As the pandemic continues to loom over the entire world, everyone continues to depend on social media and online calls to talk with each other and even hold entire conferences. Despite this digital interaction, the connection between individuals seems to suffer and becomes less important as time goes by. Sitting down with Melanie Parish is Management Consultant and Executive Coach Liz Kislik to discuss how to make every Zoom meeting and long-distance calls meaningful and fruitful. Liz shares valuable tips on how to achieve genuine human connection in the digital setting, especially when reading the room is pretty challenging, if not impossible. They also touch upon the importance of feedback loops which is becoming rare in today’s online setup.

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Making The Most Out Of Today’s Digital Interaction With Liz Kislik

I’ve been thinking about leadership, and I been thinking about the value of being a good orator. It’s one skill that we extrapolate, but it means so much. If someone’s a smooth talker, if they’re able to express their ideas fluidly, then we perceive them to be better at what they do. One way that we can even the playing field in our organizations is to look at the jobs people do and to evaluate them, not just on how shiny they are or how attractive they are, but how good is the work that they’re producing. If we’re able to train ourselves as leaders to do this, then we’re able to help minimize the kinds of privilege and marginalization that live in our organizations. Look at the actual work people do and see how well people are doing the work. How good is their actual throughput, not how well do they talk about it if that’s not part of the job itself?

I’m here with Liz Kislik. She’s a management consultant and an executive coach. She’s a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review and Forbes. Her TEDx talk, Why there’s so much conflict at work and what you can do to fix it has been viewed more than 200,000 times. She specializes in developing high-performing leaders and workforces. For 30 years, she’s helped family-run businesses, national nonprofits, and Fortune 500 companies like American Express, Girl Scouts, Staples, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, and Highlights for Children to solve their thorniest problems.

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Liz, I’m excited to have you on my show.

I’m happy to be with you, Melanie.

I want to dive right in and I have many questions. I want to learn so much about you in our conversation. Tell me what you’re up to in your work.

Digital Interaction: It’s often helpful to have people write down their comments, as opposed to sharing them verbally first.

It has been a very interesting time because of the pandemic and different organizations are handling it differently. There’s been a lot of what I would call reassurance needed about how do you look at the data? How do you make choices? How do you support employees who need different things? How much do leaders get to have their preferences met? Do they have to accommodate the needs of their staff? It’s an interesting complicated time in that way. That’s one of the issues that is coming up with a lot of my clients. Some of them feel completely confident about handling it, and some less so want more guidance or almost scenario planning. What do we do under different kinds of conditions? That’s one very big thing. In a couple of places, we’re working on succession planning and the development of a strong bench underneath the top ring, which is crucial everywhere. I will say it a million times, and you never do it soon enough.

People realized how narrow their benches were in all of these. You didn’t have that many people who could take responsibility for a new normal. You couldn’t hand who could take the bucket. There were a lot of people looking around of, “Tell me exactly what to do,” and then there are people who can innovate like the innovative people that can create something out of chaos. That venture is narrow, I agree.

You need complementary skills in it. It doesn’t work to have everybody go in one direction. You need different kinds of thinking because nobody can think of everything for such a rough situation.

The situation isn’t the same. The situation we had in March 2020 is different than the situation that we have. The landscape is not like you’re getting people who can solve an existing problem. You’re getting people who can solve a changing problem. 

That’s exactly right. Some people don’t have the intestinal fortitude for it.

I remember in April 2020, I had a request from my publicist. She said that they want best practices for COVID-19. We don’t have best practices for COVID-19. We have experiments. We’re trying and we might be able to gather data. Somebody else tried, but we don’t have any best practices. The best practices are a different world than what we’ve lived in. 

It’s tough stuff. The issue of how you manage your talent and how you face a changing world, they are different sides of the same issue.

How are you experimenting in your own business and your work?

