Putting Your Best Look Forward: Improving Video Calls

The effectiveness of leadership and persuasion now demands we leverage this awkward medium to connect, empathise, and inspire each other. It’s novel for a month, stultifying over a year.

The TV newsreaders who nightly warmly embrace our living rooms have spent a career perfecting the skills you now need to coax, motivate and excite. And the TV executives pulling strings behind them have spent 60 years manipulating set designs that capture that marriage of warmth and authority.

Without that luxury you must learn the nuanced skills to sympathise, deliver criticism, read tone and body language, and deliver with cadence – suddenly a new word in our video-lexicon.

Each of us has limited tools at home, but here are some hints for you to experiment with, developed over a lifetime of television and more recently helping people to better communicate.

 Personal presentation

1.   Dress your set in a way that defines you.

2.   Learn about framing the shot (Google ‘photography framing a headshot’; more complex ‘photography rule of thirds’).

3.   Experiment with lighting to highlight.

4.   Dress to be remembered.

5.   What you say matters:

• Let your knowledge shine - be informed and prepared
• Think, then speak
• Nuances are difficult
• Be generous in helping.

6.   How you say it matters too: empathy, humour, tone.

7.   Multitasking is a grave sin!

8.   Watch others and learn

Structure of the meeting

1.   Start with the end in mind: think objectives, strategies, tactics.

2.   Circulate an agenda.

3.   The start of the meeting is important – setting the tone.

4.   The skills of the facilitator are critical.

5.   Delegate someone to take notes so the leader can focus.

6.   Stick to the prescribed time.

7.   Ensure clear next steps/outcomes.

8.   If there is a new person joining a team meeting, have a separate one-on-one catch up.

Personal skills in a meeting

1.   Prepare.

2.   Understand first then be understood

• Don’t talk too much
• Don’t interrupt
• Be an expert listener.

3.   Keep listening during the boring bits

4.   At the risk of being corny, be:

• friendly
• a person of integrity and decency
• confident enough to be humble
• both kind and firm
• honest and transparent
• aware that we all seek meaning in work.

5.   Treat each video-event as work-in-development. Don’t be too tough on yourself. Every experience is an adventure.

After the meeting

1.   Review yourself.

2.   Followup email with clear ToDos.

3.   If there was a dissonance, call to repair the damage.