Improve Virtual Collaboration with These 7 Techniques

Oak and Reeds Founder & CEO Dave Collins

As more and more employees demand flexible or remote work, managers around the globe face the challenge of learning to lead effective virtual teams.

Oak and Reeds founder and CEO Dave Collins shared a variety of tips in a recent HR.com article to make virtual teams work more productively, including verbalizing nonverbal communication, sharing slides in advance, and understanding the right virtual collaboration tool for your needs.

To learn more about virtual collaboration skills and how to apply them to your work, read the full article in HR.com.

How to Overcome Public Speaking Fears

Public speaking is one of the most important—and most dreaded—forms of communication. It’s a critical business skill, no matter your role. Leaders and employees alike need to be able to confidently articulate their messages, whether it’s during a weekly team meeting or an all-hands presentation to the entire company. 

People are afraid of public speaking for a number of reasons—they don’t feel prepared, they don’t want to make a mistake, or they’re afraid to look silly in front of their colleagues. But like FDR said in his famous inaugural address, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” 

To help you overcome your fear of public speaking, try these techniques and get ready to inform, persuade and inspire audiences. 

Define your point of view

Before you develop your presentation, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Why you? Why are you qualified to present this material? What is your expertise? How can you make it clear that the audience should listen to you?

2. Why them? What does the audience expect to get out of this presentation? Do you want to meet those expectations, or subvert them? What is the best way to reach this specific audience?

3. Why do you care? How does this topic excite you? Even if you’re presenting at a weekly status meeting, find one interesting data point or insight to make your presentation more memorable.

4. What action do you want to inspire? What is the one big takeaway you want to convey to the audience? Make it obvious—say it at the beginning, several times in the middle, and again at the end to drill it into your audience’s heads.  

Manage anxiety

The anxiety we feel before delivering presentations is unfortunately not something we can control—it’s been hard-wired into our physiology as a response to danger. While that “fight or flight” adrenaline rush may have helped our ancestors fight an unexpected saber-toothed tiger, today you can take advantage of that “bonus energy” to be louder, more energetic and more focused during presentations.

You can also try to calm your anxiety with a pre-presentation ritual, which journalist Daniel McGinn explores in the book Psyched Up. Just like baseball players have an at-bat ritual, you can create a routine that will take your focus away from your nerves and get you into the optimal headspace for presenting.

Before I give keynote speeches, my ritual is to walk around the block while listening to a podcast about basketball. It calms me down and gives me a minute to relax before I put on my “game face.” Other examples include: listening to a favorite song, using a guided meditation app, power posing, or—as one Oak and Reeds workshop participant suggested—go into a bathroom stall, close your eyes, and imagine yourself screaming at the top of your lungs! No matter how quirky it is, experiment with different strategies to channel that adrenaline boost for good. 

Nail your opening

Another public speaking technique is to memorize the opening of your presentation. The opening is when you’ll likely be the most nervous, and it’s also when the audience will be the most skeptical. Audiences will decide in that first minute whether to keep listening or not, so it’s important to confidently deliver your opening and set the tone for the rest of your presentation. 

That said, while the opening should be scripted, the rest of the presentation can be an outline. Scripting your entire presentation is risky because if you forget something, you’ll go into panic mode without a fallback plan. Great public speakers are able to adapt in the moment based on audience engagement, gracefully deviating from the plan. 

Rebound from mistakes

Speaking of throwing away the script, what do you do when you make an embarrassing mistake? Answer: own it, and move on. 

If you spill coffee on yourself, drop the slide clicker, or notice toilet paper stuck to your heel (unfortunately all very real things that could happen), acknowledge it with a self-deprecating joke. If you don’t, the audience will be distracted, wondering whether you noticed the issue and cringing on your behalf. By simply owning the mistake, you’ll drive empathy from the audience and they’ll find you more relatable and likeable throughout the rest of the presentation. 

