For family leaders

How to keep the holiday table in one conversation

A holiday meal is the one time of year many families are all in the same room. Most of them spend it in pieces. The cousins talk sports at one end, the parents talk logistics in the kitchen, the grandparents listen to whoever is closest, and the teenagers are on their phones by dessert. Everyone was there. Nobody really heard anyone.

Changing that does not take a program or a speech. It takes one question asked to the whole table, and one person willing to hold the table to it for twenty minutes.

Decide before the day

Whoever is hosting, or whoever the family looks to, decides ahead of time that there will be one shared conversation during the meal. Tell one or two people in advance so you have support at the table. Pick the moment. After everyone has served themselves and before people start getting up works best.

Choose one good question

The question does most of the work. A good one is easy to answer, has no wrong answer and gives each person a chance to say something true about their year. Leave out politics and anything that puts one person on the spot.

• What is one thing from this year you are grateful for that nobody at this table knows about?
• Who is someone outside the family who helped you this year?
• What are you looking forward to next year?
• What is a family story you want the youngest people here to know?

Set it up in one sentence

Tap a glass and say what you are doing and why: “Before we all scatter, I’d like us to go around once so everyone hears from everyone. Here is the question.” Then answer it yourself, briefly and honestly. Your answer sets the length and the tone for everyone after you. If you talk for five minutes, so will everyone else. If you say something real, so will they.

Go around the table

Go in order around the table so nobody has to decide when to jump in. Everyone gets a turn before anyone gets a second one, including the youngest and the quietest. A child’s answer is often the one people remember. Anyone can pass, and you come back to them at the end.

When a side conversation starts, bring it back without making it a correction: “Hold that thought. I want to hear it, and I want everyone else to hear it too.” When someone gives a long answer, thank them and move to the next person.

Handle the hard moments

Most families have a topic that can take over the evening. Do not open it at the table. If it comes up, name it and set it aside: “That’s an important one, and it deserves more than the middle of dinner. Let’s find a time for it this weekend.” Then go back to the question. Protecting the table is not avoiding the issue. It is choosing a better room for it.

If the family has lost someone this year, consider a question that lets people mention the person who is missing. That is often the moment people talk about afterward.

Let it end

Once everyone has answered, thank the table and let the meal go back to small conversations. The shared conversation does not need to last the evening. Twenty minutes in which every person at the table hears every other person is enough to change how the family remembers the day.

From Leading the Room, a book in progress by Gerry Morton on how to lead any room where people gather, drawn from twenty-two years in peer groups across Vistage, EO, YPO and TIGER 21 and on boards.