It’s such a common problem that it’s almost a cliché – a meeting room (possibly virtual) full of people trying to accomplish something.  But only two or three people are doing all the talking.  The others are just observing, or looking at their phones, or sitting with their arms crossed and an annoyed expression.  The conversation is going down rabbit holes.  Or one person has staked out a position, and is defending it against any counterpoints being raised.  Or you know an idea is not being well-received, but no one will speak up to say why.  This doesn’t feel like harmony or healthy tension, and that’s because it isn’t.

The good news is that this is a fixable problem, for teams that are willing to put in the work, but the first task is to diagnose what’s happening.  There are many reasons why meeting participation may be skewed, and it’s likely that more than one of those reasons might be in play at any given time.  Let’s look at some of the causes:

Cause #1:  Differing Conversational Styles

Language is more than just the words and grammars we use.  Linguists also study the unconscious signals we send to one another with our eyes, our posture and the timing of our speech.  These cues communicate our engagement and control how conversational turn-taking happens.  Conversational style varies between cultures, and even between individual households.  The signalling can be subtle and complex, and can be especially difficult to navigate for neurodiverse people.  To complicate things, video conferencing introduces a slight delay which results in everyone conversationally crashing into one another.  It’s no wonder there is some conflict and confusion.

There are many aspects of conversational style, but one of the key aspects that impacts meetings are the unspoken rules around interruption and turn-taking.  For example, in some families, interrupting and talking over one another is seen as showing enthusiasm and support.  If you watch one of those families having dinner together, everyone is happily talking over each other and feeling very connected.  In other families, you show respect by waiting for someone to finish talking before you start.  You wouldn’t dream of jumping in if someone else is talking.  If your team contains people with both of these conversational styles, you can end up with the high-interrupt people doing all the talking in meetings, while the low-interrupt people sit fuming, unable to get a word in edgewise.  People in both camps see this cultural difference as a personal moral failing of the other – one side is seen as rude and pushy, and the other side as weak and unwilling to speak up.   “She never contributes!”   “He never shuts up!”

Happily, this problem can be fixed with a bit of understanding and team commitment.  I recommend three steps:

1.     Have a conversation about the dynamic you are observing with your team.  Maybe share this article with them.

2.     Temporarily introduce some new strict rules for turn-taking in meetings – I have two examples below.

3.     After that experience, decide as a team what your new conversation norms will be in the future.

Here are two turn-taking rules you could try in your meetings to shake up the team dynamic: 

• The talking stick. This can be any physical object that meeting participants can pass to one another. (I like to use a soft koosh ball that can be thown). The rule is that only the person holding the object is allowed to speak.  Anyone else who wants to speak raises their hand, and the speaker (when done) passes the object to one of them.  The speaker is obligated to choose the person who has spoken the least in the meeting so far.  If the meeting is remote, there is no physical object, but everyone stays muted except for the speaker, who chooses the next person to unmute.
  
  (The talking stick idea comes to us from the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast of North America, who use it at important gatherings (along with active listening) as a tool of Indigenous democracy, so it has a long history of effectiveness.  I’ve seen its introduction completely upend the power balance of a meeting, reduce tension, and lead to transformative conversation.)
  
  
  

• Speaker tokens.  These can be coins or poker chips or anything else – everyone in the meeting gets the same number (try 4 or 5 to start).  The rule here is that anyone can speak, but to do so they must surrender one of their tokens.  Asking someone a question costs a token, but answering a question does not.  Once you are out of tokens, you can’t speak any more unless someone else gives you one of their unused tokens.
  
  The purpose of this exercise is to make everyone understand that meeting time is a scarce resource, and make them aware of who is using it all up.  As supply dwindles, people start to think twice before putting in their 2 cents.

These “shake up” ideas are not intended to be permanent.  They are used to make normally unconscious meeting dynamics visible.  Watching people get frustrated and/or laughing as they engage with the imposed rules is a part of the growth process.  It’s a great introduction to a conversation about team norms and practices.  (See below for some other facilitation practices you might decide to adopt.)

Cause #2:  Differing Thinking Styles 

Some people are very comfortable thinking on their feet.  They’ll jump right into a conversation, using the back-and-forth to help work through their thoughts out loud.  Others are more deliberate with their thinking, and want to consider or organize their thoughts more before making a contribution to the group.  If your meetings are not structured (i.e. if your meeting is just people talking freely) then you will hear a lot from the first kind of people, while the second kind of people (who are trying to follow the conversation and simultaneously consider their own position) may be effectively shut out.  If you find yourself getting a well-reasoned email from a meeting participant two hours after it ends, and wondering “Why didn’t you say that in the meeting?”, then you probably have a case of different thinking styles.

As was the case with different conversational styles, this personal difference can be seen as a character flaw by people on both sides.  One side is seen as talking before thinking; and the other as trying to revisit conversations that have already ended.

The obvious intervention that many people use when some people aren’t contributing is to explicitly call on those people and ask them for their thoughts.  This is not a bad strategy if the problem is different conversational styles. But if the problem is different thinking styles, then you may be putting someone on the spot when they are not ready, making them very uncomfortable, and not getting a good contribution from them.

To be inclusive of more deliberative thinking styles, you need to add some structure to the meeting that allows thinking time, and that democratizes input.  Here are two ideas you can try:

1.     Send out a meeting agenda at least a day before the meeting, that covers the topics and goals of the meeting.  This will allow the deliberative thinkers time to prepare, so that they will be ready to contribute during the meeting.  (I like the team norm of “rejecting all meeting invitations with no agenda” but not every company will support that.)

