A: Ah, if not for the word “useless”, this would be an entirely different answer! But, there it is, signaling to me that you are head-down, get-it-done go-getter who’s “all business”… and who is primed for a violent crash into the proverbial glass ceiling because you have no idea what it takes to actually run a business.

How do I know that?

Because people with more savvy would have asked a different question… they would have asked, “Why don’t my meetings start on time,” or “Why can’t my team transition from chit-chat to business,” or even, “How do I steer chit-chat away from golf and more to something that I can engage in?” These folks would have had a problem about the way in which the chit-chat occurred, but not with the chit-chat itself… because they know something you don’t know.

What they know, and what you will soon learn, is that chit-chat serves a very real, very important function. To understand that function, imagine—for a moment—a meeting from the perspective of your company’s CEO:

You (CEO) walk into the meeting, surveying the 11 other people in the room. You immediately have questions, such as:

1. Who’s competent, and in what areas?
2. Who sees the bigger picture?
3. For those who don’t see the bigger picture, what are their motivations?
4. Who’s in a bad mood today? Who’s in a good mood? How are those moods influencing decisions and perspectives?
5. What are people’s personal interests… who’s looking for a promotion, who wants to coast, etc.?
6. Is anyone here trying to sandbag someone else? (And are they doing it to protect themselves or hurt the other person?)

You want the answers to these questions because it will help you frame the conversation that follows… it’s hard to talk tactics if you don’t understand your goals, your environment, and your people. It’s like when your girlfriend starts complaining about her friends, but you know from some subtle, intuitive vibe you pick up that she doesn’t actually want help with her friends, what she really wants is reassurance that you’re interested in her life. This knowledge helps you see that her goal has more to do with establishing a bond with you than with solving a problem… which is helpful knowledge because it allows you to avoid the trap of solving the wrong problem. (BTW, the correct response here is, “No kidding, that’s weird, then what happened?” It’s not—repeat, not—“Well, the answer’s obvious, she’s a moron and you need to stop calling her.” Don’t worry about how I know this. Just trust me.) In a business setting, this same dynamic is at work, and you, as CEO, need to find out the answers to these questions so that you can know how to respond the real, underlying issues, and not react to whatever you see on the surface.

What makes life challenging, in business and elsewhere, is that you usually can’t ask these questions directly. Very few people would look you in the eye and say, “Hey, CEO, this morning, I think I’m predisposed to see things through rose colored glasses because I had a really great night last night,” even though that might be precisely what is happening. Likewise, no one with any designs on keeping his or her job would tell you outright, “Ms. CEO, be aware that I am going to show you only information that makes me look good today, while simultaneously painting my peers here in the most negative light possible.”

So since you can’t ask these questions directly, how do you get at the answers?

That’s right, you guessed it: chit-chat.

People are constantly sending out subtle clues about their true feelings, motivations, and intentions. Some of us are trained to concretely identify those clues, but all of us sense them… and we know—in that reptilian, primal part of our brain—that the clues are easiest to spot when people are relaxed and unguarded. In other words, people’s true colors tend to show brightest during casual conversation… during chit-chat. From the perspective of the CEO, there is no better way to size people up than in the few minutes before a meeting starts, before people have adopted their formal roles and have started going into a more scripted mode.

If you are just starting out in a management position, you don’t need chit-chat for such political reasons. Or do you? Failure to engage can signal that you are, as I stated before, an “all business” go-getter with no interest and no idea about the politics; it sets you up to be the person the CEO looks at and says, “This person is a doer; I’ll wind her up, point her in a direction, and she’ll take off!” And nothing more. Also, if you avoid learning the skill of engaging in casual conversation now, when it is merely a social endeavor, you won’t have that skill when you need it later.

So relax! Engage in a little small talk, it just might make a big difference in your career.

Tagged as: assessing others, coaching, interpersonal savvy, intuition, office politics, perspective, professionalism