Understanding how to be a leader at your company, org, or department is difficult enough without learning to adjust to this new Zoom call business world. Nonetheless, there are things you can do while on camera to effectively lead meetings that don’t directly translate if you’re confident in the physical meeting room.
A session at the recently-concluded, inaugural Presence Summit featured Craig Janssen of Idibri, who said he thinks people are becoming more comfortable having video turned on in meetings.
“But there are nuances to actually presenting yourself and leading with the camera on,” he said.
Craig described a top-level authority coworker of his who could command attention in any room he walked into. The person who sits in “the power seat;” who can regurgitate bits and pieces of a meeting and instantly turn them into actionable items and takeaways.
But when he transitioned to video, he didn’t understand how to present himself, and his strengths weren’t being played to.
Craig described three terms which might help IT directors, CIOs, and other leaders at organizations effectively lead on video.
Presentational Communication: concerts, presentation, lights, video, sound projecting from presenter; no bidirectional communication involved.
Responsiveness: more like improv comedy, where an audience can interact a bit with improvisers and a director; the power is in the audience with those on stage reacting to the audience; non-linear; acting with competency and knowledge. In meetings, this can be accomplished with polls, etc.
Bidirectional communication: like a dinner party, where communication shifts organically; not directionless, but fluid.
“You need to be a facilitator by deciding what success looks like at a given meeting,” Craig said. “That will help you choose from among these three systems which may be the best to employ.
Other ways to be an effective Zoom chat leader:
- Use polls which respond in real time to dialog happening at the time
- Share cloud-based documents which are very easily accessible and sharable after the fact
- Have a scribe who makes sense of freeflowing information (particularly if employing “bidirectional communication”)
- Understand where the power is, and which tool fits best to that dynamic
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