Why You Should Get On The Balcony
“Who can be silent for five minutes?”, a friend had been thrown this challenge on the table.
We were out late one night when someone mentioned a silent retreat his friend had been on. In this retreat,everyone had to be silent – no communication, online or offline – from dawn to dusk. A pretty tough challenge for our group, given our conversation never ceased. Casual banter, ribbing each other, laughing hysterically at inside jokes were all part of any evening together.
But two of us took up the challenge. A timer was set and we became quiet. At the end, though, it was not clear what anyone would gain from intentionally remaining silent for any length of time.
This is when I remembered the idea of “getting on the balcony”.
I first encountered the concept of “getting off the dance floor, and on the balcony” at a leadership retreat at Microsoft. The instructor had said: To be an effective leader, you should not always be in the fray or on the dance floor. Three reasons why:
1) Humans love to feel heard and understood. Research shows that less than half of anything anyone says is properly understood. But more importantly, only 7% of our communication is verbal. Given these stats, and the importance to relationships in day-to-day life, it makes sense to be quiet and try to carefully understand others first.
2) If you constantly keep throwing your two cents in, people’s real thoughts and opinions can get masked or biased. Inclusive environments where everyone’s true opinions are heard yield better results. This is especially important if you’re a senior leader in an organization, and people could feel an unspoken pressure to “fall in line”.
3) You need to be centered yourself to act in emotionally intelligent ways. Our biology is wired to constantly scan our environment for threats and rewards. Any signal goes through our primal brain centers first, and if you do not act from a place of calm awareness, you run the risk of making poor decisions triggered from quick emotional reactions.
You cannot stay on the balcony forever, though. Action is important for progress and a leader needs to act. But occasionally stepping on the balcony before acting can lead to better decisions and a healthy workplace.
So how exactly do you get on the balcony? Checking in with yourself is a required first step. You need to understand your emotional state, and regulate it, before you can understand the emotional state of others. I find that taking three deep breaths and focusing inward is good way to settle in.
Then you observe. Pay close attention to everything happening around you, what everyone is saying and more importantly what they are not saying. Watch their body language and gauge the level of comfort they have in a situation. If needed, lean back physically to signal to your brain that you are stepping out of the fray for a bit.
Resisting the urge to say something and always act is a skill that needs to learned and kept sharp. Practices like meditation and silent retreats can in fact help develop this skill. The more often you take yourself off the fray, the more easily it comes to you in tense situations.
But first let's practice: can you be silent for five minutes today? How about two?