Reading the Room- The Leadership Skill That Sets You Apart

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noor Podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of Building Better Businesses, but we are Building Better Developers. We are the Developer Noor Podcast. I am Rob Broadhead, one of the founders of Developing Noor and also a founder of RB Consulting, where we help you figure out technology. There's this thing called technology sprawl. It is like letting all of the herd of cats go loose and then trying to like wrangle them back in. Technology is sort of like that, but we've been doing it for a long time. We can herd cats with the best of them and through simplification, integration, automation, innovation, we take skills, those tools, sit down with you. We help make sure that we're on the same page of what is your business? What does it do? What is the value that you bring? What do your customers love about you? And how can we leverage technology to do more of that good stuff? You spend a lot of time and money on technology. We help you make the most of that investment, whether that is the technology itself, the software, the servers, the hardware, or whether it's your staff and making sure that you've got the right people, the right training, the right education, even sometimes the right programs to properly leverage that technology, use it and put it in front of your make it in front of your customers, make it something that is a value add for your company. Good thing, bad thing. Let's see. I go with, gosh, there's so many things lately and I have got to think of something that's not just completely pointless. All right, good thing. Good thing, bad thing. This is really a bad thing is what we're going to start with is so now I'm in a place where I don't have a mailbox that I walk out today, nor do I have a front door that people like Amazon delivered it, which okay, I've got this nice place that's got like lockers, all this stuff and they'll put stuff in there sometimes or they'll just set it beside it. But I can just like wander by there and go, Oh, it's Christmas time. I've got a gift. The bad thing about this, because that was not really good. The bad thing about this is that sometimes that stuff is really stinking heavy. I never really thought about the fact that sometimes I order stuff that is, you know, 20, 30 pounds is one thing, but like 75, 100, 150 pounds when it was sort of my front door, my office was two feet from the front door, I could just like it over and then drag it across the floor and cool. Now I have to like go get a dolly or something like that or a wagon and load this thing up and haul it and by the time I get back, I am sweating like a pig. Not a good thing. A good thing. I have in my in my new abode, I've managed to secure a place that it is like lots of windows. And one of the best thing is when you throw the windows open, you get breezes like all day long. It is I'm not on the ocean, but it's almost like that. It's like it is a perfect place to be when you want to just like have a nice quiet day. And especially since I work remote most of the time, that means my work days are just that much better. Not as good as your work day is going to be because you now get to hear from Michael and you've been waiting ever since the prior episode, but he's back. Go for it. Hey, everyone. My name is Michael Mollusk. I'm one of the co-founders of developer NURB Building Better Developers. I'm also the founder of a company called Envision QA, where we help small and mid-sized businesses with their software problems. We help them analyze their software and make sure that the software really works for their business needs and that they are not working for their software or coming up with some weird processes on paper to basically make the software work for them or some basically work around to get their job done without the software. And with that, we have a team of developers. We have a great staff that can come in and we will work with you. We will help you do an assessment. We will help you find those pain points and we will offer you solutions and help you solve that problem. Good thing and bad thing. Kind of mixed. Good thing, bad thing this week. My wife has gone out of town for almost two weeks. When you watch this, you're probably through the first week, but we're a few days into this and it's really good because I'm really able to just focus on work, heads down coding, getting a lot of stuff done. Downside, we live on a large acres of property. We have lots of animals and they need tending to and it gets really hard when the little dog comes up to you and says, hey, I got to pee. I got to pee. I know, I'm on a Zoom call. Give me a, no, I got to pee. If you don't take them out, they pee right there on the carpet. So that's, it's one of those words. You don't know, it's, it's good and bad because it's like, yes, I'm getting a lot done, but I got to pay attention to other things that normally I don't have to pay attention to. That almost is a good segue into our topic this week of this episode of read the room. And this is something that actually sort of came out of talking about doing demos and things like that. But really, this is a, it's almost more of like a leadership connecting to your people, your customers, your coworkers kind of thing. It's a skill that some people are very good at. Some people are very, very not