If you want to be having those hard conversations with your team – switching roles, letting people go, moving on to different careers, etc, etc – and you want to generate a response that the team can work with and move the ball forward, you won’t be able to do it without having generated a certain level of trust and authenticity before that first discussion.
Otherwise you’ll end up with a lot of people on video, nodding their heads simply to get to the end of the call.
You can have authentic, deep discussions that don’t happen on video. We’ve been having them for decades on phones.
Ever broken up on the phone?
Ever found out some devastating news?
It wasn’t always text and video, it was the sound and inflection of someone’s voice.
What made it different was the authenticity in that moment. The time your leader put into making sure everyone knew who they were, what they stood for and what direction they were going in. They knew what you were about and how you would respond to certain situations.
It doesn’t matter if you are on video when you are having these conversations, what matters is that you have become an authentic enough leader that they are listening to what you are saying.
