zone of genius is the best use of our time AND our talent. We may be competent and even excellent at many things. Hendricks suggests that we should commit to spending as much time as possible engaged with our deepest talents, aligning ourselves with our best use — our purpose, what we were made to do. 

3. Do we know our BHAG? The notion of a BHAG (or a Big Hairy Audacious Goal) was coined in “Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies” by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras. Knowing your BHAG can help you say yes or no to a project. If it connects to your BHAG, find time for it.

4. The last question “Will this create the life I love?” comes from my coaching coach, Robert Ellis’ work in Coaching from Essence. He teaches that we all have a core essence, that when expressed, is valuable and worthwhile. In short: You are enough. When we let our essence express itself fully, we feel it. Creating a life you love means finding forms that will help you express your essence. That is our highest potential, fully expressed

5. Finally, the diagram as I’ve recreated it, asks us to be intentional about STOPPING doing other things. If we find something that aligns with our sense of play, purpose and potential, it’s time to take a look at the other things on our calendar. Make space and time to look at how you are spending your time!

The Talking and Thinking Gap

Whenever I am designing a gathering, I think about the constraints.

It might be partly my physics degree and partly my design degree.

After all, physics tells us there are some basic constants in the universe that make this universe the way it is - the speed of light, the mass of an electron…you can’t break the law of gravity, you just have to work with it!

Similarly, in design school they taught us that when you’re working with steel, glass, plastics, or any other material, you have to respect and harness the fundamentals of that material.

When your material is people and conversation, you have to respect other kinds of constraints.

How long can people really focus before they need a break?

How much time in their day can they justify setting aside for this conversation?

How many people can we fit into the room!?!

Some constraints can be bent…few can be broken without consequence.

One fundamental constraint of the human condition is the thought-intention-expression gap.

Recently an Instagram friend shared a painting with two circles. One, rather large, was labeled

“What I meant to say”

While the other, much smaller circle was labeled

“What I said”

But there is a third, even larger circle that needs to be taken into consideration:

“Everything I am thinking about this topic”

The basic constraint, in mathematical terms, is this:

People can think at up to 4,000 words a minute.

We can only speak at 125 words per minute, in most cases.

In other words:

There will always be more to say than we can ever express.

There is more that we are thinking about a topic than we might even hope to say.

Of course, there are oodles of famous quotes about this gap…especially when we multiply this diagram by however many people are in the room.

For example:

“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure that you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”

– Robert J. McCloskey, US Ambassador

If you intend to host gatherings, meetings, offsites, strategy sessions, any conversation, really, that are deeper, more connected, and therefore more effective, it’s safe to assume that slowing the conversation down will help you create the space for more deeper connections and more generous sharing.

This talking - thinking gap is why the Listening Triangle I shared a few weeks back is so powerful - leveraging the Listening triangle can help you make sure you get to the heart of a conversation.

How to host deeper connections with the Listening Triangle

Mindfully Slowing down the conversation

Lately, I’ve been hearing lots of friends and colleagues talk about slowing down a bit for the summer.

If it’s summer where you are, and you have the means, that’s an awesome choice

For example, if you’re in the Northeast of the United States of America the peaches are awesome right now…and such delicacies deserve to be savored slowly, far away from the glow of a screen.

(If you happen to be reading this essay months after I wrote it, don’t worry - every season is a great time to slow down.)

Slowing down doesn’t just mean taking time away from work, we can slow down during work, too.

But I don’t mean slacking off for a nap, although plenty of research says that’s an awesome idea.

Slowing Down the Conversation

What would it feel like to give an issue a bit more breathing room?

What would it feel like to solve one key challenge instead of tackling several challenges during a meeting?

What if we stretched out the creative process, just a bit, and came up with one more idea before we started choosing the best way forward?

What if we dropped in, slowed down, and really listened to someone, before moving the conversation forward?

Conventional Conversations move things forward

In conventional conversations, we often ask a question, hear the answer and then move on to the next questions we have in our pockets. We assume that the answer we heard is sufficient, and that it resembles what the person actually meant to say. Rapid fire! Let’s move this convo along, people!

The fact is, while folks can speak around 150 words per minute, we think at the rate of thousands of words per minute.

What does that mean in practical terms? No one can ever say all they mean to.

Plus, most of us, when we’re meant to be listening, also tend to think, even just a little bit about the next question, or how we’ll respond.

Active Listening is a great start.

Paraphrase and confirm! It’s like looping back and “double stitching” each thread of the conversation instead of moving forward in lockstep.

Active Listening Conversations go deeper

But the listening triangle goes one step even deeper!

The Listening Triangle

Triangulation is the process of finding out where you really are in a territory by taking a series of measurements. This approach, applied to listening, was recommended in an HBR article about managing a polarized workforce.

But this listening mental model works well when you want to cool down any heated conversation, or just slow things down for the summer.

Here are the basic steps:

1. Ask a real, powerful question.

2. Actively listen, ie, paraphrase and confirm that you got it right.

3. Re-ask. Don’t move on to another topic. Shift your question just a little bit to dive one step deeper and help triangulate your understanding of the person’s position.

I like to draw the Listening triangle like above, almost like a spiral, going inwards. Instead of moving the conversation forward, we’re taking it deeper, into the heart of the matter.

The authors of the HBR article suggest that the listening triangle can help you listen to understand, not just to respond, which can foster empathy and reduce polarized conversations.

This mode of relating to others can be transformative.

Slowing down your responses by re-asking can also ensure that your assumptions about someone’s beliefs are anchored in reality, not your biases or first reactions..

The listening triangle can also help someone feel really, really deeply heard.

I love to use the listening triangle in my coaching conversations.

If you take the listening triangle out for a spin this summer, let me know how it works out for you.

