by John J. Walters

I started thinking about phone interviews today because I saw one of my Facebook buddies posted that he had accidentally scheduled two of them for this afternoon.  Then I started thinking about how phone interviews are pretty much no different from conference calls, except there often won’t be too many other people listening.  So if phone interviews are similar to conference calls then it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to liken them to meetings in general.  And you know what that means, right?  It means I get to write about them — as if I know what I’m talking about!

As a matter of fact, I do know what I’m talking about.  I’m no stranger to the phone interview.  I’ve been conducting them semi-regularly for the past year for various projects for Wasabi Ventures and have also had to do quite a few for my other employer, The Maryland Public Policy Institute.  In fact, nearly a quarter of my job consists of calling folks and talking to them about this or that.  So I figured I’d share a little bit of what I’ve learned over the past year about phone interviews.

First of all, in answer to my own question: no, I don’t wear a tie to a phone interview.  But I do make a point to try and be as professional as possible when I conduct one.  In fact, I try to make sure that I’m at least presentable whenever I sit at my desk and work, even though I work from home.  This helps create a clearer divide between my work and home life.  If a tie helped me do that, I’d wear one.  It’s about feeling comfortable, but also like you’re “at work.”  Ties kinda lost that feeling for me when I had to wear one every single day in high school.

Phone interviews have become pretty normal to me, but I can remember how I felt about them before they became my bread and butter.  Until I became comfortable, I had to make it a point to make sure that I was in a familiar location and that I knew I was well-prepared.  This meant reviewing notes or articles about the subject beforehand while listening to relaxing music.  I would make a point of being in my office with the door closed at least ten minutes before the interview was scheduled just to focus.

Knowing your material is also very important.  I would review for my interviews starting a day ahead of time and then again a little bit beforehand just to make sure I remembered what I was looking at earlier (just like a test at school).  If you’re asking the questions your job is a little easier, but you still need to prepare or else it’s easy to get lost and ask a whole lot of useless questions that don’t pertain to the topic at hand.  Having been on both sides several times I would say both can be a challenge, and it certainly helps to do some rehearsing on your own.

Of course, none of these are hard and fast rules.  I’ve also conducted interviews in my car in a Wal-Mart parking lot with my laptop on my knees (although that was more out of necessity than choice).  But the keys to successfully getting your point across are preparation and relaxation.  You would do the same if you were walking into an office and speaking with someone in person, so don’t forget to take the phone interview just as seriously.  Take advantage of whatever helps you do that, be it a tie or a security blanket.

Also, keep in mind that what works for conversations between two people can also work in larger groups.  These same recommendations go equally for conference calls.

by John J. Walters

Alright, we’re back from our little “hiatus” promoting the site’s beta launch.  Now it’s back to the real content.  I had promised a second post about effective communication last week, and it’s time to deliver on that promise.

We have all heard that good communication starts with attentive listening.  That idea is practically a cliché at this point, but just because it’s a cliché doesn’t mean it isn’t true.  As Shakespeare once said, I’m sure, “It doth taketh two to tango.”  Even the most effective orator will have a hard time getting his message across if his listeners aren’t paying attention.

I gave a very brief rundown on a few ways to listen more effectively, as well as why you should care enough to do so.  So you already have some stuff to practice in your daily life, both at home and at work.  We are asked to spend a lot of time every day listening, and this doesn’t decrease with rank.  When we become bosses and managers we’ll be asked to listen to endless reports and summaries of the company’s activities, and our ability to retain and process that information is what will determine our success.

The trick is, we won’t ever get to be the boss if we can’t communicate to others that we know what we’re talking about.  As with the deceptively simple skill of listening, communicating is highly nuanced and subtle art.  I say “communication” instead of “speaking” as we are asked to communicate in a variety of different ways these days, each with its own set of complications.

There is some disagreement about the exact percentage, but I think the general consensus is that communication is only 15% about the words we choose.  The rest is elsewhere — in our tone, our pacing, our body language, or the context of the conversation.  This gives us a good amount to consider before we even open our mouths.  Sadly, we often don’t.

