So it’s been sometime now that Moodlight has been used publicly, and I’m beggining to see some regular use cases. We witnessed around 95 team leaders that made almost 270 meetings, collecting a total of 1419 moods in the application.

Maybe for people very into the art of hosting, design thinking, or from some other disciplines, these patterns are nothing new, but I’m just entering this place. Some of my observations are based on years of functioning in a mindful collective; others are extrapolated from other teams and their best practices. Using Moodlight had a ripple effect in all my day-to-day activities. Thus I’m forming some patterns for emotional harmonization within teams in my junior understandings:

Check-in with different questions

I have days when I’m jumping from meeting to a meeting, always rushing to be on top of things. If the team wants to make a “symphony” together, we usually start with a question -> “How do you enter this meeting?” But this might not be enough. It might just be scratching the surface, and it doesn’t activate me to do more profound soul searching. For developing an emotion, there’s a lot of things going on the background, and I might become a victim of the routine “how are you?” practice. Some people with high emotional literacy might be enabled from such a question to do a deeper dive and contemplate how their weekend might impact the Monday meeting or something else. But that’s not me. That’s why our check-in might get spiced up with questions exploring other dimensions but based on the same fractal. My favorite is, “Why did you join this meeting?”, especially if it’s about a weekly meeting. I still don’t dare to ask, “Why is this meeting important for you?”

Sync in the middle of the meeting

I’m easily grounded in the middle of tough dispute when somebody asks — “how does that make you feel?”. Not “what do you think about it?” or a more strategic “can we achieve it?”. So I find it useful to sync emotions when it’s getting hot. This simple provocation for awareness might change the whole experience, like in meditation. After it I might consider becoming more constructive in my responses, and the emotional landscape becomes synergistic.

Align your vibrations with a standalone meeting

When we have disturbing emotions after a meeting we might close them inside us. A good pattern is to do a walkthrough only about that. Yes, I’m suggesting to sort things out by carving time focused on different team members and their individual vibrations. After all, the business is impacted by team dynamics, and if we need to do anything first, it just might be to synchronize. It won’t hurt to do a reflection/retrospective but not based on missed targets.

Talk about how you feel and use emojis when you write.

Before a meeting is scheduled, usually, a topic is explored in written, asynchronous form. It is especially true for remote-only companies. Touching a sensitive case only with words makes other respondents not to have all cues. It makes it challenging to understand your feelings. Connect with them and express how you’ve written your words. Reveal some context, add emojis if it’s applicable and pave the way for all team members to collaborate around moods.

Wrap it all up with a check-out

Some meetings feel like a war between egos, others involve very dynamic bouncing of ideas, we even have ones with complete silence and a lot of “searching”. No matter what type of energy is involved, sometimes it might be useful to create a closure that aims to harmonize the team to end on the same page. Do a round table in which everyone expresses how they exit the collaboration. People might be surprised by the nuanced answers.

My current philosophy is that product facilitation is often around emotions, not work items. I see that no matter how detailed value/roadmap we have, no matter how good OKRs we set, everything boils down to understanding our emotions and the feelings of our colleagues. This constant wave riding of ups and downs sometimes degrades the human touch. Functioning in this state of mind is very easy to smash the inspiration of others by focusing on efficiency. It’s trivial also to neglect the tiredness of your team if you keep pushing for effectiveness. There are a lot of books written about active listening. However, I’m a slow learner and still battle to understand how to create an environment where “active listening” can thrive because impactful dialogues are happening. If you have some suggestions, don’t hesitate to shoot them.