Five Steps to Manage a Crisis: ABCDE

Stepping back from the problem

Acting from a Crisis Mode is rarely effective. That’s because when we’re experiencing a crisis we either feel like we’re *inside* of the problem, or the problem is inside of us.

As with many conversations, slowing our inner dialogue process down and avoiding jumping to conclusions is often helpful. This can help us pull ourselves out of the problem, and the problem out from inside of us and look at the challenge from a different perspective - maybe even several perspectives!

The concept of “in the problem” vs “the problem is in us” are from my coaching mentor, Robert Ellis. The sketches above are modeled after his and his work in Coaching from Essence.

The sketch below is inspired by an exercise Erin Warner hosted during my Facilitation Masterclass. Erin had the attendees visualize their biggest challenge, and asked them to visualize walking around that challenge, while physically moving in our spaces. Walking around our challenge is powerful - creating movement helps us get unstuck.

Once we’ve done some of that work, inviting others into the challenge in a more strategic way can be a lot easier.

It was Shakespeare who famously wrote in Hamlet:

 “There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

I have a favorite quote from the same play that is a slightly weirder way to say the same thing:

“I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams.”

All of which is to say: it is often our own beliefs and perspectives that make life challenging - or amazing. 

Living in a tiny space (a nutshell) is only bad if we want something more/different.

So, having a process to examine our own beliefs about a problem, challenge or crisis is worthwhile. And wouldn't you know it, such a process exists! It’s a five-stage exercise called ABCDE, and Dr. Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, is credited with creating this exercise. I use it with my coaching clients often, I use it on myself, it’s in my book Good Talk, and I’d love to share it with you.

But first…why does it work?

Your Mind is Racing

I heard a story on NPR about a woman who would leave herself voice messages, talking to herself about her challenges, while she was out walking her dog. Later, she would listen to the recordings. She could then take a step back, and listen to herself, as if she were listening to the problems of a friend. We all know how much better we are at solving other people’s problems than our own.

Many of us are also kinder to other people than we are to ourselves, applying a very different and more forgiving error recognition OS (operating system) with friends or family. Taking her internal conversation outside (changing the interface of the conversation) shifted how she related to it.

Externalizing her inner conversation also slowed down its cadence. Self-talk is fast—really fast. 

Researchers have clocked inner speech at a pace of 4,000 words per minute —which is about 10 times faster than verbal speech. The voicemail method slows self-talk down. Like taking in a landscape on a stroll versus on a bullet train, she was able to hear nuances in her own perspective that would be easy to miss otherwise.

Comedian George Carlin said, “The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept.” Even with externalization, there is a tendency to agree with ourselves, especially if there’s an issue we’re passionately, stubbornly stuck on. It can be hard to break the thread of a circling thought. Our internal conversation can cut a deep groove and get stuck in a rut. Here is an exercise that can help you change your mind:

ABCDE: Change Your Mind in Five Easy Steps

Are you willing to attempt to disagree with yourself? The thread of this conversation is designed to guide you through a discussion with yourself, and invite you to take more sides in the conversation. Using a “paper interface” for this self-conversation can slow the conversation down and get everything out of your head.

The exercise can also clarify the impact of the stories you’re telling yourself and generate alternatives.

Grab some paper, a pen and a timer. Give yourself five minutes to brain-write (free-association journaling) each step.

Adversity: Capture a detailed, fact-based who/what/when/where of a challenge you’re struggling with. For example, if you’re upset that someone cut quickly in front of you while driving, the adversity is just “I got cut off on the highway.”

Belief: What was running through your mind when the adversity happened? What’s looping through it now? Your belief, in this case, might be that the driver who cut you off is a jerk, inconsiderate, even dangerous.

Consequence: What is the result or impact of your belief on you? Are you mad, sad, or something else? Focus on your own experience. 

Disputation: Write down as many alternative interpretations of the facts as you can. Can you find evidence that might dispute your belief? Was the person who cut you off driving to the hospital? Were they having a really bad day? What else could be true?

Energy: Describe to yourself how these alternative beliefs and narratives make you feel. If the energy from one of these options is better, invite yourself to experiment with it more.

Triple Loop Learning: Being, Thinking and Doing

Learning happens on three levels. The most primal is single loop learning - doing something to get a result…and checking in to see if it got you closer to your goal. 

Think about following a recipe step by step and checking in at the end - does it look and taste like it should? If you’ve ever used someone else’s agenda or activities for a meeting and not gotten the results you wanted, you might ask - did I DO exactly what I should have done?

Often there are unseen variables in a recipe - the freshness of the herbs, how one cuts the ingredients, the altitude of the cook - and the attitude of the cook, too!

Shifts at the level of thinking are essential in complex contexts. A Chef nearly always has to modify a recipe on the fly to adapt to evolving conditions. Otherwise, we can get caught in an Insanity Loop: Doing the same thing, over and over again, and never getting the results we want.

To get out of a trap of single loop, reactive learning, we need to think differently, which can be a challenge. How do we shift how we think?

Which brings us to the third loop of learning. Shifts at the level of thinking can produce powerful results…and the easiest, most high-leverage way to shift your thinking is at the level of being. We can shift our being by letting go of what we’re not, or by shifting our aspirations and our imagination.

Working at the level of being is transformative. Shifts in mindset help you reimagine your role as a host and leader.

The Triple loop learning model draws on the work of Chris Argyris Donald Schön, but this version, boiled down to its essential core, came to me through my coach, Robert Ellis.

Gender at Work: Four tips for defeating Mansplaining and Manspreading

The Bird of Humanity has two wings

The founder of the Baha'i faith is quoted as saying:

“The world of humanity is possessed of two wings: the male and the female. So long as these two wings are not equivalent in strength, the bird will not fly.”

