The phrase “read the room” is thrown around frequently, and professional interviewers are expected to excel at the concept based on our training. People assume that reading the room simply means reading the participants’ body language during a meeting. Truthfully, most of the work necessary to accurately read the room is done outside of the meeting room. Leaders who excel at this concept leverage their strategic preparation, contextual awareness, and outcome orientation to create the frames necessary to successfully read the room during any meeting.
Reading the room quickly becomes a misguided mission if you don’t have a reason, you don’t understand what is important to everyone in the room, you are unclear on how the attendees affect each other, and haven’t thought about how the time of day and the room you’re in could impact how people behave. These considerations create a framework that increases the accuracy and value of your observations, while positioning you to connect dots that no one else sees.
Step one for preparing to read the room is understanding what your goals are. Your goals for the meeting can include information you would like to acquire, agreements you would like to cement, questions you would like to ask, relationships you would like to improve, and more. It is important to consider the bigger picture as well. Long-term goals to consider include increasing the profitability of the organization, improving your reputation, impacting the culture of the organization, setting the leadership example, and putting building blocks in place to achieve future initiatives.
After outlining your own goals, consider the goals the remaining meeting attendees would like to achieve. Start with the meeting host and determine his or her short- and long-term goals. Then move on to the group and consider what goals they may have for themselves, their team, their budgets, and their future. Once you’ve thought through what everyone in the room may be looking to achieve, you can consider how to create opportunities for you to achieve your goals, by helping them achieve theirs.
Improving your contextual awareness starts with understanding how meetings affect people. Meetings either shut people down or create performance opportunities, while either dividing factions within the group, or hopefully cultivating collaboration. This is why it is essential to understand how people typically feel during meetings. We can confidently assume that people don’t want to feel stupid, don’t want to be attacked, and don’t want to be saddled with extra work—just as we can safely assume that most people want to appear smart, align with key decision makers or influencers in the group, and prioritize their agenda.
This is why it is important to consider the people and relationships in the room. Identifying the leaders, influencers, thinkers, doers, and contrarians is crucial. Understanding who may possess an underestimated perspective or level of expertise can prove helpful. Recognizing relationship dynamics, personal history, and even conflicting schedules can unlock critical observations.
With these strategic considerations completed before the meeting, our minds are free to catalog and compare questions, statements, reactions, and responses from everyone else in the room. When listening to speakers, attune yourself to the emotional connotations of their word choices, fluctuations in their comfort levels, equivocations, and incongruencies in their delivery. While listening to the speaker, keep an eye on the rest of the room. At critical moments in the meeting, watch how people react to what is being said. Identify who appears to agree, disagree, ignore the speaker, amplify the message, or look to others for support. Are people taking notes? If so, recognize what they are capturing.
Listening equals learning. It is generally more challenging to learn while we are speaking. Collecting valuable intelligence by reading the room requires us to speak as little as possible. Allowing the time and space for the meeting attendees to declare their ideas, feelings, and priorities through their statements and non-verbal behavior gives you a strategic advantage. Now, you can use what you’ve observed to craft your statements and questions in a manner that is more likely to help you achieve your goals.
When you do enter the conversation, go out of your way to help people save face. You can be certain people will either become defensive or shut down if they feel attacked or abandoned in front of an audience. Empathizing with people’s goals, fears, and ideas—even when you disagree with them—will encourage them to keep participating in the meeting and continue feeding you with valuable information.
Several years ago, a business partner and I met with an organization to pitch them on a collaboration idea. We felt like we had the context well defined and understood the three stakeholders we would be meeting with. Our biggest concern was whether the presumed decision‑maker was politically motivated and whether our idea provided the caché he was interested in.
The meeting went well; it felt friendly, and they listened to everything we had to say and engaged in thoughtful conversation. As the clock ticked toward sixty minutes, the decision-maker shared his feelings on our idea. As soon as I recognized he was politely turning us down, I turned my focus to his two counterparts. As the woman at the end of the table listened to him decline our offer, she furrowed her eyebrows, pressed her lips, and tilted her head—but she didn’t say anything.
I patiently waited for the meeting to start wrapping up, thanked them all for their time and feedback, and then politely asked her if she had any ideas we hadn’t discussed. She responded by telling her boss that he overlooked a project she was working on that may be a perfect fit. Fifteen minutes later, we had a handshake agreement and a new point of contact for our project.
Recognizing the chance to save that agreement may appear like the result of a split-second observation. The truth is that the opportunity became available because we employed a strategic preparation process that enhanced our situational awareness and kept us focused on learning how we could capitalize on what our counterparts needed to achieve our own goals. Success in any conversation is an exercise in variable management. Having as many variables under control as possible allows us to focus our cognitive resources on the communication unfolding before us and apply our observations to create new paths to achieve our preferred outcomes.