I’m very lucky because I have a place at home that I can work. I’ll call it reasonably comfortably. I don’t love it, but it is fine. I have an office that I love. Because I’m the only one here in the office that I love, it was a great thing when I was able to come back to it when things opened up enough again for that. The experiment of working at home, I can tell you is not one I would want for the long haul. It’s been interesting learning that. At a different time in my life, I might have liked working from home. I started out that way for sure, but I love having my office to go to. I find that I love it more and more, which is funny. It’s always great when it goes in that direction. I’m worried all the time about whether the pandemic will get bad enough that I’ll have to go back home. That’s one thing.

It’s been fascinating and tiring doing Zooms. I used to do a lot of work with clients by phone. That’s not as tiring for me because I’m a pacer, and on a phone headset, I can walk and that’s great. In Zooms, you are standing and delivering in effect all the time, even when you’re not the one speaking. It’s been interesting to see the interplay of the physical and the emotional, and how people communicate differently. It’s been a great gift to have the capability. I’m always grateful when a client or a colleague wants to have a regular old phone call.

I’ve been coaching for twenty years, and in the first eighteen years, I didn’t offer Zoom coaching. A couple of years ago, I did Seth Godin altMBA and I decided I liked Zoom. I felt a loss when people wouldn’t turn on their camera. I thought if I’m feeling that I can offer more value to my clients by offering Zoom. For many years, I too would walk, think, and even carry things around the house. Things that didn’t require much thought, but just returning things to places. I was moving and I felt the joy of Zoom when I added it, but then I started doing many other things on Zoom during 2020. I feel there’s a place for the phone call.

I feel in some ways, I’m a better coach on a phone call at times because I’m not worried about what my hair looks like. I’m allowing my brain to move in the ways that I need to take in information and process. I quite love this idea of the phone call. I wonder if my clients might be curious about it as well. I also could offer makeups by phone only. I try to take Fridays off and occasionally, I’ll end up taking a coaching call on Friday. The thing that I don’t like is that I ended up doing another day on Zoom. It’s not the client’s work. I do find it fatiguing in a different way. I have my questions about whether it has anything to do with the value that I provide. 

Digital Interaction: When there are structures that the group agrees to, it gives the less powerful more control.

That’s a deep question. Did you ever have a job where you sat in a cubicle all day?

Yes, for very short periods of my life. I found that was not my jam. 

Me either. I was a phone rep for a summer, and this was long enough ago that I didn’t even have to wear a headset. In those days, I thought I don’t want the customer on my head. That just seemed terrible to me. I liked a handset that you could hang up. I was very young and I was never concerned about stress to my neck. I would time my work. I would work fast enough that I could get up for 5 to 10 minutes out of every hour and walk around, and still have had all my work done with no problem. I needed to get out of that locked-in position. Moving helps the brain move. It makes you looser. That’s one thing. The second thing going back to the brain, when you’re walking around your blood is pumping differently. You’re more oxygenated. It has to be better for thinking.

The other thing that is interesting to me is the whole concept of transfer time between meetings has been lost. I particularly find this when I’m doing work with several individuals in the same company, and somebody’s handling their scheduling because every meeting stops and ends on the hour or on the half-hour. I can’t even jot my notes about what needs follow-up, etc. I went through a process on-premises with clients doing group work, which now either you do it on Zoom or they’re doing it themselves or whatever it is. Training people that start closing up the meeting before you hit the top of the hour so that everybody can come to a closure. You know where you’re at, and you can clear the room before the next crew is trying to come in. All these things make you more efficient when you’re working. We need to train similar practices in Zoom.

I went to a community meeting, and the idea was that we would connect with each other. Because we were on Zoom, we ended up having a meeting about connecting with each other. They did one breakout room, but then at the end, what they could’ve done is open up breakout rooms and let people debrief at the end. They didn’t do it. It was like, “We’ll get right on that,” and off we went. I feel there’s a whole new world of connection and Zoom that we’re going to be seeing. Online meetings are here to stay. For my birthday, my husband planned a Zoom call and invited people from all over the world to come.

