What the Room is Telling You: How to Read the Room

You've walked into a meeting and felt it immediately - something's off. The energy is flat, or there's a tension nobody's naming. 

What do you do with that? 

In this practicast, we share a simple, repeatable practice for reading the emotional temperature of any room.

Reading the Room is a short practice in social awareness — one of the core skills of emotional intelligence. 

In this practicast, we walk through three steps for tuning into the emotional temperature of a group before and during meetings: the early arrival observation, the 3-person scan, and the traffic light check. 

Perfect for service providers, coalition leaders, nonprofit staff, and anyone who facilitates groups.

LinkedIn Practice:

1. Pick one meeting per day to practice a deliberate 3-person scan. 
2. Afterward, jot down one thing you noticed that you might have otherwise missed. 

Over time, this kind of intentional observation becomes second nature.

Links and resources from this episode:

• Join our LinkedIn group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12879756/ 
• Send us a message: practicingconnection@oneop.org 

Transcript

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Practicing Connection Podcast. I'm Erin. Today's Practicast is about a skill that sounds simple, but takes real intention reading the room. And my co-host, Jessica Beckendorf, will be sharing the practice with us. Hi Jessica. How are you?

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Hi, Erin. I'm doing pretty good, thanks. I've actually been thinking a lot about this topic lately. I feel like, it's spring as we're recording this, and I feel like spring every single year is like the time of year for facilitated discussions, because I have facilitated several workshops over the past few months, so I'm really excited to share about this idea of reading the room and what that means.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: I am excited too. It's one of those skills that I think people assume is something you either have or don't have, just like intuition, but I'm guessing there's more to it than that.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah. Exactly. I think, whether we're walking into a team meeting or we're [00:01:00] going into a coalition meeting, where it's like a bunch of people who aren't on our team, or whether we're facilitating our group, like I have been all Spring long, or if we're even just sitting across from a colleague, there's always a lot more happening than what's being said out loud. The emotional temperature of a room can influence everything. 

Things like what gets decided, what goes unspoken and whether people feel safe enough to show up fully. And I really like this practice because it gives you a repeatable way to tune in to the temperature of a room before you jump into whatever business it is you need to do.

And this is great for, look, if you're someone who thinks of yourself like your abilities in this area are not as good, or whether you're someone who you're like, “I feel like I can read the room intuitively, and it's not a big deal,” I think that this just gives you a way to be very conscious about reading the room. 

So it can help either group of people, right? Whether you think you're good at it or not.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: That's awesome to hear. I love that, [00:02:00] because I've noticed for me, and everybody's a little different, but for me, I can either intentionally read the room or I can unintentionally read the room without realizing. 

And then maybe not show up how I want to, or maybe exclude people. Because I don't realize, I'm only reading off the really intense people. So I'm really excited because it sounds like you're putting together a structure that we can use to engage in paying attention, and that gets me excited. Tell me more.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah, so I don't have a specific name for this activity because to me it's just, “Read the room,” which sounds actually like you're insulting someone, right? “Read the room people.” 

But it's really just a way of practicing. So like we've been saying, not everyone is skilled at reading other people. Or maybe you just think of yourself as not being skilled in that way. But we all have some form of intuition when it comes to reading other people. For some people, it's maybe more developed than others. But [00:03:00] the thing is, even if you think of yourself as skilled or not skilled at reading, other people reading an entire room is different.

The skill is part of what emotional intelligence researchers call ”Social awareness.” So the ability to notice what others are feeling, even when they don't say it, even when they're not saying what they're feeling, it's one of the most important skills for anyone doing collaborative work. Because groups carry emotions that no single person owns.

And in fact, the emotions can resonate and ricochet across the room, and because of that resonance they amplify. So basically we can put little air quotes around this word. We can sort of “catch” feelings. And if you can read those emotions, you can respond to what's actually happening, not just what's on the agenda.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yeah. That's so interesting. I'm glad you used the idea of catching and resonating, and I've certainly felt that in meetings where you walk into a room and you're like, [00:04:00] “Ooh, something's happened in here.” I feel it can also be potentially a positive experience. I very recently went to see Project Hail Mary in the movie theaters, and I was so glad that it was a movie I chose to see in the theater because it was this really collective experience where all these people were feeling things with me, and the movie was better, which is not always how it is. Sometimes you go and you watch something with other people and they ruin it for you. But this was just such an intense thing, where I was like really resonating with the whole room.

