Squiggly Skill Sprint Day 6: Conversations

We are on day 6 of the Squiggly Career Sprint, and today’s topic was one that is very close to my heart, how to have a conversation. Link: https://www.amazingif.com/listen/skills-sprint-conversations/

A lot of what Sarah and Helen mentioned today resonated massively with me, especially when they spoke about the challenges of hybrid & remote working. It was really interesting to hear Helen call out the difference between people that you can have a conversation with, and people that you have transactions with.

I worked remotely for a decade, and initially worked nearly totally with Americans. For the first year or so of being in the company, I thought half the team hated me, and that I was on the verge of being fired all the time. A lot of this was because there were people that would only contact me when something had gone wrong. It was only as I spent more time in the office, that I realised that we were missing out on the incidental chats at the water cooler. When I was there, I could be told something had gone wrong, but then see the same person an hour later and have a good chat.

I really believe that there needs to be space in remote work for people to have authentic and open-ended conversations, which have time to breathe. If meetings are reduced to transactional and time-constrained, then that has a really detrimental effect on remote workers that don’t get the same opportunities.

Echoing the podcast, I will heartily recommend Celeste Headlee’s “We need to talk”, and her Ted talk is one of my favourites https://www.ted.com/talks/celeste_headlee_10_ways_to_have_a_better_conversation?language=en

I’ll also give a shout out to one of the best books I’ve read for a long time, which is “You’re not listening” by Kate Murphy. It gave me one of the best rules for conversation I’ve ever come across, which I’ll paraphrase as “If someone responds immediately, then they have either not been paying attention while thinking of their answer, or they are replying with a pre-prepared answer, so why are they in a conversation”. Once I started looking out for this, I could see it everywhere, especially in remote meetings where the same people kept talking.

One final thing, thinking about the advice of having a few prepared questions to help get the conversation going. The essayist David Sedaris wrote that if he gets picked up in a taxi from the airport and the first question he gets is “How was your flight?”, he dies a little inside. He makes a point of asking curveball questions, and tells a great story about what transpired when he asked a lady at a book signing if she had ever held a monkey.

Ever since then I’ve tried asking more wacky questions, and have seen the conversations go off on great tangents. I’m not saying you should approach the CEO cold and ask them what the strangest animal they’ve held is, but you’d be amazed where it can go….