2. Leaning In
Sheryl Sandberg's excellent book Lean In has a chapter titled ‘Sit at the Table’ that begins with a story about 4 female executives declining the invitation to sit at the table during a conference and consequently seeming like spectators. Sandberg goes on to examine the particular challenges faced by women in the workplace and how many inadvertently damage their careers with their own behaviour.
The advice to sit at the table applies to anyone, male or female, who wants to contribute to a meeting. You may have heard it said that you are not at a meeting until you have spoken and it’s true but it is also broadly true that to participate in a discussion you must not only sit at the table but be physically engaged.
Sandberg uses leaning in primarily as a metaphor but it is also sage advice on the physicality of influence.
The first, and most obvious, is the purely visual impact you have on others. It's not that people can't see you if you lean back, but they don’t register you as being involved in the discussion.
Imagine what kind of impact would be created by someone sitting in a meeting with his or her head on the table.
In a protracted meeting and with a contentious subject under discussion, you might even have some sympathy. But the message would be one of exhaustion and despair and it would hugely diminish both their credibility and their scope for influencing the meeting.
Leaning back risks creating a similar impact, albeit less dramatic. The System 2 of others may not consciously notice, but System 1 will register and negatively influence people’s receptivity to your contributions.
This is distinct to the advice I offered in the first blog to get your hands on the table. It’s possible to get your hands on the table without leaning in. And possible to lean in without getting your hands on the table. Both are important.
In this photo the man with glasses on the left is out of the loop of discussion. To get his voice in he will obviously have to lean forward. But if his status is low within this group he will have to work extra hard and with his posture he has made things unnecessarily difficult.
And the larger meeting, the harder this is. Take a look at this photo and identify who’s in the discussion and who isn’t.
Those who are leaning in will find it much easier to get their voices heard. I'm not suggesting you should never lean back in your chair. It's entirely natural for our energy and interest to ebb and flow during a discussion and pretty unnatural - not to mention draining - for any individual to be continuously animated on every topic. But think about how much harder it is to get involved in a conversation at a party if you are outside a circle of people as opposed to once you are in the circle. By leaning back at meetings you put similar obstacles in your own way.
If you are struggling to get your voice heard at a meeting, then feeling intimidated or frustrated may cause you to sit back without thinking about it (this is your System 1 at work). Or it may be that, in common with many of my clients, your default posture is leaning back, in which case it may feel alien and uncomfortable to lean forward. But in the System 1 perception of others, you have only joined the discussion when you lean in.
If you’d like to discuss how I can help you sharpen your impact at meetings and get your voice heard, I’d love to hear from you on +44 7973 890578 or at bill@billbritten.co.uk