Public speaking can be a daunting task. But if you incorporate these tips, you’ll set yourself up for success—whether you’re presenting in an internal presentation, a customer-facing meeting or keynote speech. 

Interested in training your team on public speaking techniques? Learn more about our workshops on the Oak and Reeds Presentation Skills page. 

Why “Yes, And” Needs a Reboot

The concept of “Yes, and” has been, in my opinion, beaten to death in the business community. That’s in no small part thanks to consultants and trainers (like me!) who use this concept as a panacea for solving collaboration skill-building challenges.

“Yes, and” implies there are only two people in a collaborative transaction; one to share an idea, and the other to build on it. Why is that wrong? Because 99% of real-world challenges, upon closer inspection, involve multiple parties. These challenges can’t be solved with pairs of neatly organized “call and response” surface-level solutions.

Collaboration at work is messy and confusing. How can we fix that this year?

“Yes, and…and”

My solution? Include a third person. We need to start approaching challenges with a question: “Who is the third person we’re not discussing here? What do they want? What can we give them as part of the solution?”

Why is including the third person important?

1. It forces non-binary decision-making - Boolean, “ones and zeros” logic is built into every piece of technology we have, but that doesn’t mean we as humans have to problem solve like an AI robot. Moving away from binary, Yes/No decision-making helps us think about the ripple effects of our decisions in a more comprehensive way.  

2. It forces inclusion of multiple points of view - It’s simple to focus a team on hitting a single metric or target. It’s much much harder to keep multiple goals in your team’s crosshairs.

Think of it like exercise (metaphor alert!). It’s easy to pick up a weight with your arm and curl it up to your shoulder. It’s much much harder to do the same movement while balancing on one foot on on unstable surface. You get much more out of a workout if you can engage balance, stability and kinetic challenges into the same movement. The same logic applies when building collaborative problem-solving skills with your team.

The more inputs you can bring to the table, the more you’ll build your team’s ability to think dynamically about multiple stakeholders.

3. If you can include three you can include seventeen - How many customers, internal and external, do you have? I’m talking about your team, the cross-functional teams you require input from to approve budgets, your customers, their bosses determining their budgets, etc. How often do you actively think of ways to bring wins to those farther down the list?

If you can think about a third person’s relationship to a deal or solution, then you can start to think about a fourth. Then a fifth. Keep these small stakeholders top of mind and you’ll discover easy wins that come at little to no cost for the larger initiative.

Let’s practice

In these newsletters I’ll be introducing you to simple group exercises you can facilitate on your own. This month, we’re looking at how to demonstrate the power of “Yes, and, and” to your teams. The following exercise is something you can do at the beginning of your weekly team check-in meeting or in the first five minutes of a daily standup.

Skill: Practicing “Yes, and, and”

Exercise: “I’m a Tree”

Time: 5-7 minutes

# of People: 10-15

After you try this out, let me know how it goes! I’d love to hear how this approach changes the way you look at the challenges you’re addressing in a particular meeting or collaborative setting.

4 Interviewing Tips for Hiring Managers

With today’s low unemployment rate, we’re in a candidate-friendly job market. Hiring managers need to be on their A-game throughout the interview process to make sure they find and attract the right person for the job. But without proper interview training, hiring managers may fall into the trap of relying on their own assumptions about what a great candidate “should” look like, instead of the team’s shared objectives for a role. 

Taking a skill-based interviewing approach will help hiring managers define the core skills needed for a role, objectively evaluate candidates, and ultimately make a great hire. Check out our four-step process to conduct effective interviews. 

1. Create a Structured Interview Plan

Structured interviews use the same set of questions and evaluation criteria across candidates for a role. The goal is to evaluate candidates using a consistent, repeatable process that focuses on key job skills.

Start by listing the core skills and attributes needed for the role and coming up with the behaviors you believe constitute solid evidence of these skills. Then, develop a set of questions that provide candidates the opportunity to share examples of these behaviors. 