good at it. And that's where I want to talk about is the, so what are some of the things that you could do to help you be better at reading the room to get a little better at that kind of thing? Now let's first talk about what do we, what do we mean when we say read the room? Well, this is essentially how is what you are saying being received? Is it something where, you know, maybe you are wanting to anger whoever the audience is and they are getting angry or you're wanting to make the audience laugh, but they're getting angry or you want to make them happy and make them comfortable, but you can tell that they are actually so comfortable about to go into a comatose state. You know, there's, there's a lot of read the room things that I think are essentially warning flags that we want to look for. And the way to get yourself to be better at this is whatever your presentation is, whatever your, your goal is when you're in the room, when you're speaking is to be looking for things that are indicators that are either yay or nay. They're either pro or con what you're doing. For example, let's say that you are in a team meeting and you are talking about your idea for this new product. You've got a design idea and everybody's here and it's a design meeting event, let's say. So everybody's here. We're in, we're open to design and you start talking about your design. Everybody is like, you know, eye contact. They're looking at you. All right. That's a positive. That's probably what you want. People are listening. You're getting good feedback. But now as you go on, and let's say you start talking about, and it's all going to be purple and suddenly you see like a couple of people with a shocked look on their face and maybe a couple of people, a couple of people, like now they start to like look at their phone or they're taking some notes that they weren't taking before. And then they're like, Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. They weren't taking before. And so you are losing your audience. That is like a read the room. So obviously when you said purple, everybody was not a fan. And it's, that is a very, you know, like ham fisted kind of, you know, example, but those are the things you want to look for is as you're going through whatever your presentation usually what's going to happen is you're going to start off with one, whatever your goal is, they're probably going to start off sort of in that way. Now, sometimes you have to like, you have to change course. So you're, you're leading somebody somewhere or a group, the team, the pay, the room, whatever it is, somewhere they don't want to be. Maybe they're all sitting there angry and frustrated and you're trying to lead them to be happy and optimistic. That's going to be a challenge. But the thing is in that case, if you can just see them slightly less, you know, pessimistic and angry and stuff like that, then maybe you're, you're going in the right direction. The key, the cues that you want to look for is basically what are some of the things, and this is especially if you're going into something where it's prepared in some way, form or fashion, but if not, this is something you're going to have to sort of process on the fly. So what are positive indicators for whatever your goal is and then what are negative indicators? And you don't need many. I think honestly, if you can get it down to a positive and a negative or maybe two positive and two negative, something like that, you should be good because yeah, that's not perfect. But if you're trying to read a room, unless it's a one-on-one conversation with somebody, then there's just too much information for you to try to like, you know, parse that into all these different things. Now, if it's one-on-one, then you may have a whole, you know, deck of cards full of indicators that you want to work with. For room, I think it's going to, especially because the room is going to carry some sort of momentum and there's some sort of group think and things like that that go into these is that you really don't need more than a couple of indicators and then make sure that you're hitting the positive ones. And if you hit negative ones back out of that and go somewhere else, a good example in a larger room setting would be, let's say you decide to talk politics. Now, if you say, I'm going to talk politics and suddenly the room goes dead silence and you're like, just kidding. I'm not going to talk politics, but most often these days, you're going to basically either have a, you're going to, it depends on where you're at, but a lot of times you end up with a room that is either more heavily tilted one way or the other, right or left. There's going to be a majority of one or the other. Sometimes you get a mix, but it just seems like that is rare these days. You get one or the other. So let's say you're, you're going to talk politics and you want the room on your side. You actually don't care about politics. You just want them on your side. Well, a good thing would be if they start booing, yelling and throwing vegetables at you, that's a pretty good negative. If they laugh, clap, or you see nodding, you see some sort of things that are affirming. It's like, or maybe even people will be making hand gestures like, yeah, keep going. Yeah, this is great. Stuff like that. Those are the indicators of a positive response. So what you want to do is you want to look around and you