2.     Structure your meetings to include quiet thinking time as well as conversation.  This is especially useful when you are trying to generate ideas – it works much better than traditional brainstorming.  It also prevents the “anchoring” effect where the first person to speak influences the thinking direction of everyone else in the room.

Here’s one way to do it: Instead of just letting everyone to randomly shout out their thoughts, you ask everyone to take five minutes to quietly write down their own ideas.  Then, you go around the room, asking each person in turn for one idea that hasn’t been shared yet, repeating until all the ideas are out in the open.  If you are in one physical space, you could ask everyone to put their ideas on sticky notes, and then put all those notes together on a wall, grouping similar items.  In virtual space, you can use a shared digital whiteboard.  This approach leads to a wider range of ideas, and more creativity.

Cause #3:  Not Feeling Heard

Many years ago I had a colleague who could not stop talking.  She was a lovely human being, but could alienate her co-workers at time by going on and on long after she had made her point.  One day when we were having a heart-to-heart chat, she confided in me that she often felt like no one was listening to her, and was anxious about being misunderstood.  She was half-right – people would get annoyed and tune her out after a while, which caused her to try communicating harder by talking more.  (This is an example of what linguists call complementary schismogenesis.)

This dynamic sometimes plays out in meetings, with some people talking too long because they don’t feel like their point has been made successfully, or because they don’t know how to “land” what they are saying.

People understand they’ve been heard when their ideas are reflected back to them, built upon, questioned, or acknowledged in some way. You can do this in a few ways – one is to literally repeat back a precis of the idea (“So, you’re saying that you are concerned we don’t have enough staff?”)  Another is to jot down the main point on a shared space like a whiteboard.

This is also a great technique for getting people to stop “rabbit holing” – that is, going off on tangents unrelated to the goals of the meeting.  You create a “parking lot” area on the shared whiteboard, then when conversation gets off track you interrupt, write down the distracting topic in the parking lot, and move the conversation back to the main topic.  The act of writing down the distraction – acknowledging the contribution – is usually enough to get people to let go of it for the moment.  You can decide later whether and when to revisit the items in the “parking lot”.

Cause #4:  Lack of Psychological Safety

Sometimes people don’t speak up in meetings because they believe that their contribution would not be welcome, or because they fear the reaction that their contribution might provoke (e.g. mocking or anger), or because they believe that contributing is futile, since their opinions are not respected.  In some teams, those fears are well-founded.

These are all indicators of a lack of psychological safety in the team.  Psychological safety is the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.  People on psychologically safe teams know that they can raise difficult topics or constructively disagree with one another because it is mutually understood that everyone is just trying to help the team improve.  They all have each other's backs.

Creating psychological safety is a huge topic – there are books, newsletters, playbooks, and articles to help you do it.  It involves leadership behaviour, office culture, team norms, work processes, and meeting facilitation.  But the presence of psychological safety is a key differentiator of teams that are high-performing and innovative, so working to achieve it is well worth the investment.

Obviously I can’t cover all of that in one article.  Since this article is more focused on facilitation, I will suggest four facilitation practices that you can adopt that help foster a safe and inclusive environment.

1.     Choose curiosity over defense.  When someone disagrees with you – or the group consensus in a meeting – don’t argue until you really understand why.  They may know something, or have a perspective that the rest of the team does not.  Try responding with “Tell me more” rather than defending your point right away.  Practice active listening.

2.     Give credit.  Everyone wants to know that their contributions matter to the group.  Credit the contributions of others, using their name.  “Let’s explore the point Susan made earlier…”.  If an idea is misattributed, correct that.

3.     Mine for conflict.  This means explicitly ask for people to disagree, in a way that makes them feel safe to do so.  “We seem to be aligning around this idea.  Let’s game out the risk now, to be safe.  Why might this idea fail?  What are its weak points?  Everyone take five minutes to brainstorm potential problems…”

4.     Shut down any toxic behaviour.  (Shaming, mocking, blaming, ignoring, sexism, etc.)  These behaviours will kill psychological safety if left unchecked.

Cause #5: Lack of capacity

The last cause I want to talk about is lack of capacity.  The amount of energy that people have available for work is limited by what else is going on in their lives – often personal stuff that you know nothing about.  It’s hard to concentrate on product strategy when you have a very sick child, or your spouse has just lost their job and money is tight, or you are trying to move an elderly parent to a care home – or when you have other deliverables you need to finish for a big work deadline.  When your mind is occupied by more important things, it's easy to check out of a meeting.

You can’t fix that with good facilitation.  But having company policies that really respect work/life balance and provides flexibility can go a long way to preventing burnout, retaining employees, and (after their current crisis) getting them back to full participation.  When you have one-on-one meetings with your staff, check in with them about their current capacity and workload.

Related to capacity is “meeting overload” – going to too many meetings where nothing seems to get accomplished.  Team time together is precious and should be treated as such.  If you meetings are effective at driving change, people will be more engaged.

Cancel meetings that have no clear agenda – and ones that can be accomplished by an email.  Take the time to design the meetings that you do need to have – what do you want to get out of them, and what are the steps to get you there?  Have occasional retrospectives where you talk about your meeting norms, and the impact they have on inclusion and participation by everyone.

Last Words

I hope the ideas in this article can help you diagnose the participation dynamics in your own meetings, and give you some ideas to try to improve things.  Meeting design and facilitation is a great skill for any manager to develop in themselves.  It can make a huge difference in the participant experience and impact of your meetings.

More from John  (or follow his RSS Feed )

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