When you are in a meeting, you ideally want to be in control of it and not the other way around it. You want to take the meeting as you wish to and bring up points that you want and in the order that you have set. If you are addressing your subordinates, you can confidently say that you can do it each and every time. What about meetings with customers? How sure are you? Not the same as it is with your subordinates, is it?
Leading and pacing is a technique that helps you take control over the face-to-face interaction you are in. You could sit as a mediator trying to resolve conflicts, or apprising your team of the changed goal sheet. One of the sure ways of getting their attention, getting people to take you seriously and to follow your lead, is through this technique.
The methodology works something like this. You start mirroring the person who you are interacting with. After you continue doing this for a while, the party who you are conversing will get a whiff of it, and starts to feel in sync with you. And then you can start leading the person by doing something else, and the person will follow you. Once you are in this zone, you can take control of the meeting, and start leading it your way.
Let me expand on this with an example.
The people who you interact with do not sit idle. They have a certain posture, voice intonation, move their hands in a certain way, and have various distinctive mannerisms. Your first task is to observe the person. Identify one or two mannerisms that you can mime. Say the person has his arms crossed and speaks in a low pitch. How difficult is it to match these two? So you will start mimicking these two actions, and if the person changes his posture with arms on the table, you will do so.
Other items that you can mimic are breathing rate, head nods, verbiage, blink rate, and speech rate. While you do it, don't make it obvious. Let the pacing activity be subtle.
How long will you continue mirroring the person in front of you? As long as it takes for the sync to set in. You will know that the sync has happened when the person starts to mimic you after some time. You can test for the synchronous movements from time to time by moving your hands off the table and see whether the person does the same too.
The mimicking movements of the person across the table signifies that you have built a rapport at a subconscious level. Make sure that the people in the room never get a whiff of what you are doing. You would have built a sphere of influence that you can leverage on in the next step.
Now the sync has set in, it is time for you to make the moves. You can start by suggesting—"Why don't we discuss the new requirements?" The customer sitting across the room will oblige because the person can feel the connection. In this way, you run the face-to-face interaction as you would like as long as your suggestions are not ludicrous, such as "Why don't we go dancing?" If the connection is strong, then your customer may be up for this suggestion too!
Try the three steps out. It works. You need to take care of identifying mannerisms and mirror them subtly.
Suppose you have two people in the room. You can still mimic both of them together. If one of them has crossed his legs and the other has folded his arms do both the activities together. You are upping the bar by mirroring two people simultaneously. This will take time but practice it on one person.
Action Point
Exercise (for students to attempt at the end of this topic followed by a group discussion):
- For your organization, how important it is do you think that meetings, especially face to face, go according to plan?
- Run a mock session with two individuals. Let one mimic the other, and the person who is being mirrored share the experience of how the feeling was being mimicked and the possible connection that was felt.
- In another mock session, run all the three steps and see the results of improved connection and hence control over sessions through effective communication.