It’s the same way to be smarter There’s a great line in the movie Swimming With Sharks in which Kevin Spacey’s character rudely tells his newbie assistant: “Shut up. Listen. Learn.” Okay, this blog post is over. See ya! The original title of this article was “How to shut up during a creative meeting.” But the points we’ll cover here work for a lot more than creative meetings. And the advice we’ll dole out is about more than, well, shutting up. So let’s talk about 1) where this information applies, and 2) what you can accomplish when you use it prudently. Who do you want to impress? That question implies that this is all about making yourself look good. In a way, it is. But it’s much more about doing a better job in the eyes of others. If you’re in a creative meeting, you certainly want to appear creative. (There’s often a tacit competition in these meetings: “Who can come up with the best idea?”) If you’re in a client meeting, you certainly want to appear not just responsive, but proactive. Prescient. This will endue the client with confidence in your ability to anticipate their needs. And if you’re in a team huddle, you want your peers to respect your thoughts, as well as your ability to both lead and follow. Proactive listening There’s a technique called “active listening,” which is commonly employed in counseling and conflict resolution. According to Wikipedia, it “requires that the listener fully concentrate, understand, respond, and then remember what is being said.” That’s fine. But we want to take this a step further. It’s not just a matter of listening. It’s a matter of eliciting. Of culling. Of, very gently, teasing out information from the others in the room, which you can then put to better use than everyone else. This, of course, predicates upon the dynamic of the meeting and the personalities of its participants. Sometimes you’ll luck out—in a way that most people wouldn’t consider terribly lucky. That is, you may be in a meeting, say with a creative team or a new client, and the Key Person You Want To Impress is one of these loquacious sorts who just spouts on and on for a seeming eternity before running out of steam. If that’s the case, take notes. And remember: this person will run out of steam. Eventually. So take advantage of the fire-hose of info. You needn’t poke, prod, or probe. Conversely, if the KPYWTI (!) is reticent, you’ll need to work. Gently. Little open-ended prods such as “Really? How so?” can net you infinitely more, and better, information than detailed show-off questions. Remember: You’re saving your thunder. Circle around The beauty of being a proactive listener in a meeting is that you have the ability to spot themes in the conversation that the speakers themselves don’t, since they’re in the verbal smoke of battle. What is it that connects what Speaker A is talking about to the seemingly-disparate stuff being discussed by Speaker B? This is not easy. We never said it was. It requires multi-tasking. You’re 1) listening, 2) taking notes, 3) looking for common themes, threads, and nexuses among the topics being batted about. And you’ll score bonus points (in a minute) for acting like it’s no big deal. Don’t sit there and sweat through this exercise. You’ll call attention to yourself, distract the meeting, and rob yourself of your pending thunder. Don’t rush it Don’t expect these themes to jump out at you. Or to come at you early. You may sit for 30 minutes of an hour-long meeting not saying much of anything. It may feel risky, but it’s okay. The point is to not speak up until you’ve either got a good question to ask or an interesting observation to make. We were once in a meeting of electronic engineers (a new client company), discussing a particularly thorny issue with B2B applications. A theme arose among the different engineers: There seemed to be competing sources of computing power in the system being discussed. So after a long session of shooting back and forth, the engineers sat there wearily. We raised a hand and asked: “Couldn’t you just borrow some processing cycles from the ECU?” It was a decidedly geeky question. From a decided non-engineer. But all of the conversation had seemed to be dancing around such a question, so we posed it. It was the first that we had even spoken up in this big meeting of maybe ten people. The engineers blinked. “Who are you??” they asked. It was a very nice moment. They got to discussing the elusive ECU and its elusive processing cycles, and we were happy to have catalyzed that new conversation and the ideas it spawned; later, during the lunch break, one of the engineers asked us: “Are you an engineer?” It was flattering. Precipitate Years ago, we were backstage after a concert given by a world-famous pianist; we were there because our friend, a musical genius, got us there. And he used this same technique with stunning effect. All of the wealthy patrons of the arts were fawning over the pianist, bending over backward to ask lengthy and impressive-sounding questions, trying desperately to ingratiate themselves with him. The pianist, to his credit, was charming. Then my friend posed his question. It was something deceptively simple-sounding, like “Why did you play down the second movement?” The pianist, still in his polite-host mode, started to answer. When—and you could see it on his face—the depth and insight of our friend’s question washed over him. He just lit up in a smile. And he was the happiest pianist you ever saw, spouting about his technique, and different composers, and the choices he made in that performance and others. The other patrons were left in the social dust. When we left, the pianist gave our friend a special thank-you and handshake. He even gave us a special thank-you and handshake, since our friend’s brilliance had haloed over to us, too. So it can be done. It’s not easy. But making it look easy is half the fun.
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