There are thousands of articles and tips on how to run an effective meeting and create the perfect agenda to get what you want out of that meeting. It usually requires an agenda that the facilitator controls and perfects. It usually means crafted presentations, perfect timing, carefully vetted speaker lists, and a limit to how much time people can ask questions or make comments.

The focus is to make sure that the participants know you’re competent or qualified to do the job.

Leaders who project strength before warmth run the risk of eliciting fear. When people do not feel connected or belonging they move into their emotional brain where it’s hard to reason with them. People who are in their emotional brain cannot retain information. Perfectly prepared and crafted meetings can make people feel nervous of doing or saying something wrong. This means people begin to move to fear.

When people do not feel safe our brain only functions at 5%. This makes it difficult for us to be hopeful, efficient and creative. When we function from 5% of our brains it makes it easy for us to go with the majority, settle, become complicit and maintain the status quo.

Before people decide what they think of your message and approach, they decide what they think of you. Our goal at Naqsmist, whenever we enter a space is to cultivate safe spaces through protocols. We do our work internally to learn how to regulate ourselves to work from a place of trust in ourselves and trust in the people that come into our spaces. We want to support people in the room to have a voice. Our job isn’t to convince the group to go along with the loudest voices, it is to cultivate a space where everyone has a voice that contributes to decision-making.

When people feel safe, connected and belonging, they are creative, they are positive and solutions based and they are more likely to contribute their own thoughts and ideas.

Here are a few things we put in place at Naqsmist to support good governance and decision-making through warmth:

• Make space for storytelling. Storytelling evokes emotion which opens up connection and trust. Storytelling contributes to decision-making.

• Make space for each person in the room to introduce who they are and what is on their heart. Connection contributes to decision-making

• Make space for questions even the ones we’re not sure of. Questions contribute to decision-making.

When you support connection first, your leadership becomes a gift not a threat.