About Virtual Leadership Development:
how to master the new normal
In the series we share our experience and expertise as coaches and facilitators, focusing on leadership and leadership development in virtual or online contexts. We explore not only the inherent challenges we face in these environments but importantly, how to address these challenges yourself.
Whether you are a coach or facilitator, a leader looking for ideas or solutions or just a team member wanting to make a difference, we will offer our experience, thoughts, tips and suggestions of how to approach this, as we dive deeper into the specific key areas.
29 How to leverage Interpersonal Skills: Supporting
What does supporting mean as an interpersonal skill in Virtual Collaboration? How well do your team members support each other in your virtual meetings? This is the topic of our conversation in episode 29 of our Virtual Leadership Development series.
As we’ve said previously, we enjoy working with Human Synergistics’ Survival Simulation - Team Building series. In our experience, their Problem Solving model is great not only for solving problems but also in helping us improve how we communicate and collaborate in virtual sessions. In this episode we focus on the second skill - supporting - of four interpersonal skills: listening, supporting, differing and participating, to create greater acceptance.
How do we support others in a way that everyone is able to engage with each other equally in a conversation? So often meetings are dominated by one or more participants while others contribute little. Effectively, this robs the team of valuable contributions that may have led to more diversity and better solutions. A principle of supporting from our perspective is that as leaders or facilitators of a session we need to take responsibility to create a space where everyone is able to contribute equally and support each other to do so.
So what are examples of what wouldn’t like to see in a virtual session?
Participants focusing on what is wrong with an idea. To focus on what’s at fault with an idea, or find problems with it, is very seldom motivating. The less interest we have in what others say while defending our own opinion, the less we are able to connect and engage.
Conversely, if we apply Supporting, what should we be able to observe?
We would see participants acknowledge what ‘works’ in others' ideas and find the positive aspects to help make them even better for everyone. Help others to express their ideas fully by being curious and creating a space where they feel empowered to contribute fully. Often a great contribution to a conversation could be a simple question, like 'what does that mean for you?' or 'tell me more?'
7 Jan 2022
28 How to leverage Interpersonal Skills: Listening
Want to boost the effectiveness of your virtual communications? In episode 28 of our Virtual Leadership Development series - How to leverage Interpersonal Skills, we do a deep dive into the interpersonal skills we can leverage to achieve this.
We are big fans of Human Synergistics’ Survival Simulation - Team Building series. One of the models used in the series Problem Solving is excellent for building problem-solving skills in Teams. However, working again with this recently, we discovered that the Interpersonal Skills defined in this model become even more relevant in helping us improve how we communicate and collaborate in virtual sessions. In short, the model focuses on four critical interpersonal skills: Listening, Supporting, Differing and Participating, to create greater acceptance.
We have already spoken at length about what we defined as Conscious Listening, and in this episode, we thought it worthwhile to take another look at it from the model's perspective. In this and the next three episodes in this series, we explore each skill from 2 perspectives, firstly the behaviour we observe in how we show up using the skill and secondly, the process we use in applying the skill. To make it even more practical, we also distinguish the behaviours in terms of what we want to see and what we would not like to see. As an example of the latter, we don’t like seeing people interrupting each other and having more than one conversation at a time, which online leads nowhere very fast.
11 Oct 2021
27 How to Manage the Tech part 2
What impact do your choices about Tech issues have on your Virtual meetings?
In our 27th episode of Virtual Leadership Development - How to Manage the Tech, we focus on how connectivity and devices impact our connection on an interpersonal or relationship level and how we can approach this constructively.
We have all faced connectivity issues as result of problems with ethernet, WiFi, bandwidth or mobile connections. What impact do these connectivity issues have on our connection with others, how can we influence or deal with these issues? We discuss these from a practical perspective and one of the simple suggestions we have is that, it is all dependent on preparation. You can never be too prepared!
Our second topic in this episode covers devices. Again it is really important to understand how the choices we make about devices have an impact our connection. We run through quite a few topics that, from our observation, people often ignore, moving beyond choices about desktops or laptops to, for example, the important impact that cameras, lighting, microphones and backgrounds have on the quality of engagement we have in virtual surroundings.
The final responsibility for tech choices and decisions lie with each participant. However, it is our responsibility as moderator or leader to influence these so that we create the best environment for connection to happen.
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