I love this quote, but it’s a bit outdated since it was written in the early 1900s. Today we might say that the bird of humanity also has a lot of non-binary feathers that play a critical role in flight. We're all part of the same bird.

Lifting up women everywhere and strengthening their presence in the halls of power is necessary to stabilize the bird of humanity and help us all move forward together.

Another necessary part of "stabilizing the bird" is to encourage the “male wing” to use some different muscles and re-imagine what masculinity can be.

I’ve been co-leading a men’s group since 2018 and men’s work has been an important part of my ongoing personal development. Men’s work has allowed me to expand my emotional range and resilience. It’s also expanded my range and depth in my one-on-one coaching and team transformation work.

Men have work to do to help shift how we work.

How we talk is how we work

How we talk is how we live, relate… and how we work. 

Conversations are the smallest, atomic unit of change. 

In my book, Good Talk, I identified 9 elements of conversation dynamics that, when shifted, can change how conversations work. In this essay, I’ll share a few of these key elements and ways to reimagine them to create more gender-balanced and productive conversations at work.

There’s work that women-identifying folks can do to shift how conversations work (and I’ll share some strategies below), work that all leaders of any gender-identity can do… but men also need to do their own work, on themselves. 

Let’s say that again: it's not on women to shift how conversations work at work. There are strategies below to help…but men have a lot of work to do, starting with themselves.

I’ll give you a personal example: I rather like feeling smart.

Not having an answer to an important question is frustrating. I get impatient.

I don’t think I’m alone in this.

Very few people come to me and say:

“I’d like to get my team to have longer meetings, with less-clear outcomes.”

Sitting in the mystery isn’t really the flavor of the 21st century.

Why?

In my own experience, I noticed that being smart, clever and having the right answer was an easy way to get approval from my father at the dinner table.

Good grades were rewarded. Slacking grades were a disappointment. 

Verbal jousting was the family pastime. 

Being silent and reflective was a value, too, but not in a conversation - being first off the blocks got you points.

My pre-teen brain imprinted the lesson:

“talking first = good, 

listening = not as good”. 

“Knowing = good, 

uncertainty = not so good.”

I don’t think I’m alone in this, either.

Agility, Design thinking, Sprints, structured facilitation all offer the promise of better results in less time and all are very, very popular things to train a team on, all for good reason.

Wondering, wandering, asking why and pumping the brakes aren’t quite as flashy and popular, which is a bummer.

A few years back I interviewed my friend Kai Hailey, then the head of the Sprint Leaders Academy at Google, on my podcast. The Sprint is a key part of Google’s startup culture, and helps them move quickly. 

Sprints are about helping teams and organizations move faster…but Kai is passionate about slowing down, too. Why? To make sure we’re all heading in the right direction and to consider the long-term impacts and ethics of our products and services.

I think we all suffer from “go go go” disease… but I think that men have a unique role in the creation of this situation… and in transforming it.

Men’s Work and The Man Box

Men need to learn to listen more deeply. 

Men need to learn to listen more deeply to women. 

Men need to learn to listen more deeply to other men. 

And Men need to learn to listen more deeply to ourselves - to recognize, deeply feel and process our emotions with other men - and discover a broader range of capacities….in other words, we need to get out of the “man box”.

When I look at Jennifer Armbrust’s diagrams of the qualities of a masculine economy and a feminine economy, I feel a much greater pull to the feminine economy!

The Man Box is a rigid set of expectations and perceptions of what is “manly” behavior. 

We tell boys to “stop crying” instead of “It’s okay to feel sad.”

We tell boys “be brave” instead “I understand that you feel scared.”

Because no man perfectly fits the description, all men are limited by hegemonic masculinity through policing of behaviors seen as “violations” (Edwards & Jones, 2009). 

Men are constantly pushing each other to get back in the man box.

Just google “toxic masculinity” if you need a reminder of what men pushing each other back into the Man Box gets us. 

You could also google “mass firing over zoom” to see why men need to learn new modes of being - not just in their lives, but at work. 

The future of work requires masculinity to find comfort in new ways of being.

Men who are forceful are “leaders”. Women who are forceful are hysterical.

… so we are taught. 

Dominance, power, and strength have historically been seen as "male" traits, after all. In fact, there is ample evidence that women are punished for acting too “bossy” or being “pushy”.

Similarly, historically "feminine"  behaviors, like vulnerability, collaboration, caring, connection and empathy are not deeply cultivated or encouraged in men. 

If a man leans too far in that direction, you’ll get pushed back into the Man Box with accusations of being “too soft” or a “sissy.” 

In order for the bird of humanity to shift, in order for new modes of holistic leadership to thrive, men have to step into new ways of working… and to do their own emotional work.

Stepping out of the Man-Box

Men coming together to see each other, and to be seen, to feel deeply and to slow down is a radical act against the norms of masculinity - learning to feel other emotions besides anger and to accept each other as we are, instead of policing each other back into the Man Box.

At one point every man has felt like he wasn’t enough.

Men’s work is just about being mindful and relating intentionally with other people who identify as men, to allow ourselves to just be, together…to stop policing each other, and start supporting each other as whole persons. Men…if you’re reading this: Join a men’s group!

Gender at Work: Hedging, Mansplaining and ManSpreading

Some people still reading this might actually doubt the proposition that gender affects conversations at all. 

Sigh.

Women tend to use what Caroline Turner, author of Difference Works, calls “Disclaimers, hedges and tag questions.”

Power is a fundamental element of conversations, and disclaimers push power away from the speaker: 

“You might have thought of this, but…”

Tags like “I hope to” hedge against the appearance of boasting, or to lessen the appearance of power grabbing. 

“I hope I can generate some ideas for your project…”

If you want to see what this kind of hedging taken to the absurd maximum looks like, enjoy this instagram reel.