TechRepublic has a nice article by Steven A. Watson about how to maximize managerial success with good communication practices.  The best part is by far the example story he tells, in which a new employee enthusiastically begins laying the groundwork for a revised LAN setup.  When support lags and disappears entirely she is both surprised and frustrated.  Then she realizes that she forgot to get to know the team and their thoughts, experiences, and needs before implementation.

That’s where listening comes in — but once you’ve got your listening skills down, you need to be able to show others that you understand and that you can help.  Enter the “Four C’s of Communication” as explained by Isabelle Albanese.  In a nutshell, these involve making sure your audience trusts you, understands you, has common ground with you, and remembers your message after you’re finished.

Each of these things is extremely valuable in a business setting: Trust, understanding, camaraderie, and being remembered.  Since meetings are often the place where the most communication goes on in a business, effective communication becomes exceedingly important during meetings.  Honing your listening and your communication skills could be your ticket to increased productivity — or even the corner office.

by John J. Walters

I was wracking my brain trying to think of something to write about that was at least partially meeting related while listening to music (as I usually do while I work) when it hit me — what is it you’re asked to do for the majority of nearly every meeting?  Listen!

I’ve always admired the people I’ve met that possess the skill of listening more than they speak.  It is certainly not something that I do very often, although I really wish it was.  When I speak I give my opinion, my advice, or my reaction to something.  I am rarely surprised at what comes out of my mouth, and I rarely ever learn anything.  When I listen, however, I never know what I am going to hear.  So long as I am “tuned to the right station,” anything is possible.

A quick Google search for “listening” will pull up a ton of articles on the subject.  I grabbed three from the first page at random and read through them quickly to see what they had to offer, which I will summarize briefly here.

The first article was written by Larry Alan Nading, PhD.  Its value is in its simplicity, and in the broad number of topics that it covers.  The most important lesson to learn from it is about the three basic listening modes.  There’s competitive (where we’re only waiting for our turn to speak), passive (where we listen but do not participate) and active (where we listen and then seek to understand completely through verification).  Simply being aware of what type of listening you are employing in a given situation will often make you a better listener.  The article is a good introduction to the art of listening, if you’ve never really given it any thought.

The second and third articles focus primarily on active listening skills, which is helpful as long as you truly understand what active listening is.  Active listening is more than just carrying on a conversation.  One article summarizes it quite nicely as “being able to repeat back in your own words what they [the speaker] have said to their satisfaction.”  The words are theirs but the emphasis is mine.  When someone talks they are (hopefully) talking for a reason.  If you can’t summarize that reason back to them immediately after listening, then you’re not listening effectively.

Both articles contain some very helpful hints and tips to improve your listening skills.  I highly recommend reading them, especially the one on MindTools.com as it is the most career oriented.  But improving your listening skills doesn’t have to be all about being a more effective meeting participant.  I’m sure your friends and your spouse or significant other would appreciate a little more active listening from you as well.

by John J. Walters

Last week I shared with you my secret for making everyone else shut up and listen to one person at a time.  But what about when you need to make one person shut up and listen while everyone else talks?

This became very important to me when I was working on my first book, which was a team effort of six authors in total.  Each of us wrote two chapters and we would meet once a week to discuss our progress.

Getting people to shut up when their work is being criticized is a difficult thing.  While we may think that responding to each individual critique with a well-reasoned explanation of our intent would be helpful to the discussion, really all we’re doing is defending our work and making the whole process take forever.  And it’s not like well get to sit there as everyone in the world reads our book, pointing out to them what we “meant to say there.”

Because we wanted to discuss everyone’s work each week and we didn’t want to be there all night, we instituted the Infamous Egg-Timer Rule.  This one is pretty much as simple a concept as the Talking Stick.  You give each person a certain amount of time.  Say, 15 minutes.  You allow them to make some introductory remarks about what they think the conversation should focus on that evening,and then they must open up the floor to everyone else and keep their mouth shut until the timer goes off.   Simple as that.