It really felt like we experienced something together, even though I did not talk to a single other person in the room besides my husband, who I went to this movie with. And so you are saying that shows up in all kinds of spaces, not just the movie theater, and that's something we can actually be tuned into and read nuance into.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah. And there's actually one really important nuance, and that is that we don't all read emotional cues the same way. And we don't all [00:05:00] get read the same way by others either. As you build the skill, it's really worth asking yourself, “Whose signals am I most practiced at noticing, and who might I be overlooking or misreading?”

Because reading the room well means not so much hyper focusing as it means widening your lens, like being able to take in the environment and the mood. It's a really important nuance to consider, but I think just getting started practicing is a good place to start.

And then as you go along, you can be like, “Okay, now whose signals am I most practiced at noticing? Who am I possibly overlooking or misreading?” And look, I have often misread, for example, men that are maybe a little older than me, a little bit wrong. I've noticed some of my own patterns that way.

And because I notice those patterns I have been able to adjust my thinking around all of it. And does it mean I'm better at reading them? [00:06:00] Yeah, it certainly means I'm better at reading it. Or what's really happened in my case is I'm better at asking questions at the right time, right? I notice when I'm starting to feel that little bit of tension, and I ask questions, and so it helps me to widen my lens and to not misread the person who is who I'm talking to too.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yes. That is a really helpful context. I think you've got me really excited for learning this skill specifically, because it sounds like it's also a really useful tool if you're someone who has to switch contexts. You know, if you're moving between different organizations with maybe different levels of formality or different levels of decisions get made. 

Sometimes people forget that not everybody does things the way that they do, and they don't communicate what they're doing. So this is potentially a way to figure it out without having to make a big mistake publicly, and then have someone say, “Oh no, we don't do that here.” [00:07:00] Right, which is a thing I have survived many times. 

It's a very survivable thing, but it's never comfortable. So this is also okay.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: It's really great for cross-sector collaborations. It's a really great skill to build. If you're going to be going into rooms where everyone in that room is coming from a different context, a different organization, a different way of doing things.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yes. Okay. You've got me really excited. We could chat all day, but let's dive into it. Walk us through this. How do you do it?

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Okay, so the first step, and we're going to be talking about this in the context of a meeting, because it is a very familiar work context to use this in. But you can adapt to this to other types of things as well. 

The first step is to arrive a little early and observe, and I'm talking about just building in 60 seconds. I don't think you need to go 20 minutes early and stare at everybody as they're walking in the door, stare them down, [00:08:00] observe them. No, I'm talking just 60 seconds. Arrive a little early and observe. 

This is before you start talking, checking your phone or setting up. Just notice. Who's in the room? Where are people sitting? Are they clustered together or are they spread apart? Are there quiet side conversations happening? Is the energy light or is it flat? 

This is your baseline information. You're taking the temperature before the conversation starts. 

So step two then is once the meeting begins, you're going to pick three people to scan. Ideally, this will be someone you know well, someone you don't know well, and someone who tends to be quiet. Now, maybe this is your first meeting with the group. Just pick a couple people you don't know well, or a couple people who maybe as you were doing that kind of initial step one where you arrived a little early, you noticed one person was quiet and one person wasn't. [00:09:00] So you could just pick those two. Doesn't have to be three people.

So what you're going to watch for during the meeting is things like their posture, are they leaning in? Are they pulling back? What are their facial expressions? Do they look a little confused, skeptical, or disengaged? Even if they aren't saying anything.

And keep in mind that you might be misinterpreting their facial expressions. You can still make note of what you think they are, but please, always remember that you may be wrong. This is just for you to get a sense, and it's your best possible sense of what's going on.

And then the third thing is to take a look at their participation patterns. Are they unusually quiet, or are they talking more than usual? And again, if this is your first time in the meeting, you're going to just do your best to notice those participation patterns. Maybe you don't know if they're usually quiet or talking more than usual, but you could say, “Oh, this person was quiet, and this person was talking a lot.” You [00:10:00] could just make note of that. 