He gave them five-minute timeframes to come, say cheers and a quick toast. It was lovely because I stayed put, they came and went, and I didn’t end up on a group Zoom call trying to celebrate my birthday. It was this connection and I loved it so much. That connection is what I miss. I work one-on-one with people a lot. I’m not in many meetings, but I do feel like in the big meetings, there’s room for us to figure out how to party together, how to celebrate together, how to have a connection. We’re seeing each other, but we’re not connecting. 

People are starting to do this. In the group settings, one of the things is it’s helpful to have somebody who acts as the host or emcee because we’re not good at sorting ourselves. I don’t just mean to assign people to a Zoom room, I mean to host the discussion. The small group dynamics have to be attended to as a real thing. They are a thing. Making sure everybody gets to talk and not letting anybody run away with it. There are loads of that because to your point about connection, when people now suddenly feel like, “I’m being heard,” they can go on for a very long time because it’s such a great experience to think, “I’m finally getting to talk and people are paying attention to me.” You can see them get excited, warmed up, and maybe even puff up a little bit, but that takes all the air away from everybody else.

You need management processes. Your husband was very smart. We’ve had lots of family gatherings for occasions. I have every Sunday morning with my parents and my siblings. If any of our kids are available. You can get too much talking at once. Some people retreat immediately and others keep hammering away there. Here’s another thought. My sister-in-law who was not only a gifted human being, but is a retired fourth-grade teacher. She and I had a conversation and now she presents us with a question of the week.

How lovely is that.

It’s great. You learn things you never knew. They’re evocative and sometimes they draw a memory. It’s very nice. It could be a get to know you, but also for people who’ve known each other a long time. That’s a useful addition to things like departmental happy hours where nobody knows what to say.

I agree wholeheartedly that people should ask a question. I want to shift a little bit. I know you work a lot with people in conflict. I want to make sure we talk about that because it’s fascinating. I work with teams sometimes. What are you seeing around conflict? Where is conflict happening? How is it happening? What are some tips for people about that? 

I would say that just like humans, it’s different all over. There are some people who are reveling in the fact that they don’t have to see the other people that they might otherwise have a conflict with. There’s a lot of stuff that I’m concerned about that’s going underground.

Say more about that.

Different organizations handle conflict in very different ways. Some run toward it, some run away from it. Different leaders handle that differently. Places that pride themselves on being nice and warm often don’t tolerate overt conflict well. When I’m talking about conflict, I’m not necessarily talking about fighting to try to kill the other person. I’m talking about actual differences of opinion that needs to be resolved, which sometimes can lead to bad feeling, arguments, and stuff like that but don’t necessarily have to. For places that would rather avoid conflict until there’s a crisis, now is a time when it’s much more possible to do that. At the crisis point, there may be differences of opinion, but then either somebody resolves it or remains unresolved, and everybody in effect goes back to their corner and nothing happens for a while.

You can have people stewing very easily to have more behind-the-scenes conversation of a different kind. It’s not the same as the premeeting where you prepare for what you’re not going to like about the meeting, then after the meeting, you meet again in the restroom, the hall, or the parking lot to talk about whose behavior you didn’t like. Backchannel stuff, whether people are on Slack, texting each other, or even having their Zooms privately. All the same tendencies that have always been there are there. They manifest a little differently because there are different tools for it and different ways to avoid.

There are also interesting different ways to shut people down, which sometimes happens on Zoom if a leader doesn’t like where a conversation is going. When you’re not all in the room together, even with the little boxes, you can’t check the room as well as you used to. When you’re physically present, it takes half a second, two seconds. You can scan all the faces. You get a judgment. It’s your judgment. You figure out what your next move is. It’s hard to look at everybody and see what’s happening with them. Different people are positioned differently in front of the camera. I’m sure you’ve seen this. You see the top of their head or the side of their cheek.

You have to check your slides. If you were using slides, then you’ve lost the entire view.

If you’re making a presentation, you can’t read the room the way you used to. There are a lot of differences in how the dynamics play out.