say, you know, you step in, put a toe in and you talk about, like you say, Hey, what about that well-known left figure that alone? You haven't really committed to that, but you're probably going to see just by mentioning the name. Some people are going to be, if they like them, they're going to be happier. They're going to be uplifted. They're going to pay attention. If not, if they don't like that name, then they may be there. And it depends on what it is, but more likely not. They're going to be like, Oh no, I don't need to hear about that. You know, things like that. So they're going to now you may have to actually go out on a limb and limb and even say something nice or sorta nice or sorta bad about the person to help get the additional feedback. But that's what you're looking for is look for a cue, a positive and a negative, and then just be looking for that. So like in this case, a positive and negative cue. So a positive cue would be a laughter or a smile. So I mean, one of those lines and then a negative would be like, you know, a boo or a grunt or a frown or something like that. So you have, those are easy to read actually across an entire audience. Now there are things that are going to be more, maybe a little more subtle, but depending on your audience, if you're a teacher in a classroom, if the students are looking at you, that's very different from if they are heads down. And particularly if you hear snoring or see drool coming off of desks, very different kinds of things. But you do know in those cases, it's a positive and a negative. And these are, that's a good thing is that I think we intrinsically can read these when we are looking for them. Thoughts on that? So the first thing I want to throw out is the first thing that came to my mind when we started talking about reading the room and you started getting into, you know, talking politics was Mel Brooks's history of the world part one, when the guy, the comic goes up in front of Caesar and starts talking, like throwing out jokes. That is a perfect example of reading the room. One of the key things that a lot of comics do and anyone presenting it or talking about a topic in front of people, one of the best things to do to help you read the room is start out with leading questions, like try to interact, try to connect with your audience first to get their feedback, you know, throw out something that'll make them laugh, throw out something that might make them like groan or that way you kind of get facial expressions. You kind of get their moods. You're kind of setting the mood or setting the indicators to understand as you're speaking, how, you know, how are they reacting? Oh, okay. He's laughing. But when I actually told a joke, this guy kind of didn't laugh. It kind of gave a different facial feature. Okay. I'm seeing that. But when I said this, okay, now he's really upset. So this gives you a way to help you gauge the room before you begin your presentation, or it really helps set the stage for you to understand your audience as you're giving the presentation. It helps you get the feedback you need without the verbal feedback you can kind of get from just looking at them along those lines. The other thing you could do is start out with icebreakers, start out with things to connect with your audience. So you have a little more connection with them. So as you're, as you are giving your presentation, you will pick up, Oh, this person likes cats. So as I'm talking about this presentation, I, here's cats. So you can kind of gauge and sometimes those people will laugh or giggle and you might get other responses. But sometimes you can, I don't want to say you have like, not stand ins in your audience to kind of help move things along, but you can almost do that with an engaging question at the beginning to connect with your audience to where you could say, Oh, hey, Peggy, you said you like this. Well, how about this? And you go into that section of your presentation. Yes, you've addressed one person. The audience knows that you are paying attention to them. You're interacting with them and hopefully you can keep them engaged so that you get more out of your presentations and it helps you read the room more. And kind of the last thing I'll throw out with reading the room. It's funny, you know, you talked about throwing dirty vegetables and things like that, but sometimes reading the room with perfect strangers is extremely difficult and it can even be doubly. So if you have a room full of friends or co-workers because you already know their biases and sometimes as you're presenting things, you might inadvertently trigger some of their biases or you might try to engage some of those, their personalities or some of their, the way they perceive things to help move things along. Sometimes that works for engagements. Sometimes that can be a detractor because sometimes that engagement, those people may not like to be called on. They may not want to be engaged. So engaging them will turn them off and kind of sour the mood in those presentations. So as you're reading the room, also be careful when you're working through engagements that you're reading those engagements. Are you actually engaging with people that really enjoy being engaged with or people that are so introvert that you are just shutting down your presentation? When you are in a situation where you know, you have some secret knowledge, we'll