For example, if you’re evaluating collaboration skills, note how candidates discuss working with their colleagues, developing cross-functional goals with internal partners, and sharing their team’s successes versus their own contributions. This technique will help you focus your interviews by prioritizing searching for objective evidence of skills rather than relying on a “gut feeling” about a candidate’s general abilities.

Though it takes a little more work upfront, structured interviews actually save time in the long run. You’ll use the same skills rubric and line of questioning across all candidates, which not only provides more consistency and fairness but results in apples-to-apples comparisons that simplify the post-interview evaluation. 

2. Practice Active Listening 

While it’s important to have an overall interview plan, it doesn’t mean you have to robotically stick to a script. Interviews are conversations between two people—and that’s where active listening comes into play. 

Active listening is a core communication skill that helps you understand and remember what a person says. It entails paying full attention to candidates’ verbal and nonverbal communication—not only listening to responses but being aware of eye contact, facial expressions, and tone. 

We’re all busy and it’s often challenging to overcome short attention spans and the myriad notifications from our email, Slack, and calendar. But being distracted during interviews could result in missing out on important differentiators and interesting moments. One easy behavior change is to silence your phone and mute computer notifications during an interview conversation (those emails and messages will be there when you’re done!).

Practicing active listening will prevent you from interrupting or thinking about what you want to say next. It also helps you discover opportunities for unplanned follow-up questions to go deeper into a unique experience and ensure you have enough evidence to properly evaluate a candidate’s skills and abilities. 

3. Tackle Unconscious Bias

Whether we like it or not, we all have unconscious biases based on personal experiences and societal expectations. At a fundamental level, unconscious biases are shortcuts our brain uses to make decisions quickly. When left unchecked, they can cause us to evaluate people based on instinct rather than evidence. 

In interviews, our biases act as a lens that influences the way we interpret candidates’ answers. When faced with limited information, our brains tend to subconsciously map candidates to people we’ve worked with in the past who we feel are similar. Because of this, it’s critical for all interviewers to actively work to limit the impact of these biases as much as possible. 

In addition to using a consistent interview structure across all candidates, hiring managers can tackle unconscious bias by avoiding beginning interviews with “chit chat” on topics unrelated to the role—including questions about where candidates are from, whether they have kids, and what they did over the weekend. These questions don’t focus on the candidate’s qualifications and may result in evaluating them based on how well you relate to the candidate, or how similar they are to you. 

For example, instead of asking a candidate about where they live or what their commute is like, pose questions directly related to the requirements of the role such as, “We have a weekly 9 am meeting on Tuesdays—are you able to be in the office at that time?” 

Some organizations try to show off their fun culture with irreverent interview questions like “If you could be any animal, which would you be?” But these queries are incredibly subjective. The answer “owl” can be interpreted in five different ways by five different people, and it doesn’t provide any objective evidence of skills or values!

4. Follow Through with an Objective Evaluation

You’ve done that hard work of conducting an effective, fair interview—now it’s time to set yourself up for successful candidate evaluation. 

Once the interview is over, refrain from sharing your thoughts with other interviewers until they’ve all met with the candidate and you’re gathered together for a debrief meeting. Ask interviewers to record their feedback immediately, focusing on specific, factual evidence about the agreed-upon skills. Because of your structured interview plan, you’ll be able to easily compare responses and choose the right candidate for your team.

Bad hires happen when organizations hire candidates who are great interviewers but don’t have the right skills for the role. Remember: your role is never to evaluate whether or not a candidate is a great interviewer. Instead, your mindset should be to give each candidate as many opportunities as possible to provide clear evidence of their skills and values. 

By focusing on gathering objective evidence about desired skills, you’ll be on the right track to building a great team.

How to Avoid Small Talk in Business

How many times have you had this conversation?

“Hi, I’m Dave.”

“I’m Jess. How are you doing?”

“Good! You?”

“Can’t complain.”

[pause]

“Crazy traffic today, huh?”

