The Silent "No"

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” -John Quincy Adams 

How often have you felt “Yes, that meeting went well,” and later, found no results came from that meeting? It has happened to all of us! We all could use an “insider” (someone inside the brain of those we work with) to interpret what others are thinking after they smile and say, “Okay, I’m on board”… 

As two clients recently experienced this frustrating feeling, I came up with some steps to follow.  They had teams of people, an agenda, excitement (their own) and what, they felt, were strong ideas. This post won’t deal with 2 things: 1) how to run great meetings and 2) do we have enough alignment organization-wide (a little note on alignment below). The former is covered in other posts and the latter in an upcoming book we are writing. In this post, we will deal with how to get effective feedback.   

KLE Quick Tip:  Hold meetings that are impactful and be clear about what attendees need do to. Then, ask them what they will do and by when before they leave the room. Everyone does not say, “Yes, I am on board,” when leaving a meeting. Many just leave the room!   

The silence in the “Silent No” is coming from either your style or substance.  

On the style side, if you are not creating a psychologically safe environment, there may be some things you can look into. An attendee to one of your meetings may fear saying “no” and giving you feedback. And, this fear could be exacerbated by your communication style. Your style could be making them say “yes” (when they mean “no”), or worse, making them reluctant to give you the feedback you need or even more insidious, giving you “soft” feedback that looks like feedback, but in reality are pleasantries, pushing you to believe that you are on the right path, when what you are still getting is a real “no”. Their feedback is the exact input you need to win. 

Consider: 

- Quality of your words. Depending on your audience, your syntax, grammar, and vocabulary may not represent you well.  

- Pace of your words. A frenetic pace is scary to a listener, pushing them away from psychological safety. 

- Amplitude of your voice. Speaks for itself. Triggers fear responses in most people. 

- Number of pivots in direction during your conversation.  The pivots to a number of concurrent stories in one conversation are confusing.  

So, you can get feedback in this situation by: 

- Becoming aware and changing the key variable(s) in your communication style 

- Traditional feedback form (amazing how many people don’t do this…) 

- Having someone you trust that will tell you the truth in the room. Have them poll the attendees informally and summarize for you. 

On the substance side, you may or may not be a master of the role you have. If not a master (or you perceive you are but people are not achieving big things after meeting with you), with the right mentorship and coaching, as well as a framework of what you need to learn in your role, you have a path to mastery.     

You can get feedback on substance by: 

• Same idea. Traditional feedback form - open-ended survey. 
• Create a structured survey covering the areas of substance of the meeting. For example, if you were having a sales meeting, have questions on: 
•  - Messaging, do we have enough knowledge in the room? **
•  - Prospect insights, have we surveyed enough?
•  - Negotiating skills, can we convert more leads to sales with better negotiating training from the outside? **
• Have a peer in the room who is a great at achieving results and get their input.

** Notice the structure of these questions allows for a respondent to not criticize you but you also get feedback if you are not providing them enough substance.

In addition to substance and style, there is one nuance I want to touch on lightly here, and that is alignment.  If you don’t have alignment, you will put in a lot of effort and see a lot of activity, but not get results.  People in this chaos will either: 

• Behave in their patterns and not align to your Core Values and not be curious to learn new ways, OR
• Use knowledge they have walking in (those “this is how we did it at my old company”) people) and not solve the problem at hand with customized solutions.   

Ultimately, your impact can only be judged by the result after a meeting.  You can lie to yourself, but I guarantee, reality will lead you to mastery.  Keep practicing and “failing” until you succeed by getting your desired result… 

Note: Please share this post with others who may be able to use it to be more abundant leaders. Or, in the interest of practicing what we preach, please share some feedback on how these may be more useful to you and others.