Silence in Meetings: Why People Aren't Speaking

SPEAKER_00: Hi friends, I'm Jill Griffin. I'm the host of the Career Refresh. And today we are talking about silence. The silence that is happening in meetings, whether they are in-person meetings, whether they are uh virtual meetings, what is happening in Teams that I'm seeing a lot of.

And I'm sure you've noticed it, right? The feeling starts to fill up the room. You're wondering why nobody's talking. You're wondering what's happening.

And I'm going to tell you what I'm seeing in my slice of the world. It's because people are thinking, but what's happening is that we're staying quiet and silence is a neutral. It affects the whole room. And when people don't participate, you lose perspective, you lose accountability, you lose the actual texture of what's being said.

And it really does affect the culture of a team or a group. So I want to dig into this today and really show what we can do about it, whether we're a peer, whether we're a leader, or if you're a person who finds yourself not speaking up in meeting. So let's dig in. Okay, here's what I'm seeing.

What silence can mean is I want you to use it as a diagnostic tool, not necessarily a judgment. Silence might mean I haven't thought this through. I am at capacity and I don't have bandwidth. It might mean that I'm still internally processing.

It could be I'm afraid of being wrong. Depending on the culture, it might also be like, you know what, I don't trust this room to share my ideas. It might also mean, you know what, I am mentally checked out. Again, I am at capacity, folks, and you are asking me to think.

And what I'm seeing is that we're often waiting, or people are often waiting to say anything before they actually commit. And none of these are the same problem. And they require different moves when you start to think through what's happening within my current team and how do I want to change this? Because again, if I'm being invited to a meeting, I don't want to sit there in a meeting where I'm just listening to somebody talk at me.

I want there to be participation, or I could go get work done. I don't need to be here. So sitting in a room where I'm being spoken at, I know very often, look, sometimes there are leaders that are constantly talking and are not creating space for others. But I'm finding that this is a problem where leaders are coming to me and saying, no one's participating.

What's going on? So a couple of things that I'm seeing. The first is what uh there's a recent study, and I will put the link in the show notes between BetterUp and Stanford University, that they're calling it work slop. AI-generated content looks completely different and it lacks substance, right?

There may be the feeling of like slick slides, or there's a summary with three supporting bullet points and uh a couple of wrap-up, right? But it doesn't actually say anything. It's like a word salad. Or we're seeing fully baked reports where summaries are so tight, there's no nuance, there's no context.

Like I've talked about this before on this podcast, where what we used to want as perfection in corporate communication was considered polished. Now, could you just give me a typo? Like, just give me, let me know that there's a human behind this. Um, there's there's no context.

And what the study shows is that when I send you something that is completely finished and completely done by AI, and I haven't thought through, there's no discernment, there's no thinking, because I'm just taking whether it's accurate or not, right? I put a couple of prompts into whether I call it Claudette or Chatty G, right? Whoever my servant robot is of choice, right? I put my thoughts into there, and then I'm just cutting and pasting and going, Oh, this is good.

Let me send it out. You know the feeling. What happens now is the shift puts on you, the recipient. So suddenly I'm getting an email or a first or a report or some sort of written communication where I'm reading it and I'm like, wait, what did I just read?

I have to read it again. So that's the second time I could read it. Then I'm like, what are you saying here? So suddenly you putting the work that's all work slop on somebody else shifts the energy where now I'm the one who now has to manage the workload, right?

So if that's what's happening, I don't have the capacity then. So I have to do your job too. And then I need to read this before the meeting, but there's no substance here. And that's what we're talking about.

So if you're doing the cleanup and the thinking in the in real time on your own, I can understand why people are client are being silent in a meeting because they're like, wait, whoa, whoa, you know, it's like drinking from the fire hose, but not actually having a chance to look through the slop that's been sent to them. And this study that was done by Stanford and Better Up said that 40% of desk workers received work slop, and they give the definition for that, right? Again, it's exactly what you think it is in the last month.