Any couple of tips for how to navigate this as a leader, as a participant? What should I be thinking if I’m on a group call? How do I up my game? 

For me, the first thing is always to think in terms of what are the structures we have for running this well? Do we have an agenda? Have materials been distributed in advance? Who has responsibilities for which topic? Is the agenda timed so that everybody knows this is our plan? Maybe we need to shift it, but we have a plan. Those kinds of things. Another thing that is structural, if there’s a big discussion, particularly if it’s on new turf, new things that you have to raise and work through that you haven’t before, it’s often very helpful to have people write down their comments as opposed to sharing them verbally first. You can have them do that in the chat although, if you have too many people on the Zoom, the chat goes by too fast. I would recommend against that unless you have somebody who’s skilled, can slow it down, pull it back up, and do those things. If everybody writes and you say, “Take two minutes and write down your thoughts,” that does several things. The people who are quick to speak get a chance to think before they speak, which they might not always do.

It’s never done before.

It helps the introverts a lot because then they are on equal footing when the time comes to speak. On Zoom, that’s even harder to manage than in a room where someone may say, “Jane, did you have a comment?” If Jane hasn’t spoken because Jane is usually quiet.

I’m super fascinated by this. I’m having this thought and I’ll share it with you. I do a lot of DISC profiling, personality style coaching, and things like that. I’m noticing, and it’s been my tendency too, that dominance or control in Zoom provides a better product. If I set some rules, set some guidelines, set an agenda, time it out, that control stuff does make for a better experience for people. It’s like my husband, people were shocked that they got five minutes to come and spend with me on my birthday, but the product was spectacular. I’m curious about that privileges, a certain style, this control style, or this organized style in doing Zoom. As somebody who wants diversity, I’m finding it interesting. I don’t even know what my question is, but you get what I’m saying. 

Let me speak about that a little. Here’s the thing that is of interest to me, whenever something is a better technique, it’s usually better in lots of places. It’s funny to me that you started with control and then you went to organized. When there are structures that the group agrees to, it gives the less powerful more control. It makes the most controlling moderate themselves. I see it as a way to platform a more equivalent experience. That’s because of it that way and I tee it up that way. If you are using the agenda as a way to determine who will speak and you are in charge, that may be fine for a controlling leader who only gets the value out of the group that a controlling leader will get, which is not as much value as a more open and engaging leader.

The controlling leader may not want that kind of participation. That could be a problem for the organization or under either crisis circumstances, it could be exactly what’s needed. You can’t have twelve people issuing their opinions. It’s a crisis. Somebody got to decide in 30 minutes. It’s the controlling leader who must take that on if it’s their responsibility. All of these are circumstantial. There’s no medicine that’s good for everybody. Years ago, there was a big push to bring retired people back into the workplace. There was a lot of resistance and hesitancy.

Their computer skills weren’t going to be good. They were going to be setting their ways, all kinds of things which were turned out not to be true. You give any willing person some training, and they do better than they would do on their own. All of the things that became the tools for helping to onboard, train, and manage these people who were supposed to be so challenging were useful to everybody. If you make the work experience and the work process clearer, more accessible, it’s good for everybody. It doesn’t matter which group you think needs it. Everybody needs it and everybody does better.

Digital Interaction: If you start feeling fluttery, feel your feet in your shoes, stand tall, and anchor in your body because it always knows if something’s messed up.

I often talk about the idea that we have these personality styles, but what we need to do is learn to see them as tools that we can pick up or put down. That’s exactly what you’re talking about. Somebody might start a process from a dominant or controlled place. People who have that style are good at making sense out of chaos. They flourish in a chaotic time. Later, we need to help everyone in the organization pick up those, and turn them into best practices. That turning them into best practices is how you use them to make sure everyone gets a chance to speak.