In Western culture, speaking directly and bluntly is seen as powerful and “masculine.” 

Women are punished for taking on so-called masculine traits. When they do, men and women describe so-called masculine women as unlikable or “bossy.”

On the other hand, any grammar checker will tell you to take out extra words and the passive voice from your communications:

I think…
I feel like…
It would be great if…
Should be able to…
Basically…

Every leader or manager wants teammates who can say what is really going on - this is the essence of psychological safety. The cost of women feeling like they can’t be direct and own their own knowledge, insight and power is real, from inside a surgery room or a board room or a zoom room.

Ladies: Don’t hedge! Say what you know, and stand in your power!

Dudes: Learn to deal with powerful ladies!

Mansplaining Antidotes

1. Amplification

2. Threading

In meetings, women commonly report getting their ideas “mansplained” back to them. This can lead female-identifying people to speak less (what’s the point, after all!?), and hold feelings of frustration and resentment. 

Sometimes comments spoken by women are not taken seriously until a man agrees with them, and often men will wind up, in essence, stealing a woman’s ideas—running with them, without any attribution to their source, which can affect the promotion of females, equality of pay scales and the retention of a diverse workforce. 

Quite a cascade of effects from one conversation.

This asymmetric gender dynamic happened even inside the Obama White House. Female staffers, who comprised only one third of the staff, had to work to be heard. Frustrated, they began a strategy they called amplification, leveraging two fundamental elements of conversation: Threading (the weaving of conversational narratives) and Turn-taking (being mindful of who speaks when).

Whenever a woman made a key point in a meeting, other women would intentionally repeat it, while giving credit to its author. If a man tried to adapt or co-opt the idea, the female staffers would continue to re-attribute the idea and re-amplify it, bringing the thread of the conversation back to the original sharer.

This careful use of threading and turn-taking left little room for the men to ignore the women’s contributions. The female staffers also seemed to be mindfully leveraging another element of conversations, Error & Repair, by not bothering to attribute malice to the men’s actions or by calling them out or blaming them. They just used turn-taking and threading to fix the imbalance. 

Like pouring clear water into muddy water, slowly, the consistent application of this “amplification” strategy delivered clear results. 

Not only did the Washington Post report on this strategy, apparently, Obama seemed to notice the shift, and began calling on women more often in meetings. Also, during Obama’s second term women gained parity with men in Obama’s inner circle.

Manspreading Antidotes

3. Timeboxing

4. Turn-taking Structures

Manspreading usually refers to the wide-legged habits of male commuters - taking up more than one butt’s-width of bench space on a train or bus.

Manspreading exists in conversations, too.

Many “traditional men” would assume that “traditional women” are more talkative…but some research shows that men talk more than women (especially in groups) and that when they take a turn, they speak for longer. In a now-classic study, Barbara and Gene Eakins recorded seven university faculty meetings. They found that, with one exception, the men at the meeting spoke more often and, without exception, spoke longer.

The longest comment by a woman at all seven gatherings 
was shorter than the shortest comment by a man.

Read that once more and let it sink in. 

Yikes. Not cool, guys!

This manspreading problem is easy to fix, though. 

Don’t yell at the talkative dudes. 

Don’t get an Elmo doll.

Get out a timer. 

It can feel like you’re making your meetings more mechanical, and less natural…but the “natural” way of meeting isn’t working.

Calling on women first in lectures has been shown to balance the levels of gender participation but these kinds of policies have gotten some backlash.

I recommend hearing from *each* person in a meeting for a few short minutes on whatever question, challenge or problem the group is gathering to resolve. Giving people a moment to think or journal on the topic will deliver even better results.

If that adds up to too much time, your meeting is too big, or you have scoped too little time for real conversation.

TLDR: Set up structures that ensure equal airtime for all! 

Don’t get caught up in berating offenders, build  systems of equitable participation.

Who knew that the most powerful tool to dismantle the patriarchy was a timer?

How to Dodge a Question

“What was your salary at your last position?”

“Are you planning on having kids?”

It happens often: we get asked a question we don’t want to answer, or that we don’t feel like we should answer.

We can also get asked questions that we legally don’t have to answer (like #2!)

In that moment, we have a few options. 

We can reply honestly or lie. 

We can decline to answer or give a “non-answer”...or we can deflect, artfully, with another question.

Each option comes with costs and benefits, both economic and relational.

Maintaining Trust and Likability

Saying “I don’t have to answer that” might be true…but can make you seem unlikable. Sigh.

According to this paper, deflection, answering a direct question with another question is a helpful way to maintain a relationship while avoiding a topic. 

This handy table from the paper sums up what honesty, avoidance, lying, paltering (what the authors call a non-answer) and deflection can look like:

Four tips for Artful Deflection

Deflection takes Poise, Humor and Staying on Topic-ish

1. Take a micro-pause. Some direct questions can make your blood freeze or boil, depending. Responding from that place of feeling activated isn’t likely to help you. Panic makes us freeze up. So, take a breath! Try not to audibly groan with anxiety while you do. :-)

2. Stay in the Context. Subtle evasion by asking questions works to avoid a topic…but only if the evasion question is in the same domain according to these two researchers from Harvard. If someone asks about your salary you can’t deflect by asking about vacations. That’s just too obvious!

Conversations that veer off course violate conversation theorist Paul Grice’s Maxims: Conversations are cooperative ventures. Being uncooperative makes you look…uncooperative. You have to keep hold of the thread of the conversation.

So how do you avoid a topic by staying ON topic?! That brings me to tip 3:

3. Playful Inversion. When someone asks in an interview how much you made at your last position and you reply “Does that change who’s paying for lunch?” you are staying in the topic - we’re still talking about money, in a way.