That the average time to resolve this is two hours. So that's not save time, it's shifting the burden again to the recipient. There's also a recent study by MIT that CEOs are saying they're not seeing the ROI on AI because it's being used as a thinking replacement or an appendage or a tool that's external, not a thinking partner. So, what we're doing very often is we're offloading the workload of thought of what makes us amazing and strategic and rich and nuanced and why I want to have a conversation with a human.

And instead, we're letting the AI translate how you think. So stay with me. This is gonna show up as silence in meetings because people have less to say because they weren't trained or they weren't using their own brains to think through it. So we've trained again on to consume rather than think and engage, right?

And it's the same thing. If you're one of those people that overloads yourself on social media, you are in constant consumption mode. And then I hear from so many people how it makes them really anxious because do I really need to have a hundred voices in my head of commenting on whatever the topic is before I start my day and have my first cup of coffee? unknown: No.

SPEAKER_00: It's also why, friends, I mostly delete my social media apps every Friday and download them again on Monday. And you might think that's crazy. I'm on an iPhone, it makes it super easy. I can just delete and then download again on Monday.

But I want to spend my weekend in participation and community and not sitting there scrolling social media for hours. Again, when we're outsourcing our thinking, when we show up at a meeting, it's no wonder that we're silent because we're actually not doing any thinking and we're not processing. So if you're a leader and you're noticing this, I want to remind everybody, I don't care what your title is, because leadership isn't a title, it's a choice, it's a lifestyle. There's an expression that leaders are not in charge.

They are responsible for the people in their charge, right? A leader is creating capacity for others. So how you show up as a leader in this situation, we got to stop this, friends. So the first thing I want you to do is set the expectation.

Whether you are actually the top of your org chart or the org chart of your department, or you are a leader amongst peers, I want you to really think through. Let's start with setting the expectation. Being in the room means we have an expectation for conversation. And that doesn't mean having something perfect or brilliant.

It doesn't mean having everything polished. It means we're engaged, we're contributing, we're actively listening. Silence becomes not an option at this point. I want you to tell people what you expect.

I want you to reset the ground. And I don't again, I don't care if it's an in-person meeting or if you're having a meeting on Zoom or Teams. I want you to make sure your team knows if you are being invited to this meeting, this is the expectation. Second thing I want you to be doing is removing the friction.

So this means setting out an agenda in advance. Some people need time to think, and that's fair. They are not, you know, some of us are really good on the spot, and some of us need a little bit more to internally process. So giving them an agenda advance is going to give them time to think.

If this is you, if you find that speaking up in meetings on the right, you're up, respond, is something that's harder for you, then I want you to be able to take a moment, take a beat, look at that agenda, and come with something, whether it's a question, a reaction, an observation, that's the ask. Because often what I hear is um people who are coming up in their career are like, I want to have a seat at the table, but then we give you a seat at the table and then you don't say anything.

Now, there's many reasons for that. This is one of them. There could also be some structural or gender biases that are going on at the same time, but we want to make sure that you are in contribution. Next, I want you to name what you're observing.

If the room goes quiet, name it. Actually say, I'm noticing that we're not hearing from everyone. That tells me something. So I want to know what's thinking.

What are you landing for you? Do not say, does that make sense? I hate that expression, right? Because it's often used as a veil for people to check their own, did I make sense?

Or I'm not seeing anything. So I now feel uncomfortable. So I'm gonna check to make sure. Does that make sense?

No, it makes sense. So the question for you is what question do you hear as what question do you have for me as you're hearing this? What is everyone thinking? I would love to hear some reactions, feeling is provoked.

What are your thoughts on this? Let them then say to you, I didn't understand. I don't know what you're talking about, Jill. Let them say that.

Don't you minimize your leadership? Again, whatever title you are, don't you minimize your readership? Where it almost becomes sucks to come off as condescending when people use that expression. There's a podcaster who I love, but every time they speak, they say all the time.

Does that make sense? Does that make sense? And please, let's erase that from our language. So, really removing that friction, sending an agenda in advance, and then asking people when you're noticing that that they're not talking.

Okay, everyone, I'm noticing that there are no responses. I'd love to hear some responses. What's going on for everyone? Let them talk.