This works quite well for creative work; I would imagine it would work just as well for other things.  It’s amazing how much can actually get done when you eliminate people’s ability to defend their efforts (no matter how much room there may be for improvement) and force them to listen, even for 15 minutes at a time.

by John J. Walters

I’ve been talking a lot about technology in my posts these past two weeks; when to use it and when not to use it.  This week, I thought I would take things back to the first post I wrote six weeks ago on the history of meetings.  There are things that we can learn from ancient cultures that will help us out today, and I’m not just talking about weird medicinal herbs or mystical potions here.

I can’t even remember the first time I heard about “the talking stick” but I think it was from one my elementary school teachers.  If I remembered more specifically, I would name names, because whoever invented it was a genius and whoever told me about it was a saint.  I would love to give credit where credit is due, but both are too far in the past for me, its creator lost to history and its professor lost to other memories.

The general idea of the talking stick is to encourage listening as well as talking — something that any experienced meeting attendee knows can be a difficult thing indeed.  The concept is simple.  At every meeting you have a stick.  It can be a large, ceremonial staff with intricate carvings or something as simple as a paper cup turned upside down with a smiley face drawn on it in magic marker.  The only requirements are that it must be visible, and easy to pass around.

When you hold the stick, you can speak.  When you don’t hold the stick, you listen.  If you want to hold the stick, you raise your hand.  It’s as simple and elegant as that, although you can introduce all kinds of other twists on it.  Below are a couple examples from my own experience:

• The stick can only be passed to the right (or left).  No skipping is allowed so everyone must contribute.
• There is a time limit to holding the stick (I recommend using an egg timer, as it is often very difficult for people to self-regulate when they’re speaking).
• To hold the stick you have to answer a specific question or weigh in on a particular issue before saying anything else.
• To hold the stick you must remove an article of clothing (not actually recommended for business meetings).

You can take this idea and run with it.  You can even claim that you invented it (although some people might have learned about it back in elementary school and call you out).  I’ve used this for meetings and even during family dinners.  It can be adapted to any situation that you think needs more listening and less interrupting.  Good luck.

by John J. Walters

The past two weeks I’ve talked about how meetings generally suck, and that most people who are there would rather be anywhere else.  A quick search of the web will show that there are indeed other people who think meetings suck — and are talking about it!

One of them is Sue Pelletier, whose list of her top ten reasons to bolt from a meeting was the focus of last week’s post.  This week’s seed article is a very well written piece by Craig Borysowich about the importance of keeping your eyes on the prize when it comes to meetings.

It’s no secret that one of the keys to a good meeting is having an agenda so everyone starts off at the same point and on the right foot.  The quality of feedback will vary greatly between a meeting where everyone sits down prepared and one where nobody knows what the topic is until they see the first power point slide.

Can you imagine asking a teacher to waltz into a classroom and teach a class on a topic of your choice without any preparation whatsoever?  They might be able to pull it off if all the conditions are right.  Perhaps they have a good grasp of the chosen subject, or maybe they’ve been to a particularly informative seminar on a similar topic.  But the odds that they’ll stumble around and generally confuse the students are much greater the less preparation you allow them.

Holding a meeting without an agenda, or even with a brief or vague agenda, is kind of like that, except there are multiple teachers in the room.  Everyone is expected to both inform and be informed; participation is mandatory.  There are often large costs (in terms of lost productivity) associated with everyone leaving the meeting and going off on their own to relearn everything they were supposed to learn during the meeting, if this is even possible.

Yes, the stakes are high, but luckily one of the best ways to mitigate the risk that everyone will leave the room saying, “Well that was a complete waste of my life,” is also quite simple.

When planning a meeting, write down everything you want to get accomplished.  Send this list out to all attendees and ask for their input.  Revise this into a solid agenda for the meeting and send it out a few days prior so everyone can show up prepared.  If you can’t do all this, then maybe it’s time to rethink why you’re scheduling the meeting in the first place.

In a nutshell: plan meetings with the agenda right from the start.  Get input, listen to it, and start the process early enough so there are no surprises.

I know this sounds like it may take a bit more time and preparation than your standard meetings, but maybe that’s why standard meetings tend to suck so much.