“Terrible!”

[pause]

No one likes small talk. But we resort to it in so many business scenarios, whether it’s during job interviews, at networking events, or in the office kitchen. We end up having the same surface-level conversations on default topics like traffic and the weather over and over again. And they don’t do anything to establish a meaningful connection with people who could help advance your career. 

There has to be a better way to approach these interactions. 

Improving active listening and empathy skills will help you better bond with your colleagues and have more memorable exchanges. 

And being memorable is valuable; you’ll stand out from the crowd of people making banal jokes about weak coffee. You’ll also see better follow-up results – referencing a specific conversation in your note or in the email subject line will increase your chances of getting a response. 

The connections you create at these business events will help you grow a wide network of strong professional relationships, which ultimately results in better career or sales opportunities.

Partner up and try out the below exercise in your next team meeting to help strengthen your active listening and empathy skills. 

Let’s Practice: Two-Minute Reflection

Context: 

• This exercise is a great way to build relationships with those you work with. 

• It’s especially useful when a colleague approaches you with a problem. Instead of delivering advice right away, use this as an opportunity to practice active listening and reflecting.

• Set up the exercise by telling your colleague you’d like to take a few minutes to try out a listening technique. Emphasize that you’re not trying to solve their problem right away; instead, you’re helping them explore the issue by reflecting on how they describe it. 

Instructions:

• You say: “In two minutes, I’d like you to describe a challenge you’re currently facing. Describe it in whatever way makes the most sense to you.”

• Your colleague describes the challenge.

• After two minutes, you then reflect back:

  • A brief summary of the challenge in your own words

  • What your colleague cares about most

  • Your colleague’s personal or professional values

• Switch roles and repeat.

Debrief Questions:

• How accurate was your reflection? What did you miss? What did you add?

• Did the way you described your partner’s challenge highlight or reframe their challenge in a helpful way?

• Did you catch yourself wanting to provide solutions?

These 6 Values Help Top NBA Teams Win

Steve Kerr of the Golden State Warriors and Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs are two of the best coaches in the NBA. While a number of factors make them successful, a key trait they share is a values-based leadership approach.

Since Kerr began coaching the Warriors in 2014, he built the team’s culture around four leadership values: joy, mindfulness, compassion and competition. These values have become part of the Warriors’ DNA. Take joy, for example—Steph Curry dances after three-pointers, Draymond Green emotes after every big defensive play, and Klay Thompson is consistently considered the NBA’s most popular player.

Over in San Antonio, Popovich is known for developing character in his players, which in his mind, includes a sense of humor. He explained in 2015, “Having a sense of humor is huge to me and to our staff because I think if people can’t be self-deprecating or laugh at themselves or enjoy a funny situation, they have a hard time giving themselves to the group.”

Popovich also asks, “Has he gotten over himself?” The answer helps the coaching staff measure a player’s work ethic, ability to listen and selflessness.

Let’s Practice: Define Your Values

Joy, mindfulness, compassion, competition, a sense of humor, and humility. The same values that guide two of the most successful NBA coaches can also help business leaders inspire their teams. Start developing your own list of leadership values by reviewing the following questions:

• What are five values that are important to you?

• Which values guide the way you work?

• What are the common traits and behaviors of your favorite colleagues?

• Which traits and behaviors in colleagues frustrate you?

• What makes you proud to work at your organization?

If you feel comfortable, complete this exercise with a colleague or friend and compare notes. Do your values align with your organization’s? If not, how can you start a discussion with your manager or team to bring these values to the forefront of your work?

Octavia Spencer, Icelandic Politics and 80s Comedy

In January, a new law went into effect in Iceland. It is now illegal for companies that are larger than 25 employees to pay men more than women for doing the same job. To enforce this new law, companies must submit payroll records every three years to prove they pay employees on an equal level.

