Next Steps Toward Mindful Leadership: 1. Setting the Stage for Meaningful Interactions and Effective Communication

1. SETTING THE STAGE FOR MEANINGFUL INTERACTIONS AND EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION

Setting the stage for a meaningful interaction is critical. Here are some examples:

In-Office Meeting

• If you’re in your office and someone comes in to talk with you, I suggest getting up from your desk and walking around to greet them. This does several things: it truly acknowledges the person, it takes you away from your screen and it removes the barrier of your desk and screen/s from between you. It levels the playing field and creates a sense of your immediate attentiveness.

Phone Call

• Similarly, if you get a phone call it helps to distance yourself from your screen or other distractions. If you’re on a cell call it’s easy to get up and take the call away from your desk, if it’s a landline you can still stand up and disconnect from whatever you were doing before the call.

 Group Meetings

• Another example of setting the stage is in group meetings. Often times we bring our laptops, or tablets, to meetings to take notes. And we have our cell phones face up in front of us. All too often an email pops up, or we’re reminded of something we needed to do, and we get distracted from the meeting in which we’re supposed to participating. If you want to optimize the meeting potential I would recommend setting a standard to not bring a device and to turn your cell phone face down.

Virtual Meetings

• Many meetings happen virtually these days and one thing I like about videoconferencing calls is you can see the participants. When I took an executive position with a large national company, I inherited a tradition of a large videoconferencing call with a group of General Managers. Conceptually, this was a wonderful opportunity for these managers to connect in spite of geographic distances between them. However, it was the norm for some participants to turn off their camera. Others weren’t quite so courteous, leaving their camera on while they they kept banging away at emails and stepping away from their desk to do something in the middle of the meeting! This was a practice I discouraged from the outset. If the meeting was at all valuable, people needed to be present, and not routinely distracted.

In the scenario where I had distracted managers on a video conference call, I asked them what they thought the most valuable elements of the meetings were, and what parts they didn’t like. Funnily enough, the participants raised the elements that concerned me most. They pointed out that they felt it was rude when people turned off their camera or didn’t focus their attention on the speaker. They also felt a lot of what was being discussed was not relevant to the group, as a whole. We went about tuning up and tightening the agenda and cut the meeting time by over half. With the managers asked to be present and engaged, with an assurance of keeping the meeting short and on point, these weekly videoconference calls became invaluable.