I’m watching that in my head as we’re talking and thinking how interesting that is in a Zoom call. How do you do a good Zoom call? We start with somebody who’s more dominant maybe thinking, “This is ridiculous. We’re not going to do this every time,” and then they come up with a plan. Later, everybody else had adopted the method. The method helps to elevate everyone’s voice. I love this idea. This is a fascinating conversation and it’s fun to hear your thoughts on it. I’d love to know what you do for self-care. How do you take care of yourself in these crazy times? 

What made you asked that?

You seemed grounded. It’s a question I often ask, especially people who are helping others, sometimes we have some fatigue. I’m curious.

I’ll tell you in this period, not enough. I’m conscious of that. I am somewhat envious of the people who perfected their sourdough, are quilting, and doing all kinds of new things. That doesn’t seem to be happening for me.

Me either.

I have more people who I speak with more regularly, even outside of work, because people need to be in touch exactly as you were saying before. For self-care, I try hard if I could be in bed for eight and a half hours. That would be great. I have worked my way back up to about seven. Sleep, that’s important. I have an on-again, off-again meditation practice. I do it for a long time, and then I break. I try a different kind. I’m completely not rigorous about it, but I’ve done it for many years that I can drop into it if I feel I need it. You used the word grounded. I do a lot of what of what I think of as grounding, and I encourage my clients all the time, if you start feeling fluttery, feel your feet in your shoes, stand tall, anchor in your body because your body always knows if something’s messed up. That’s very important. There are self-care things I used to do. I used to have a monthly massage. I used to have a monthly facial. Those went out the window. I can’t wait until they come back. I’m looking forward to those.

I walk a lot, that’s helpful. One of the things that’s the most helpful and it’s so small, in my office, I am again so lucky with the ability to have an office that’s mine and I control it and it’s how I want. I have a fantastic large window and view where I can see a whole bunch of the town laid out in front of me, including train tracks. It’s like Lionel’s set. There are always human activity, trees, and all kinds of interesting things that I can just turn to if I need to turn away from something I’m stuck on or frustrated with. I have a lot of plants and I tend them.

You talked about putting things away as you’re walking around, I will pick dead leaves, which is a strangely meditative process in itself. Those are the things, and I read a lot less right now. I don’t have as much time for reading as I would like. It’s almost all work-related, but I’m very fond of knowing what’s in the news and reading new things particularly in terms of neurodevelopment and a variety of whether they’re mindfulness practices, compassion practices, or soothing to know about and to try, and they’re helpful to clients sometimes. It’s great to know that there’s so much development in those areas that we can manage ourselves better.

Where can people find you, Liz? 

The best place is my website, which is www.LizKislik.com. If it’s helpful to anybody, they can also get a free eBook that’s about the interpersonal aspects of conflict at work. I have a newsletter and a million blogs going back for several years. It’s lots of information if anybody wants and they can also find me on LinkedIn and Twitter.

It has been such a pleasure to have you on my show. Thanks so much. 

It’s been so nice to talk to you.

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I’ve been here talking with Liz Kislik about all sorts of things, about how people can better interact with technology during a time that people are online. I find it fascinating that she’s talking about leaders needing reassurance, and that takes me back to feedback loops in an organization, hearing how you’re doing and having other people give you feedback on that. Those feedback loops are so important, especially as we’re trying new things. Those feedback loops are a type of data collection as we think about how we’re interacting, and is that working for the people around us? Go experiment.

Important Links:

• Why there’s so much conflict at work and what you can do to fix it – TEDx Talk
• www.LizKislik.com
• LinkedIn – Liz Kislik
• Twitter – Liz Kislik

About Liz Kislik

Liz Kislik is a management consultant and executive coach, and a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review and Forbes. Her TEDx “Why There’s So Much Conflict at Work and What You Can Do to Fix It” has been viewed more than 200,000 times.

She specializes in developing high-performing leaders and workforces, and for 30 years has helped family-run businesses, national nonprofits, and Fortune 500 companies like American Express, Girl Scouts, Staples, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, and Highlights for Children solve their thorniest problems.

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