Later that same month, Academy Award-winning actress Octavia Spencer spoke about the topic of equal pay during an interview at the Sundance Film Festival. She revealed that in contract negotiations for a current project, her co-star Jessica Chastain learned that Spencer was earning five times less than she for appearing in the same movie. Upon learning that, Chastain went back to the producers and demanded that co-star’s pay be increased, otherwise she’d walk away from the movie. She was successful - Spencer received a substantial pay bump and the project continued on schedule.

Race and gender in the workplace are currently squarely in the center of our national consciousness. Practically every American industry has seen leaders at the highest levels removed from their jobs because they abused people, neglected responsibilities or acted cruelly to those who report to them.

As I’ve read through the stories, tweets, interviews and discussions on this topic, I’ve realized there’s a theme from the world of improvisation that crosses over directly into this workplace conversation. It’s a concept that seems to underlie all the discussions and deserves to be discussed on its own. That concept? Status.

What is “Status”?

In improvisation, status is the perceived difference in power between two characters. When played for laughs, it can be a terrific tool to show the absurdity of our expectations about two characters and our assumptions about how they will behave.

The movie “Trading Places” is an excellent example of how playing with “status” can create hilarious results. If you haven’t seen the movie (You should! It’s on Netflix…), the premise is that a young Eddie Murphy is picked off the street by two old and crusty stockbrokers. They’ve made a bet over whether or not they can turn any random person into a successful financier. Throughout the movie, Murphy’s character slowly but surely raises his perceived status through miscommunication, embarrassment and outrageous bravado.

Why do I bring this up? The key tool he uses throughout is “Status Transfer.” He’s able to use status expectations to his advantage to improve his stature, wealth and influence. At a more fundamental level, he learns how to do two things: raise his own status and lower the status of others. By the end, he’s become so adept at transferring status to himself that, well...I won’t spoil it! 

Raising Your Status

Kat Koppett, an expert in the tools of applied improvisation, discusses status in the workplace in her book, Training to Imagine:

“In the U.S., we eschew the concept of class and power. Everyone is supposed to be created equal, and so that must mean everyone is equal. An awareness of status differences, especially with a small community or team, has come to constitute political incorrectness. Organizations flatten their hierarchies and expect that status differentials will disappear. And perhaps not surprisingly, it is often those with the most power who resist the concept the most strongly. As social science tells us, the privileged are often blind to their privileges.

But make no mistake. Status dynamics exist. All the time, everywhere. What may distinguish one culture from another is what characteristics endow someone with status, which behaviors are expected of individuals with differing status roles, and how stable those roles are... Status can be understood not as something we are, but as something we do. We confer or accept status through our behaviors, and it is those interactions that determine who is perceived as holding the power.”

This idea that status is a behavior, not an endowed trait, is immensely powerful. In an organization, status is constantly shifting, evolving and changing. In one meeting, you may be the highest status person in the room, later that afternoon you may be the lowest status and have to sit quietly while others make decisions and you sit silently.

Luckily, we don’t all have to be comedic geniuses like Eddie Murphy to shift our status in the workplace. There are some simple things that will immediately help to show confidence and raise your status relative to those around you:

• Pay attention to your physicality - posture and eye contact go a long way towards establishing confidence and respect.

• Tone of voice - speaking loudly, clearly and without “um’s” and “you knows” demonstrates mastery of content.

• Calm demeanor - finding ways to stay cool, calm and collected in the face of uncertainty and animosity helps increase your perceived status.

Raising Others’ Status

Unfortunately, there’s only so much we can do on our own to raise our status. Power structures built over decades can’t simply be turned on their head by maintaining eye contact. That’s where high status people must transfer power to lower status individuals in order to empower them. That’s Jessica Chastain’s acting as an ally to demand pay raises for her coworker. That’s the power of the Icelandic government putting checks in place to ensure corporations provide equal pay for equal work. For those of you who typically take on a higher status position in your role (i.e. you’re a holder of power), here are some ways you can transfer your status to those that you manage or oversee:

• Provide insights and context of what’s going on “at the top” so that your colleagues are armed with accurate information and facts.