say basically of the audience, which like Michael said, like maybe it's a group of friends or something like that, where you could have the option of maybe there's an inside joke you could tell, or maybe there's like a, sometimes there's some low hanging fruit that you can use to sort of like kick people in the butt to move along that way. Whether it's something that you know is going to anger them, whether it's something that's going to unite them, divide them, make them laugh, because especially if it's a group we know, there's going to be certain things. It's like going to, it's like going to Wisconsin and going to certain parts of Wisconsin and just being like, yeah, it's just like how the Green Bay Packers did. And everybody's like, yeah, Green Bay Packers did. And everybody goes crazy. There's things like that. It's just like, you know, it's easy. It's just like, yeah, that's an easy way to get people thinking a certain way. Or it's just like, don't you hate it when you stub your toe or step on a Lego or something like that? Everybody basically knows that. So everybody has now joined you in wherever you're at, whatever that emotion is that you're wanting to listen. So sometimes that's your icebreaker. Maybe that's the thing that you start with. If you want to set the stage, set the tone for what you are about to present or what you're about to talk about. Now, that does tend to take a little more preparation and things like that. So you're probably not going to do that on the fly. It's not going to be something you improvise, but you could possibly do that as well, because wherever you're at, there's probably some common denominator that you know that the audience is going to have. It's like when a rock star comes up and like, hey, everybody, how are you doing in Detroit or something like that. Or they'll say, yeah, I was driving down Main Street just today. And of course, everybody knows that Main Street's right there, you know, things like that. So just do that quick connection. It's cheap. It doesn't have a lot of value, but it can at least be a start and sort of like open the door, but then just make sure you follow it up. And don't just like keep going back to a low hanging fruit to save yourself if it has gone off the rails a little bit, which foreshadowing that's something we're going to talk about in the future. A little bit of that going off the rails before we go off the rails though. I'm talking about the challenge this week, the challenge this week will be pick a room that you're in, whatever it is this like this week, and ideally a room where you're just more of an observer than anything else. Like if you're getting coffee at a coffee shop, or if you're in a restaurant or you're waiting at a bus stop or whatever it is, particularly this is really a people watching challenge is get a room or a park or an area of people and just sit there for five to 10 minutes and literally read the room. Look at the groups, look at what they're doing, just spend some time sort of analyzing what is going on. And then as sort of the wrap up of this exercise is what is something I could do that would basically get everybody's attention very quickly and start them down a path of whatever it is I want to start them down. It's not exactly attention getting like, Oh, I could throw a bomb in the middle of the room and it would blow up and everybody like, why did you throw a bomb? Not something like that, but usually more of like an of emotional, it's not shock or, or are something like that, but it's more like what if, you know, what is the commonality here? And there may not be one, it may be too challenging, but I think it is something that if you do that, and then occasionally you try it out, it will help you start to figure out to advance to create that skill of being able to jump into a crowd, read them, hopefully read them faster than in five to 10 minutes so that you can then have something that will be like, Hey, now I have your attention. And so now I'm going to be able to do something to, now I can actually, I've got your eyeballs. Now I can actually make a point, sell something, things like that. And it may even be to the level, like now you're going to learn how to do like, you know, some little magic tricks or something like that. I don't know, but you know, learn how to walk on your hands or walk on stilts. There's different things you can do. Maybe that becomes your gimmick, your thing that allows you an entry into whoever your audience happens to be. I may be going a little farther than I need to on this, but it is something that I think even from a business point of view, you may be able to, you're not going to carry stilts around. I know, but you're going to, maybe you can find something that is a, maybe it's an icebreaker joke or a comment. Maybe you talk about certain sports team or it could be politics or local politics or the weather at the park or something like that, that is a, that is that common factor that allows you to step in and then give yourself some time to read the room. That being said, I'm not even going to ask you for all the other stuff this time. I'm going to let you off free. You know where to go. And if you don't check the next episode, check a prior episode for now, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to building better developers to develop a newer podcast. 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