The Art of Communication in Meetings, According to Me

I have worked building apps and services for consumers at companies for 22 years. My companies have ranged from startups, to small established companies, to big media (IAC, AOL, iHeartMedia) and big tech (Yahoo). Over that time I estimate either participating in or leading over 30,000 meetings. Malcolm Gladwell would say, at this point, that I have achieved mastery of meetings.

I don’t consider myself an expert at meetings, but I have learned a few pieces of enduring wisdom over the years that have helped me fare better.

Worth the 7 minutes, this sketch ‘the expert’ is awesome.

When in a meeting, commonly you are faced with a person who doesn’t seem to understand what you are saying, has not been persuaded to agree with you and looks like they’d rather see you leave the room than talk to you. Has this happened to you? I’ve lost count of how many times it happened to me.

Here are a few anti-patterns that I’ve tried that have not worked over time. Please don’t:

• Steamroll the person by monologuing over them
• Start an argument out of frustration
• Walk out of the meeting

I’ve tried the above (and sometimes I tried all three!) and, beyond the momentary satisfaction of telling someone off, these tactics do not work.

Over time, I’ve learned that there are multiple layers, each which are observable to a degree, that are important to understand when taking a position in a meeting that is not the consensus and attempting to drive it as the solution to the problem at hand.

When speaking with someone during a meeting, remember that there’s:

• What they say
• What they mean
• What they feel

You cannot convince a person of something until you have:

1. Validated what they feel
2. Shown that you understand their position
3. Shown that your solution is the appropriate course, given #s 1 and 2

A great friend and mentor told me the following during a coaching session: You can view organizational challenges as system design problems, and proceed to resolve them as you would a system architecture. Obvious examples here would be the engineering manager being the load balancer and her engineers, the servers/hosts being balanced.

I think a similar analogy can be found in the OSI networking model. The OSI defines the layers involved in communication between two computers that know nothing about each other, but do know how to communicate messages on top of UDP or TCP-IP.

7-layer OSI networking model

The ‘What they feel’ is important to deal with first, as being emotionally in tune with your fellow meeting participants is a necessary step towards persuasion. This is necessary to create connections between you and each of the other participants in the meeting. This is the ‘Media Layers’ portion of the OSI (Physical, Data, Network) and the Transport layer. When you have connected emotionally, you now have an active socket connection with the person. This is the process of establishing rapport.

The ‘What they say’ is analogous to the Presentation and Session layers. This is where you connect on an intellectual level and ensure that your listener knows that you are understanding of their position and that they are understanding of yours.

For ‘What they mean’, you will need the application layer. This is where you take what you are hearing and work to determine what they actually mean by that. This is the crux of the meeting, and what will determine your success. If you can manage to connect with every meeting participant in the room (at least, all of the decision makers and/or active participants), and you understand their point of view (and, they yours), this is where your true persuasion happens.

Chris Voss and the Black Swan group have inspired some of my codification on this topic. Chris was for a long time a lead FBI hostage negotiator, now a speaker and thought leader on the art of communication, and also talks about the emotional and logical layers therein. He talks about never splitting the difference in negotiations and the benefit of employing ‘tactical empathy’. Here’s a taste of Chris:

If you can present a path persuasively that validates what they feel, shows that you heard what they said and understand what they mean, and is a path in line with what is needed at the company at this time (topic for another post), you will have the greatest possible chance of success.

At least, that’s what I think.