The readout was going fine until minute forty. Then a senior vice president who had not spoken in six weeks unmuted himself, said he had concerns about the whole direction, and took eleven minutes to explain them. Everything he said was fair. All of it was new to me.
In an office I would have known by week two. I would have known from the way he angled his chair away from the wall of work, or from ninety seconds in a hallway where somebody said you know he hates the word premium, right.
None of that exists now. What exists is a grid of faces, a third of them dark rectangles with initials in the middle.
Remote work did not make stakeholders harder to read. It moved the reading out of the meeting entirely, and almost none of us rebuilt the part that used to happen in hallways.
Think about what a conference room handed you for free. Arrival order, who came early and who slid in late. The small physical tells, the lean back, the pen set down, the glance across the table between two people who had clearly discussed this before you got there. Eight unstructured minutes before anybody opened the deck. None of that was on the agenda and most of your stakeholder read came out of it.
Video kept the agenda and deleted everything else. Worse, it moved the honest conversation into private chat, where the objection you most needed to hear travels sideways instead of toward you.
Which means you have to make it explicit. That feels bureaucratic. It is not.
Call every senior stakeholder one at a time before the readout. Not a group pre-read, which is the same meeting held earlier. A phone call, fifteen minutes, in which you ask what would make this land badly for you. People will answer that question one on one who would never answer it on a grid.
Ask for cameras on in decision meetings and say why. Six months into this, people accept a rule with a reason behind it and resent one without.
Then close every session by name. Not any other thoughts, which is an invitation to silence dressed up as an invitation to speak. Go around out loud. Dana, anything. Marcus, anything. It is slow, slightly awkward, and it surfaces the eleven minute objection at minute twelve instead of minute forty.
People will answer that question one on one who would never answer it on a grid.
The karaoke bar in Southeast has been dark since March, and I miss the singing less than I expected and the room more than I can explain. You could feel a crowd decide something before anybody said it. That was the skill. It is still the skill. It just costs phone calls now.