• Provide mentorship or be a peer coach. Seek to mentor colleagues and be a resource who can provide help and assistance.

• Create Opportunities. Give people the chance to do the work that proves their skills and raises their profile. Give them credit for a well-done task.

• Speak up when others demean or disrespect others. Make it clear that you won’t stand for a widening of the “status gap” between powerful people in your company and those that report to them.

Let’s Practice!

In these posts I’ll be introducing you to simple group exercises you can facilitate on your own. This month, we’re looking at how to explore the subtle ways we take and give “status” to those around us. The following exercise is something you can do at the beginning of your weekly team check-in meeting or as part of a larger conversation around power dynamics in the workplace.

Skill: Exploring “Status Transfer”

Exercise: “Status Cards”

Time: 10 minutes

Supplies: One deck of playing cards

Number of People: 2-50

Let's Practice: "I'm a Tree"

In every monthly newsletter, I’ll be introducing you to simple group exercises you can facilitate on your own. This month, we’re looking at how to demonstrate the power of “Yes, And, And” to your teams. The following exercise is something you can do to kick off your next team meeting.

Skill: Practicing “Yes, And, And”
Exercise: “I’m a Tree”
Time: 5-7 minutes
# of People: 10-15

Instructions

At the beginning of your next team meeting, gather attendees together in a standing circle. Let them know that you’re doing a warm-up exercise to get collaborative juices flowing. To introduce the exercise, say:

“This exercise is called, “I’m a tree.” It sounds silly but it’s a really effective seven-minute warm-up for setting a collaborative tone in this meeting.

Let’s form a circle. I’ll start the exercise by walking into the circle and pretending to be a tree by saying “I’m a tree!” Next, someone will join me in the circle, add something to my tree and say something like “I’m a bird!” and place an imaginary bird on one of my “branches.”

Then a third person will add something to the scene, for example, “a park bench under the tree.”

Once that third person has entered the circle, we prepare to repeat the exercise in the following way: The original person in the scene, in this case, me, the “tree,” will take something out of the circle by saying “I’ll take the bird,” leaving only “the park bench.” That person stays and continues to be the same thing. They’ll start a new sequence by saying “I’m a park bench.” Then someone new adds something to the bench scene, (i.e. “I’m a person sitting on the bench”) and off we go!”

Facilitation

The group will be reticent and slow to participate at first, but will quickly get excited by the possibilities they can create together. Encourage people to jump in whenever they have an idea, even if it’s not perfect, in order to support the other players.

Continue repeating these steps for 5-7 minutes or until you feel the group has reached a high-energy stopping place in which to begin the debrief. If you’re short on time, skip the debrief and go directly into the rest of your agenda.

Debrief Questions

• What was the most surprising supporting idea presented? What was an obvious one that you would’ve guessed? Does it matter how obvious the ideas are?

• What made it hard to add to a particular idea? Which ideas were easy to build off of?

• Were you stuck at any time? How did that feel? What did you do to get unstuck?

Takeaways

• This is “Yes, And, And” in action. Adding a third idea opens up opportunities for unexpected, creative solutions. In the context of this exercise, the group is building out an interesting scene. In a work situation, it means adding additional opinions, ideas, and solutions into an idea-generation process.

• It’s tough being the first person out in the circle waiting for someone to come in to support them. Finding ways to be the “second” to someone’s idea in a real setting is a great way to support teammates or clients and create a collaborative atmosphere.

• Be on the lookout for people that are great at “seconding” and those that prefer adding the “three” for a big laugh. Typically the funniest part of this exercise is the third idea added (see: rule of threes), but that doesn’t mean it was the most important. Often, the second idea won’t be that funny, but a clear and deliberate choice will dictate the entire direction of the scene and set up a hilarious “three.”

• Try doing this with more than three people adding to a scene (Remember: “If you can include three you can include seventeen.”)