You do not have to carry everyone's weight. They are in the meeting and they need to step up. The next is I want you to hold the line on substance that when someone brings something fully formed or fully formed piece of thought or content to a meeting, I want you to ask for the thinking behind it. This is a way that we're not trying to catch people, but I think it's totally okay to say, you know what, I used AI or I used um this internal bot or whatever you know platform you're using as a strategic thought partner in as I was doing this work.

And here's what I'm considering. Here were the alternatives I weighed. I was finding that when I was using the AI tool, this is what it was telling me. And I really want to restructure it to this.

Let's just start getting obvious because if we think people aren't using AI in their communication, they are. We know this. So let's make sure that we train people just the way if you're writing a paper or you're um you're doing a research paper, you would name the source because otherwise that would be called plagiarism or theft. You need to be doing the same thing with AI.

I use uh Claude as I did this project, or I used AI, or if you have an internal um chat bot that you're using, call it. So I want you to hold a line on substance and I want you to tell me what you're thinking and how you got there. The next accountability is needed here, where we're creating accountability for presence. If you are in the room, if you are in the conversation, that is feeding to your team's culture and it applies to everyone, including you, the leader.

So if you're checking your email or half listening or um on WhatsApp or using chat with the people in the room, you're modeling silence, but you're also modeling a distracted silence. Because if you think people don't know that you're half in it, they can tell by your eyes if you're in a virtual meeting. They can see that, you know, you're not necessarily looking at the camera, that you're looking off to the side. And again, I'm making references.

There are people who um are neurodivergent or have different ways of working. This is not a judgment, it's understanding how people might be working. But we also know the difference between someone who may have a um uh a preference to not stare at the camera versus someone who has a preference that their eyes are shifting the whole time because we can tell that they're multitasking. If you are doing that, then you're in the meeting, but you're not actually in the meeting.

And you know that it's like talking to a friend where you're all out to dinner and they're on their phone the whole time and you're like waiting because they're on social media and there's nothing worse. And also what I've been seeing lately is I'm child-free, but I've been around a lot of my friends and communities' children and they're all in the room and they're all holding their phones. And I know they're talking to each other, but it's an interesting thing. And if that's what works within that cultural group of kids or people, fine.

But in an office in a meeting, we are here for a reason. This is work, not a hobby. We need to be accountable for our presence. And then listen, if you're the person who is staying quiet, you might not see the cost, but there is one, right?

Your perspective matters. I want to hear from you. Your thinking matters, the room needs it. There's the beauty of diversity of thought that leads to innovation, that leads to ideas.

You know, I'm in a book club where the age range is someone very young in their 20s to someone who's almost 80. The richness of the dialogue and conversation of those various perspectives, I relish them. Now, again, I'm a trained strategist, so I love hearing people's point of view and I'm naturally curious. But that's when you start to really see what people are thinking.

And when you don't participate, the room needs you. So you start to lose your own influence. This often happens to people inadvertently, and you stay on the sidelines. And as a mentor always said to me, remember the gazelles on the outer of the pack are the ones that get nipped off by the lions.

So you want to make sure that you're in contribution and not sort of forgotten on the side. So show up in conversation. If it's not to the full team, maybe it's the person next to you, or maybe it's after the meeting you follow up with somebody so that you're not crosstalking in the meeting. One question, one reaction, that is enough as a start to where you can start communicating.

The whole point of this is how we lead. Whether we're managing people or not, leadership is a lifestyle choice. It is an inside job. How we choose to think, how we engage, how we hold ourselves and others accountable is going to show up in our actions and in actions.

And silence and meaning is a leadership problem. And it's a problem that we can solve. And again, I don't want to be in a meeting. I could just read the memo then.

I don't want to be in a meeting or a conversation where no one is participating. So, friends, I want to hear from you. What are you seeing in your meetings? What's happening?

Send me an email at hello at JillGriffernCoaching.com. I will absolutely answer you, uh, bring your question on the show, and depending on your point of view, maybe even bring you on the show. So, as always, be intentional, find ways to participate and always, always, always be kind.

Okay, I'll see you next week.