This question also leverages a bit of dry humor…it’s a bit cheeky. Humor lightens the mood and makes your deflection seem…fun.

The person who asked you the question ALSO wants to stay on topic and be helpful…so they have to grin at your response, even if your playful inversion is a bit rough around the edges. In any case, this helps you with #4:

4. Playing for time: “Do you have kids” is an honest question/response to the question “are you planning to have kids?”. It shows cooperativeness and relatedness. Maybe you actually want advice from them!?

Any deflection also buys you time to go back to step one - finding a bit of calm. Unless you KEEP taking step one, it’s hard to get and stay loose and playful in the conversation.

What have you found is a helpful way to avoid a question? When have you had to use it? When have you wished you had these skills at your fingertips?

Minimum Viable Transformation

How many people does it take to change a culture?

No…this isn’t the start of a bad joke. It’s a real question!

Margaret Mead famously said:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”

But how small of a group does it really take?!

A 2018 study from the University of Pennsylvania attempted to put a number to that Mead truism…

Damon Centola, an associate professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania did a series of experiments, creating groups of online communities and trying to get them to set a norm and then, to shift the norm.

Professor Centola concluded, after running 10 iterations of this experiment, that change became inevitable when 25% of the people were on the side of making the shift - what Centola calls a  “committed minority group” driving the change.

So, if you want to begin changing the culture, you might want to get at least 25 percent of the people in your community on your side.

One asterisk in the experiment – the change actually started with planting ONE activist in the groups. 

So…what’s the journey from one person to a 25% committed minority?

Step One: Nonviolent Change

Erica Chenoweth, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study gave a TEDx talk in 2013, sharing insights about patterns she was seeing underlying one of the hardest types of change: political change. And not just any type of political change…the hardest and most important type - changing an oppressive regime or public policy.

One surprising fact of Professor Chenoweth’s research is that nonviolent change is more successful than violent change. More and more, violent change is rejected as illegitimate, and effective only 10% of the time. But non-violent change is, on the whole, 70% effective.

So - if you’re trying to create a change in your culture, leveraging non-violent methods are going to be your friend - tools like Design Thinking, co-creation, Appreciative inquiry…and intentionally grounding all of these approaches in Non-Violent, inclusive language.

Step Two: The Active, Sustained 3.5% Rule

Again, what’s awesome about the 25% result in the University of Philadelphia work, is that the change initiative started with one activist. 

ONE. 

So, while you might need 25%, you just need to start with one voice - it could be yours!

The 25% rule was just their experimental measurement of when an inevitable tipping point acceleration to a new way of working occurred.

Dr. Chenoweth’s research puts some clarity into the journey from one to 25% and maybe offers a different number.

Looking at hundreds of political change campaigns over the last century, Chenoweth found that it takes around 3.5% of the population to ensure serious political change. Which is, you may have noticed, somewhat less than 25%!

The 3.5% rule comes with an asterisk, too: those people need to be actively engaged in the change, and engaged over time - sustained involvement. And the work needs to be grounded in Non-Violence resistance, not violent aggression.

Grief, Loss and Invitation

If you’re reading this far, most likely, you’ve got a team you’re hoping to grow into new ways of working or a department or organization you’re hoping to shift. 

I’ve been involved in many change initiatives over the years, and mostly, that change was decided in one room, and then explained and trained in another set of rooms.

I wouldn’t call this conventional process of change non-violent. One coaching client of mine described their current situation as being whipped around by “the re-org of the day”. So much change, coming down the line SO often has people spinning their heads!

Change can create reactive resistance when people aren’t part of the process. Change means loss of the old way of working, without any say in the matter. That sense of loss is grief, and it’s real trauma. Acknowledging and accepting this reality can help us design more inclusive change models.

Certainly, my friend Bree Groff, a partner at SY Partners found that identifying 6 types of loss in change initiatives helped her be more intentional about leading change - we talked about these six types of grief and loss in organizational change in our podcast conversation here.

The core of non-violence is invitation - that someone can come into the change, and make it their own, can be part of a co-creative process, to see and feel their stamp on the process. 

Invitation also means to be able to leave safely at any time. My friend Daniel Mezik introduced me to the importance of invitation in change - and you might enjoy our podcast conversation here about that.

Corporate Transformation: Sheep-Dipping Training vs. Sustained Coaching

I’m embarrassed to say that in the past, I’ve been involved in transformation by “Sheep Dipping” (as one of my clients described it).

Usually, Sheep Dipping describes dipping actual Sheep into an actual solution (fungicide, most often). 

In a corporate transformation context, we’d dip a group of people in a non-solution: A one-day training on the new modes of thinking and working. We’d train a bunch of people, and then move on to the next batch, with maybe a few check-in calls over the next weeks and months, with fewer and fewer folks showing up to each check-in call.

Dipping sheep, actual sheep, actually works. Giving folks a one-day training and expecting they’ll start being different is a tremendous ask. The forgetting curve is real -  people walk out of a training session and lose at least half of what they heard nearly immediately - especially if we’re talking about complex behavior change, like better communication or collaboration. There’s no simple manual that works in all contexts (not even my helpful book on designing better conversations!)

One could also describe this “sheep dipping” approach as “Spray and Pray”.

One aspect of Prayer is hoping that folks will start using the tools and principles we’re teaching them. Bridging the gap between general examples in a training and putting those principles into practice is always a challenge - a challenge folks are often left to manage on their own.

The other aspect of prayer is praying that these folks will stick around.

The old joke goes: 

“What if we train them and they leave?” to which the reply is:

“What if we don’t and they stay?!”

Getting a 25% rate of people trained and bought in on new ways of working, and putting those tools into practice significantly, is a challenge, especially since folks often look at training as an opportunity to grow, and as a signal that the company wants to change - that’s why they hired an external trainer for this, after all.