So you're going to look for those three people. You're going to look at posture, facial expressions, and participation patterns. All you're doing is, noticing three people should give you just enough data without feeling overwhelmed. And then this is going to give you a clue as to how things are going along the way, right?

So you'll keep observing those three people along the way in the meeting. And finally, this is the last step, step three is, this is where you widen the awareness to the entire group. I'm calling it a green, yellow, red traffic light check, because I am not very inventive.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: I think it's also good teaching to use accessible frameworks, and a lot of people have experience with traffic lights, so that's a pretty easy way to shift through information. 

JESSICA BECKENDORF: We couldn't do this with a roundabout, right?! We couldn't describe it the same way with a roundabout.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: For people who aren't from Wisconsin, a roundabout is also known as a traffic circle in other parts of the country.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yes. Okay.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: I had gotten into lots of [00:11:00] fights about this when we moved to Wisconsin. I was like, what is that?

JESSICA BECKENDORF: So step three builds on step two by asking you to be in tune with the whole group, not just those three people. So the best time to practice this step is after something important is shared, an idea, a decision. A question. And so you're going to use your scanning skills from step two to take just two seconds.

And I know that doesn't sound like enough time to read an entire room, but the more you practice this, two seconds is going to feel like the exact perfect amount of time. 

So take two seconds to scan the whole group. If you're leading the group, just make sure to take a pause. No one's going to notice a two second pause. No one's going to notice a five second pause. Just take a pause if it helps, take a drink of your coffee or your water or something in that pause, so it'll just give it a little more time. They won't know that you're reading the room. 

So then what you're going to do is ask yourself in those [00:12:00] two seconds, “Does the group feel like they're green, yellow, or red?” Green is that people seem engaged, the energy is flowing. This is really a clue that you should just keep going.

Yellow, something seems like it shifted. Maybe the energy dipped a little bit. Maybe someone's expression changed. This is a clue to you that you should slow down. Maybe offer to take a break, if you're the one leading the meeting, or maybe if you're not leading the meeting asking, “Hey, could we have a five minute break or two minute break?”

The other thing you could do instead of taking a break is ask a question. “What's landing for you right now? Is there anything that we'd like to name that's happening in the room right now? What's coming to mind for everyone right now?” 

And then red: probably, obviously is where maybe the tension is quite visible. Someone maybe looks upset. The group seems a little bit fractured. A conversation has stalled. 

This is the moment to pause, to [00:13:00] listen, to name what's happening, and when I say name what's happening, I would be really careful about that. Because when you name what's happening on your own, you're coming at it from your perspective. And you may not be correct about the perspectives in the room but you might say, “I'm reading that there's some tension in the room. Am I correct?” 

You could check in with everyone: “Am I correct that there's some tension here?” And if so, you could let the people in the room name it, right? You could let them acknowledge that there's some tension and name it.

I want to just say that how you approach the red part depends on what the issue seems to be. I'll give you an example. I was facilitating a big group, multi-county initiative that these folks were trying to really make a difference in big ways across their counties. The meeting started out great, right? So I, we were green light at first. The meeting started out great. The energy was great. 

And then, somewhere in the middle, something shifted. We went into yellow. [00:14:00] Something shifted. I couldn't put my finger on it. They were still engaged, they were still going through the activities that I had brought for them to think through their strategic plan. But then the energy dipped. 

The conversation then started to stall. That's when we had moved into red territory. So they're at small group tables. They started out maybe just with a little bit lower energy. So they were in the yellow zone, but at their small group tables, this is when the rubber's supposed to meet the road in this particular activity. They were going to be coming up with action steps and all of that, and the conversation stalled.

It got quiet in the room, and I had been noticing something happening over the course of the day. We only had the one day to get these ideas down and on paper. And so, I made the choice of asking, “Okay, so here's what I'm noticing. I'm noticing that there's some tension.” 

I checked in with them, is there tension in this room? And they [00:15:00] all admitted to it. And I said, “Can we talk about it? Is this something you feel comfortable talking about?” And they said yes. And it turns out that there was a difference in opinion about how they should proceed. About half the group was like full steam ahead, and the other half of the group was like, we need to consider the management of what we're doing because. If we do full steam ahead, we're going to be burnt out real quick. 

