jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #62 on 19 Feb 2021 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Conflict/Difficult Discussions
The skill of naming what’s happening in the room - Lara Hogan, LeadDev
There are a number of meeting skills which can certainly apply to manage a team but are powerful skills to have in other contexts, too. In what may be a first for the newsletter, Hogan appears twice in one issue with articles from two different venues. In this LeadDev article, she describes one powerful and under-used skill - actually describing what’s happening in the meeting. An example from the article:
‘Hey, let’s just take a second to check in: it feels like maybe we are going in circles on this.’
As people partly in (often academic) research and partly in tech, we as a population are disproportionately … less than enthusiastic about talking about feelings or individual reactions to stuff. Life of the mind, and all. That’s what makes this a bit of a superpower; “I get the impression the software developers are less enthusiastic about this idea, is that right?” or “The research team has repeated that point a couple of times - I get the sense they feel like it’s not being fully understood, is that a fair interpretation?” can completely un-stick a meeting which has fallen into a frustrating rut.
Even if you’re pretty junior in the context of some particular meeting and not feeling comfortable calling these things out, just learning to make these observations and put them into words in your own mind is an incredibly powerful skill to develop.