I’ve found that if the culture doesn’t change, and change quickly, folks are quite happy to take their new-trained mindsets to a company that is into these new ways of thinking and working. 

Getting to 25% when a company is losing folks to the great reshuffling is a challenge, to say the least.

Trying to train large numbers of people at once also allows social loafing - hiding in a crowd of dozens of people is easy.

Step Three: The Law of One person and one step

We all know the quotes about a journey starting with a single step and that we need to be the change we want to see in the world.

What if the 3.5% rule applied to your context? What if we don’t need to train everybody, but instead, just need to coach a small group of people to create a non-violent resistance to the old ways of working, and to slowly, relentlessly bring the new ways in? What would that look like in your context? 

And more importantly…what do you need to do in order to be the change you want to see in your world? What is the first domino you would need to set up and get into motion?

Recipes, Cookbooks, and Chef's Mindset

I love a good recipe.

Take this one, from Food52, for Lemon Bars with a salty, olive oil crust.

I’m not sure how I first stumbled on this recipe, but I do know that I nearly never make it...or at least, not in full.

The crust, however, has become a trusted friend. It’s so easy to make compared to a traditional butter crust, and it’s really tasty.

I know that thanksgiving is coming up for some of us, so I’ll just note that it makes a great crust for pumpkin pie, pumpkin pie cheesecake and pecan pie.

You’re welcome. :-)

The Recipe does not make the Chef

I’ve written before about how the recipe doesn’t make the chef.

What does make a chef is a willingness to pull things apart and to see how they’re made.

Also, the courage to try new things - to take a new recipe out for a spin, and see how it tastes, and to remix cuisines, flavors and techniques in unexpected ways, in pursuit of excellence.

Take a simple recipe for a group conversation, like “Integrated Decision Making” (IDM for short) illustrated below.

IDM comes from the Holacracy world...here’s the recipe, written out:

1. Present a proposal
The proposer states their proposal and the issue this proposal is attempting to resolve.

2. Clarifying questions
Anybody can ask questions that seek information or more understanding. These are not judgments or reactions.

3. Reactions round
Each person reacts to the proposal. Discussions are not allowed

4. Amend & Clarify
The proposer can clarify the proposal further, or amend it, based on these reactions. If it’s not possible to amend right away, the proposer can stop the process and go back to the drawing board.

5. Objection Round
Objections are captured without discussion; the proposal is adopted if none come up. Two questions are asked here: ”Do you see any reasons why adopting this proposal would cause harm or move us backward?” And/or “Is it good enough for now, and safe enough to try?”

6. Integration
If an objection is raised, the facilitator tests the objection for validity. If it is found to be valid, they can lead a discussion to craft an amendment that would avoid the objection. If several objections are raised, they are addressed one at a time, until all are removed.

The process is pretty straightforward and clear.

What’s NOT clear or straightforward is how to get a group of people to engage in this process.

From Outer Games to Inner Games

This is where the work of facilitation shifts from the outer world (doing) to the inner world of thinking and being.

IDM is a nicely designed facilitation “game”...it has rules, it begins and ends...and if everyone on your teams knows how to “play” the IDM “game” it can be pretty effective.

But...How do you build up the courage to suggest a new process to folks and onboard them onto it?

How do you develop the storytelling skills to explain the value and benefits of trying a new model out?

How do you keep your impostor syndrome from collapsing in on yourself when the group hits a snag in the middle?

How do you herd all the cats when someone tries to break the process?

This is where the work of facilitation becomes the work of self-development, self-management and self-leadership. It’s where you push your edge and face your limits and your shadow.

There are two ways I can help with this inner and outer work.

One is the free course I made on developing your facilitation style, through a visual sketching exercise. If you haven’t checked it out, you can sign up here. If you have a co-worker or friend who you know needs to push their boundaries and expand into facilitation more deeply, feel free to send it their way!

The other offering I have is the Facilitation Masterclass I host. It’s 12 weeks deep dive into the inner *and* the outer game of facilitation.

In the Facilitation Masterclass we explore recipes galore...but we don’t neglect the development of the inner skills you need to grow and develop as a facilitator and a leader.

It’s best for folks who are already leading groups and teams inside a company or as consultants and who want to nerd out with other facilitation nerds and find more community.

I’ve also found that folks who have dabbled in facilitation and want to go off the deep end are grateful that they said yes to coming.

Finding the Crust (ie, the Core Idea)

When I look at the IDM process, I see the core of the process as separating the conversation about “What” from the conversation about “So What?” and “Now What?”.

“What” is the proposal or idea. It’s “what” we are considering.
“So what” are the clarifications and reactions.
“Now what” would be the objection and Integration steps.

This core idea is simple and straightforward, and it doesn't require you to explain the whole process at once or to get over the hurdle of explaining what "Integrated Decision Making" means.

Saying “Let’s start using the Integrated Decision Making process” sounds like a chore.

Suggesting we share ideas and clarify them before corresponding to them or objecting to them…to me, that sounds like a nice, solid crust to build a pie on top of.

Adding a sprinkle of...

Remixing and layering group conversation modalities is my jam.

Take the “reactions” round.

One could lead this session freestyle - all reactions accepted however folks want to share them. IDM suggests sharing “in the round” with no crosstalk, which isn’t a bad recipe.

I prefer to add a sprinkle of Rose, Thorn and Bud (RTB) to this step.

People (myself included) love to skew to the negative. Asking for feedback on “what’s good” in the proposal first (a rose) as well as for “what’s missing or not good” (ie, a thorn) can help make sure that a reactions round is balanced, considered and more psychologically safe.. (You can read a bit more about RTB and other ways to split up a reflections process here. RTB as a way to cultivate safety is, in my view, a protocol of protection. Read more about those here.)