And we were able to talk through that and get some things down on paper before the end of the day. Because that was the only day we had to work on it. So we were able to come to some conclusions now. It didn't solve all their problems, but it did very publicly name what was happening in that group so that they could begin the conversations of solving or resolving, I'm gonna say in this case, resolving their issues.

So I let the people in the room name it. I named what I was noticing about the [00:16:00] tension, and I let them name what the tension was, and I checked in, “Are you guys comfortable talking about this, or should we talk separately?”

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yeah. Okay. I'm curious, do you use this when you're not facilitating the room?

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Like when you and I are in conversation, is that what you're asking, Erin?!

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: No, I just think that not everybody who listens to our podcast maybe facilitates big groups of people. Is it still useful when you're just like, Joe Schmo, just a person in a meeting?

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah, I mean I think you could even use this with one other person, although the activity is about reading the room more than it is about reading one other person. Although certainly you could use step two with reading people's posture, their facial expressions and their participation patterns when you're doing one-on-one. 

But yeah, I absolutely think you could use this in any kind of a group setting, with your friends, right? You could use it in a friend setting if you want to. You could use it with [00:17:00] family, and also I would always caution people to be careful. Be careful facilitating your family. There's too much history sometimes,

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yes. Okay.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: And certainly with your team, even if your team is just three people or whatever, you could certainly use this with the team as well.

So really that two second pause, that step three is critical to the whole practice. It's where reading the whole room actually happens, versus honing in on a few people, to check in on how things are going as you go along. 

So yeah, that's the practice. Arrive and observe. First do a little bit of an individual, three person scan. And use green, yellow, red as a way of reading the whole room before you move on, especially after you drop something big. You know, an idea, if you're leading the meeting and you dropped an idea that the leadership of the organization wants to move forward with, and nobody had been consulted ahead of [00:18:00] time, that's a moment to pause and just do the scan right.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yeah. Well, thank you for leading us through that. It sounds very useful. One thing that was coming to mind for me is a couple of weeks ago we had an episode about practicing discomfort by expanding your circles. It struck me as you were explaining this, that this might also be a practice you could use as you are experiencing a new space.

And I would perhaps say if you were using it in that space, maybe you won't go to the point where you're acknowledging the tension in the room and trying to do any kind of facilitation, but it may be a really good way to notice and read the room in a space that you're unfamiliar with, and practice learning how maybe there are different ways that people express things.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: That's a great idea. Green, yellow and looking at the whole room and just practicing naming green, yellow, red too, right? Without, maybe in that particular [00:19:00] case, it's not your responsibility to do anything about it. 

Also, we can always lead from where we are. And so if we're in yellow, for example, if it's a participatory meeting, you can ask a question too. If you feel like it's your place or if you're feeling it. 

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yeah, I am somewhat of a notorious question asker, so definitely if I had been in the room and we got into small groups and it got quiet and nobody was saying anything, I probably wouldn't have talked to the whole room, but I would've asked my table and said, “Wow, it seems like none of us wanna talk? What's going on?”

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yep. You know what? I did initially go to a couple of individual tables and said, “Am I right that there's some tension?” I didn't ask him what it was, I just said, “Am I right, before I address the whole room?” 

But yes, I'm certain that would happen. So anyway, reading the room is about, and we talk about this all the time, right, and we always say that every single Practicast we have is one way of practicing something. [00:20:00] So in this case, reading the room is about staying aware and curious. Those are two things we always talk about about: what the people around you are actually experiencing. 

And when you do that well, you can build trust, you can deepen collaboration and you can help people feel seen. That's something that a lot of people very much enjoy. They like to feel seen and heard, so this is one way of doing that too.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Awesome. Thank you. 

That's it for this episode. Thank you all for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please click the share button in whatever podcast app you're using to share it with a friend. 

We'll be back next week with a new episode. Until then, keep practicing.

[00:21:00]

CREDITS: The Practicing Connection Podcast is a production of One-Op and is supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, US Department of Agriculture and the Office of Military Family Readiness Policy, US Department of Defense under award number 2 0 2 3 4 8 7 74 3 3.