The Virtual Meeting Coach

Before people are willing to heed your advice,  buy your products, or use your services, they need to trust  you. And building trust online is a bit of a tricky process.

Over the course of 20+ years learning and working online, I’ve been studying what kinds of things enhance trust when we’re working with others at a distance – and what kinds of things tear trust apart. I’ve spoken all over North America and Europe on this and other topics related to achieving high performance when people are working on teams.

This year I decided to make a course  to  share with web-workers and other people looking to learn more about trust-building, in particular.  It’s a topic of vital importance to most of us as people are searching for new ways to contribute in this volatile economy, isn’t it?

So, I’ve just published a new 10-day e-course at Virtual Meeting Startup that teaches “21 Sure-Fire Ways To Build Trust Working With Others Online.” I’m offering it free, as part the Pre-Grand-Opening festivities for Virtual Meeting Startup.

If you’d like to spend 30 or 45 minutes a day over the next 10 days considering three tips a day and doing a little homework to integrate the tips to your online meeting and online relationship strategies, please pop over and sign up.

Instead of pushing advice, I’ve made this course interactive. As you go through the daily lessons, there will always be an invitation for you to take time to do a short exercise at the end.  Day by day, as you do the “Your Turn” exercises, you will be building yourself a custom action plan that can turn you into a much more effective leader/facilitator of online meetings.

Helping people build trust as they work across differences – and distances – is a lifelong passion for me! I’m truly interested receiving feedback from people who decide to take the course.  So if you sign up, please feel free to share your honest thoughts, feelings and questions about any of the lessons.  I’ll do my best to address them here in the blog, whenever possible!

Enjoy!

This week I read a stunning piece by Jeff Jarvis in Business Week.

Jeff teaches at the CUNY School of Journalism and blogs at buzzmachine.com. His piece is short but packed a big punch.

He probed around a number of key issues in the conversation about openness – or transparency – and the Internet. The whole conversation of “publicness.”  His opening line was provocative, “In the company of nudists, no one is naked.”

The longer I live here, in southern Oregon, the more I see that what’s most important to people here is having a place to live their lives in “peace and privacy.” Migrants and natives alike.

I moved here not quite three years ago from Austin, Texas, and it’s taken me awhile to appreciate just how deliberately my fellow residents of the “State of Jefferson” cultivate their disconnection from the rest of the nation – and the world. I consider myself a very “private person,” but compared to most of my neighbors, I’m a virtual slut. So, I spend a lot of time trying to calibrate my enthusiasm for online learning and virtual business relationships with the thinking of most folks I’m shopping for groceries and gardening supplies with.

All week I’ve been pondering Jeff’s point about  the obstacle to more transparency in our online relating being “control,” not  “privacy.”

Privacy and Control Are Not the Same Issue

A new friend (who’s a 30-40-something) told me this week she just signed up for Facebook and that she wanted to talk to me about some “virtual meeting coaching.”  She was in a panic about how she was going to keep her real-life friends out of her Facebook. She said she didn’t want them “in there acting like they do.”

When I asked her why not, she said she wanted to be able to keep taking crazy, fun road-trips to the beach with them – without having to acknowledge “in public” that she enjoys their carousing. She was worried that if she let them into her Facebook, they would make her look bad to the other people she wanted in her Facebook and she wondered what she could do about that.

As I listened to her, I heard a perfect testimony for Jarvis’ suggestion that our hesitation about increasing the transparency of our online communication isn’t about “privacy.” It’s about “control” of how we reveal (or conceal) our different faces.

Privacy and control really aren’t the same issue, are they?  What we want from relating “virtually” are new ways to strengthen relationships – without being misunderstood or taken advantage of.

I gave my new friend some personal advice about how I’m handling this challenge, but I’m really interested in how the rest of you are handling it. How are you handling the opportunity to become more and more transparent with your online communication?

Will you help me out by leaving some comments below?