The Art of Invitation

This is the heart of the chef’s mindset: You cook up a lovely meal and plop it down in front of a hungry crowd. They eat it, with joy and gratitude.

Cooking up a tasty team conversation is just the same. Explaining the entire process you used to make the food is not required. Announcing the courses of the meal and the next course up is a nice touch, though. (ie, explaining the next activity in plain and simple language, in the context of the whole experience).

This way of bringing people into a new conversation is inviting, not intimidating. It’s not selling or pushing...it’s inviting people in.

My dream is to have you all mixing and remixing, inviting and engaging team conversations, and helping your organizations make great things.

If you want to hang out at the chef’s table, definitely check out my Facilitation Masterclass.

If you want to live the chef’s mindset in your work and want more personalized coaching, you can get in touch with me here.

Conversational Range

Listen to this article:

When you hear the word “conversation” the image that most likely lights up in your brain is of two people facing each other (or these days, in a zoom room).

What happens if those two people are at a party and another person steps up? The two people might swivel outward and invite that third person in. Now the conversation is literally bigger.

As more people get invited into the larger conversation, the dynamics shift. The cadence might heat up as people lean in and engage (or cool off as people look at their phones).

Turn taking might flow through the group as various people hold the floor in a dynamic group discussion. People might make side comments to their neighbors and get drawn into smaller group interactions. This could break the big circle apart into small groups.  If you walk into a party and see ten people in a big circle, you can be reasonably sure that there’s a very funny or popular person holding that circle together.

Hosting these types of dynamic conversations online requires artistry, engineering and design…and the ability to see conversations as a material we can shape - incidentally that’s the core idea behind my book Good Talk. Helping others find their own place of power and purpose as they shape conversations is also why I host my Facilitation Masterclass.

What’s your Conversational Range?

Each of us has a conversational range. What size of conversation brings you alive? Are you more at home in intimate interactions or in big, sprawling discussions? Do you like “single serving friendships”, as described in Fight Club, or do you prefer conversations that are long and meandering…or ones that evolve over decades?

David Whyte’s book The Three Marriages suggests a unique way to think about our conversational range—as a set of marriages. In Whyte’s model, we should each cultivate a healthy “marriage” in these three realms.

The first marriage he outlines is much like a conventional marriage with a beloved person. These sort of intimate relationships nourish our lives through love and mutual support. He also points to the marriage we have with our work, our dedication to our purpose in the larger world. Finally, there’s the marriage we have with ourselves: creating space and time for inner growth and development.

Often people sacrifice one of these relationships for the sake of another, and pay a price for that bargain later in life. We all know too well how a relationship can falter when one person disappears into themselves, or loses themselves in their work. Sacrificing yourself and your work and “living on love” is an equally untenable situation. Whyte suggests that “work-life balance” is too simplistic of a solution to the challenge. It’s more about these relationships being in a dynamic conversation.

Over the years of hosting my podcast, I’ve learned that well-balanced leaders are well-balanced in their ability to navigate the full conversational spectrum of life, to be able to navigate the entire scale from small to large. Being a whole person means being able to cultivate meaningful conversations across this entire range.

The Perfect Conversation

In my recent podcast interview, my friend Michael Bervell outlines a similar conversation model to the one David Whyte lays out, but with some more mathematical straightforwardness.

If you haven’t met Michael before, he’s a Ghanaian-American angel-investor, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and philosopher. He currently serves as the youngest President of the Harvard Club of Seattle and works as a Portfolio Development Manager at M12, Microsoft’s Venture Capital Fund.

He's also the author of Unlocking Unicorns and the host of the blog "billion dollar startup ideas" 

He's also a conversation design nerd, like me… and his insights into conversation design are not to be missed - that’s why I was so thrilled to host him on a recent podcast episode.

In Good Talk, I drew a spectrum of conversations, a long line from 1 to many, just like the long number line poster my 2nd grade teacher Ms. Brydon had mounted around the entire wall of our classroom.

Michael visualized Conversational range with a Concentric Circle model, like this:

What’s interesting to me about this way of thinking about conversations is that it puts self talk where it belongs, in the center of the conversation.

As Michael points out, we can think at 4,000 words per minute. Over a single conversation of 10 minutes, we’ve thought a lot! And half of those thoughts are about what we could, should or won’t say. What do we “let slip” out? And what ideas should we allow in? Michael’s circle model with arrows helps me visualize this idea more clearly.

If we, as folks who design group conversations (ie, team leaders, facilitators or managers) don’t give self talk the respect it deserves, we’re rushing through a conversation with only surface reactions and letting conversation dynamics run on habit and reflex, not real thinking.

Time to think alone before we talk together

In nearly any workshop or transformation program I run, I love using breakouts to connect people and to have people share thoughts together. People thinking together can create wonderful things.

But before I invite people to think together, I love to ask people to turn off their cameras, grab a piece of paper and sketch out their own point of view on the question at hand. 

This creates a solid center point in the conversation - for each person to be able to say what they really think on an issue, and then to make space for listening and learning about another person’s point of view as well. What we do next with all this information…that’s where the magic comes in!

One interesting approach to redesigning conversations that you might try: don’t speak at all. Check out my guide to silent meetings here.

Let's have a meeting about meetings

Let’s talk about meetings

A few years ago I read an article about the key types of meetings any team or organization should be having…but the ONE type of meeting they said you should NEVER have is a meeting about meetings!

A chill of cold fury (or was it sadness?) ran through my body. 

A meeting about meetings is without a doubt, the most important meeting to host with your team. 

Right now. Or…as soon as you read this essay!

Virtual meetings are here to stay AND we’re all burnt out to a crisp. 

So, let’s delete some meetings on our calendars if we can. But how? There’s so much to get done!

