Navigate Special Situations

With a little bit of practice, you’ll soon feel like a natural leader in the virtual environment. You may still experience occasional awkwardness and confusion, but as your repertoire of responses grows, you’ll feel more capable of putting others at ease and running productive meetings. But occasionally, some situations require extra care. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to handle yourself in two of these different and challenging scenarios.

Give a video presentation

You’ve been asked to give a big presentation to a scattered audience. That’s great—but also potentially nerve-wracking. Before you get caught up in the technological aspects of your talk, spend some time on the basics. Video presentations, like live ones, need clear goals and a strong core message. Focus what you’ll say by asking yourself questions such as these:

• What’s the purpose of my presentation—for example, am I teeing up a specific decision or problem?

• Who’s my audience? Who else will be attending the meeting or reviewing my materials after the fact?

• What platform will the meeting use? What communication technologies or presentation apps are available to me?

• How much time do I have?

• Who’s the technology point-person for this meeting, and how can I get in touch with them? Will they need anything from me before the meeting—a copy of my presentation, any specs or contact information?

As you’re preparing the presentation itself, keep the graphics lively, and avoid densely written slides.

Once you’ve drafted your remarks and the slides that will accompany them, practice—a lot. Time yourself, leaving room for audience participation, and do at least one dry run with the technology you’ll be using during the meeting itself. For example, if you’re presenting through a teleconference app, make sure you know how to navigate its presentation functions. If you’ll be visible to the audience on a video screen, experiment with what you’ll wear and where you position the lens, so that you don’t discover at the last minute that your plaid shirt breaks down on screen into wildly distracting pixelated waves or that your eyes look glazed when you read through your speaker’s notes.

When you begin your presentation, tell the other participants how you’d like to handle questions and comments. It’s awkward to stop your words midstream, especially over the phone, where people can’t signal their intentions with questioning facial expressions or eager body language. So, ask participants to wait until a Q&A at the end, to keep track of questions in a shared Google Docs file, or to feed you questions via chat or text while you’re talking. If you’re open to interruptions, explain how the attendees can get your attention.

Throughout the presentation, keep your audience engaged by drawing them in. If you’re using a technology that allows for other attendees to be heard, periodically solicit their input by posing questions (“What’s the first thing that jumps out at you when you look at this graph?”) or hat-tipping experts (“This data is from Chandra’s group—thank you! Can you quickly explain how your team sourced it?”). If the attendees can’t jump into the discussion, you can still pose questions to get them thinking. Pause for a second before you reveal the answer. If they came up with the “right” one, they’ll feel satisfied and smart. If not, they’ll feel surprised—and want to understand why.

Finally, don’t exceed your allotted time. If you haven’t gotten through everything you planned, wrap things up as gracefully as you can (“This is a good stopping point. Please follow up with me if you have more questions”), or ask the meeting leader if you can have more time.

Bridge linguistic or cultural barriers

If you’re crossing global boundaries to bring together people with different languages and cultural norms, you may feel additional pressure to make their interactions work. The danger of miscommunication is even higher than normal (and in a virtual setting, it’s always fairly high).

Before you implement any particular solutions, think about the barrier you’re dealing with. Some people will have a difficult time understanding the speech of someone who doesn’t share their native language if they can’t watch the person’s face. Participants who don’t understand what’s being said might interrupt constantly to clarify. Or they might simply fall silent, too embarrassed to reveal that they can’t follow what’s going on.

But understanding language goes beyond the simple recognition of sounds. Your participants might have fundamentally different ways of communicating about their priorities. In cultures that prize direct language, it’s customary to say, “That deadline is too late. We need to move it up.” In cultures that communicate with more indirect language, someone might choose to say instead, “Thank you for creating this schedule. I am very eager to see it completed.”

In addition, it’s important to recognize that all of our norms around the use of technology are culturally conditioned. For some of your colleagues, it might be acceptable to enter and exit a room while a teleconference is going on. Others might view this as the height of rudeness. Fortunately, you don’t have to resolve these big cultural gaps. You just have to clarify which behaviors are OK in your own meeting, and help people live up to them.

Ask participants how they prefer to communicate. Make this part of your technology-prep protocol (see the earlier chapter “Manage the Technology”). Some people might find it easier to understand another speaker when they can use a landline or when they can watch other people’s faces as they talk on video. Accommodate these preferences, if you can. Your colleagues will be more confident and focused during the meeting if they find that the tech setup doesn’t put them at a disadvantage.

Identify important cultural norms. You can’t—and shouldn’t—shed all your cultural habits, but with a little research, you can learn a new behavior that will build goodwill and avoid a basic cultural offense. Pay attention to things such as how to welcome and address attendees (even virtual ones) and the social etiquette of saying hello, good-bye, and thanks. For these matters, it’s better to talk to someone with experience than to run a Google search. Tap your network to find someone familiar with both the culture of your collaborators and your particular work environment.

Find common ground—ahead of time. Research shows that similar life experiences or a shared background, however minor, is your best bet for building trust quickly. Use Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and any other platform that comes to mind to learn about the people you’ve invited. Where did they go to school? Do they have kids? Share related hobbies? And so on. When you open the meeting, include these details in a thoughtful round of introductions. Trust grows over discussing even such small things.

Periodically summarize the conversation. If people are consistently struggling to understand one another’s speech, it becomes tiresome to ask for clarification. Compensate by kicking your moderating skills into a higher gear. After each comment or question, briefly paraphrase what was said. For example:

• “That’s an important question. I agree that the production facility’s capacity is a major risk in this plan. Here’s what we know . . .”

• “So in your experience, this research technique requires a lot of resources, maybe more than we have. What does everyone else think about that?”

Follow up with extra care. Documenting your agreements and following up will give the participants time to fully absorb what all of you covered and will help avoid miscommunication. If a colleague is freezing you out and shirking their follow-up assignments, find someone culturally proficient to help you interpret your communications. You might need to identify a better strategy if you discover that there may be something happening other than the person’s being overloaded or disinterested in the assigned task.

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Running a virtual meeting requires focus, tact, and discipline. But for all the ways a meeting can go off the rails, there are so many more ways it can go right. When you call on your quietest collaborator and they resolve a raging disagreement with one well-placed comment. When everyone bursts into laughter at the same weird, high-pitched noise, and your glitchy tool becomes the group’s new in joke. When you end a call by telling your coworkers to enjoy the weekend—and they wish you a happy Friday morning. When two colleagues in different cities, both speaking a second language, successfully diagnose a problem for the rest of the team. Your meeting doesn’t need to be perfect to be a success. With a bit of planning and an alert spirit, you can carry anything off.