Smaller Than a Speech (and More Important Than One)

Showing up warm and attentive in your first real conversations sets a baseline your team measures everything else against for the rest of the year.

At some point in the first few weeks, you’ll have a conversation that matters more than you’ll realize while you’re having it. It won’t look like much—not like a state-of-the-team address. Not a goals presentation with a slide deck. It will be something smaller: a genuine check-in that shows your team that you’re paying attention to the people doing the work, not just to the priorities they’re working toward.

What does this conversation actually need to do? It doesn’t need a polished opening or a clear agenda—in fact, an agenda can actually get in the way. It needs to demonstrate, in a few honest minutes, that you notice the person in front of you and not just their output. That might mean asking what’s genuinely different for them this year, even in small ways, and then sitting with a longer silence than feels comfortable before you fill it with your own thoughts. It might mean asking what they need from you now that they didn’t need last year, and then adjusting based on the answer instead of nodding and moving to your next point.

Consider two versions of the same conversation. In one, a Chair opens a one-on-one with, “I want to make sure we’re aligned on this semester’s priorities,” and spends twenty minutes walking through goals. In the other, the same Chair opens with “Before we get into anything else, how are you actually doing coming back this year?” and means it enough to wait for a real answer. Both conversations might cover the same ground eventually. But only one of them tells the person anything about how they’ll be led.

The Baseline Effect

How you show up in these early conversations becomes the standard your team unconsciously measures everything else against for the rest of the year, often without realizing they’re doing it. If the first real conversation is warm and attentive, a difficult conversation three months later about a missed deadline or a performance concern lands as coming from someone who’s already shown that they see the whole person. However, if the first conversation is transactional, checking a box, moving through an agenda, or even a genuinely warm gesture later in the year can read as performance, because the baseline was already set.