If you hold a meeting only to pass information to others, you are committing relational malpractice.
Our recent status meeting began with a description of a camping trip to the waterfalls above Lake Superior, then moved to an all-night rave in Amsterdam, and ended with a weary sigh over a weekend full of kid events.
And then, we got to the business of our communication projects.
Was that wasted time, that talk of how we had spent the weekend?
No, because our relational connections build through conversational zigzags. Our work and our relationships improve with understanding those we work alongside.
Coming to understand my teammates is essential to our team-ness. Empathy grows as I hear my teammate talk about the frenetic dancing in the Amsterdam nightclub. I have also felt the soul-weariness of tracking kids from event to event. And in between, there was the work we were all there for.
Language is great for passing information from one person to another. And if that seems like the purpose of all your meetings, please take another look. Our words reveal who we are to the people around us even better. Seeing how we present ourselves helps us land at the nut of knowing someone else—as if by osmosis—with seemingly no effort.
But something odd happened to me after that conversation. I felt, how to say it, “attenuated,” that is, my own objectives were reduced and took a back seat to what was being said. The talk of our lives outside of work opened a door for more profound listening about the work itself and how that work fits my client’s priorities. I was no longer listening just for instruction or to make a reply; I was instead absorbing this other person’s priorities.
When we worked with a global medical device firm focused on innovation, the conventional wisdom was that our large technical conferences, which pulled people in from all over the world, were good for presenting information that helped everyone move ahead. But there was massive enthusiasm for the white space in those conferences, the hallway talk, and dinner meetings where circuitous conversations spawned innovative approaches.
What starts as a recitation of weekend activities can pull us into a deeper understanding, a “cogito,” according to the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. He thought objective knowledge was one thing, while “cogito” went deeper into taking responsibility for others. He saw this deeper knowledge as a way to face their “otherness” and understand their priorities.
We love those moments of white space with our clients, especially when they open new paths. White space might include the talk that “warms the screen” before a Zoom call gets fully underway. White space might include unstructured time at the end for responses and reactions. White space surely looks like colleagues having lunch or coffee. The key is that white space is unstructured and that people remain present.
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