Meeting about meetings #1: Where are we on the trust and communication curve?

My podcast conversation with Emily Levada, who was then the Head of Product at Wayfair at the time of our conversation, but is now the Chief Product officer at Embark Veterinary, advocates for a team conversation based on a simple diagram, pictured below. 

Ask your team to silently note and anonymously map together answers to:

How much trust do I think this team has?

Are we spending too much time talking or not enough?

As Emily points out, when there’s total trust, there’s also a sense of safety - When my collaborators trust me to make things work, I feel empowered to find my own way, without calling for a meeting.

If trust is low, add strategic communication to deepen it - not just more meetings, but meetings with the aim to increase transparency and connection. Work with a team coach and focus on creating the conditions for increased trust.

If trust AND collaboration time is high…find ways to remove collaboration time. One way to do it is by learning to work together asynchronously, which I’ll talk more about in Meetings about Meetings #3.

Meeting about meetings #2: How do we talk when we talk?

Groups can move mountains if everyone is pushing in the same direction. More often, group conversations ping pong back and forth. The conversation flow gets stuck, drifts, or overheats. 

Someone usually speaks first when the team lead shares a challenge or issue. The conversation can get anchored to that first turn.

I call it “first speaker syndrome” and one way to solve it is to not talk at all in your meetings! 

Try a silent meeting, video off, with everyone in a document together.

Silent, video off meetings can be incredibly relaxing. Like Study Hall was back in High School.

Or, just tame the complexity of the group conversation with better turn taking rituals. 

It’s hard to listen to two people speak at the same time. In fact, it’s nearly impossible. Listening to one person talking takes about 60 bit/sec of attention…and our entire attention span is 120 bits/sec!

Try a round robin, or ask people to “pass the mic” so that each person speaks on a topic to open the floor up. Being clear about who’s going to talk and for how much time isn’t being bossy…it’s helping everyone with clarity and leadership so that the conversation can be inclusive and fluid. For extra credit, if you want to really stretch your turn taking patterns, I’m a fan of Quaker style meetings which set a high bar for taking a turn:

Everyone waits in shared silence until someone is moved by the Spirit (i.e. has a strong religious feeling) to share something

A person will only speak if they are convinced that they have something that must be shared, and it is rare for a person to speak more than once.

The words should come from the soul - from the inner light - rather than the mind.

Meeting about meetings #3: Do our rituals and patterns serve us?

My friend Glenn Fajardo co-authored a book called Rituals for Virtual Teams. I was so excited to host him on my podcast and have him share his copious wisdom about helping teams collaborate better from afar.

One thing Glenn excels at is cross-time-zone, asynchronous collaboration. A lot of folks feel like synchronous video and audio (ie, Zoom calls!) are the best (and only) way to connect remotely...but Glenn suggested that video messages can be amazingly connecting, and even more powerful because they are asynchronous. Tools like Loom, Dropbox Capture or even WhatsApp can make remote, asynchronous collaboration fun and efficient.

Design the Moments of Meeting with Occasion, Intention, and Action

Glenn suggests (and I do too!) that you do an inventory of the meetings and moments of interaction for your team. (What are the Occasions?)

Find ways to declare, clarify and if needed shift the Intention so the moment really serves the need the team has.

Action has two lenses: One is what action do you want people to do or take at the end of the occasion/intention moment? Being clear on this can help you lead thoughtfully designed actions...and the more often you host these, the more they will become rituals, ie, core artifacts of your team’s culture, that anyone can start leading.

In short: create an inventory of your team’s essential moments and find a pathway to make those moments create the team experiences you intend to create. It is, as Glenn says, as simple as asking:

“How do we want people to feel in those different moments in a team's lifespan? And then, what are the actions that we could associate with those things?”

Team Work is Team Learning

More and more, I’m aware of this simple fact: True collaboration is a group learning process.

The group needs to learn:

• What everyone else thinks about the challenge: What is happening? What’s the real challenge?

• What they themselves believe is possible — what futures can be created with this group?

• What does the group believe is possible?

• What are we willing to try? How much risk are we willing to endure?

• How committed is the group to the challenge? Who and how will things be seen through?

If we know all of the answers to these questions, we can usually just make a spreadsheet and solve the challenge asynchronously!

So…given that team work is team learning, it’s important to understand that learning for adults isn’t the same as learning for children:

Andragogy isn’t Pedagogy

Pedagogy literally means a method and practice of teaching. But it has the Latin word for “child” in it: Peda. It’s the same root in the word Pediatrician.

(At some point in your life it’s weird to still be seeing your pediatrician. You need to move on to a big kid doctor.)

Pedagogy is all about how kids learn. Adults learn differently from kids. Teaching with adults in mind is called Andragogy, a (very awkward) term coined by Malcolm Knowles. He laid out five principles to follow for better results when teaching adults.

+The learning is self-directed.
+The learning is experiential and utilizes background knowledge.
+The learning is relevant to current roles.
+The instruction is problem-centered.
+The students are motivated to learn.

If you look at these five principles, it looks a lot like empowered teams.

Team learning happens over time

We all know that one meeting isn’t going to solve everything. We need to decide what is going to happen next, questions like:

• who do we need to talk to next?

• Do our assumptions match reality?

• what is safe to try?

For learning with people, over time, the Kolb Cycle of learning is a helpful mental model:

The Kolb Cycle of Learning

In the early 1970s, David A. Kolb and Ronald E. Fry developed their experiential learning model (ELM), which suggested that there were four key elements in learning:

1. Concrete experience

2. Observation of and reflection on that experience

3. Formation of abstract concepts based upon the reflection

4. Testing the new concepts

For me, this cycle feels a lot like design thinking: Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver. Learn, Make, Test, Reflect.