Gallup’s survey also shows us that actually 35% of managers are themselves not engaged in the work. If you have a manager who is not engaged in the work is it any wonder that a lot of organizations are still struggling to keep great people? Going through that hamster wheel of hiring people, on-boarding new people, then how do you keep that good talent.
What are the odds that the next meeting you’re in will be a hit or a miss? If you’re a betting person, your chances will be much higher that your meeting will be closer to the “It sucked” end of the spectrum than the “It was super!” end.
It’s astonishing how often people are in the same conversation but hear completely different things. The potential for misunderstanding, feeling disrespected and disempowered is huge. Whether you’re leading a team of one (yourself), or a team of hundreds the quality of your listening hugely affects the quality and impact of your leadership.
Great technology will never replace or be more important than the quality of the relationships we have. We need to really keep the relationships and the connection that we have with each other and with the mission, and then with the purpose of the work that we do together at our core.
We need to build digestion times to our virtual meetings. Let me explain a little bit what I mean about that. We figured out so far that you can’t have the same length of time of meeting because people just don’t have the attention span for that as they would if they were in a real in person meeting. Fine. So, we made them shorter.
Here’s the big cost that we need to be worried about when we’re working virtually: the cost of people’s time, their attention, their goodwill, and their productivity. We need to think about those costs because they are so important. And once you squander them, you have to work super hard to regain the credibility to get them back from your people.
You need to build your game plan in a way that it not only makes sense before you have the meeting, but that you can respond and adapt it to what’s actually happening in the meeting. You might feel it yourself, but our attention spans are shorter than they’ve ever been.
How do you really hear from everybody? How do you ensure that you’re getting a diversity of views? That it’s not just the people who are comfortable to make their points in a group discussion? What do you do about those voices that are a little bit held back or maybe need a little bit more reflection time?
How you start a meeting is so important! It really sets an energetic tone and a space for the entire conversation, which is so critical. I think it’s an area where I’ve been noticing a lot of people are just blowing by how we start a meeting and often not doing it as well as we could.
When you think about taking the kinds of meetings that we used to have when we were meeting in person and making them virtual, it’s challenging. People are feeling a lot of pressure with that, there’s a lot to communicate, there’s a lot of information to share, there’s a lot of decision making that needs to happen.
Copyright © 2025 www.CarolynBEllis.com Designed by Virtual360
By signing up and providing your email address, you’ll also receive the weekly “Bits of Brilliance” newsletter which contains resources and strategies to help leaders navigate change effectively. All emails include an unsubscribe link. You may opt-out at any time. See our Privacy Policy.
