Why the same people talk in your meetings, and what it costs you

Watch any meeting for a fortnight and the pattern is hard to miss. The same people talk in every meeting, the same people don't, and by the second week you could write the transcript in advance. Most managers have noticed. Most have tried the obvious fixes, going round the table or asking the quiet ones directly, and found that the fix lasts about a meeting and a half.

The fixes don't hold because they treat it as a personality problem. Some people are talkers and some aren't, and that is true up to a point. But most of what decides who talks is timing, and timing can be practised.

Whoever is ready first gets to talk

Think about the two seconds after somebody finishes a sentence. One person has spent the last thirty seconds composing a reply, so they are ready the instant the sentence ends. Another person was listening, and needs a moment to work out what they think. The moment never comes, because the first person has already started.

Do that thirty times in an hour and the meeting has arranged itself around whoever was ready first. The people who talk are the people who plan their next sentence while you are still on yours. The people who don't talk are, often enough, the ones who were paying attention to what you said.

Listening comes early in every one of the sessions for this reason, before anything about ideas or presence. Nothing else in the session works until people can hear a colleague finish.

What the rest of the team stops offering

Being talked over once does not matter much. Being talked over for months teaches people to stop preparing.

The small offers go first. The half-thought that might have been useful stays unsaid because there was no gap to put it in. The corrections go next. Somebody knows the figure on the slide is out of date and decides it isn't worth the effort of getting a word in. After that the objections go, which is the expensive one, because the objection is usually the piece of information the two talkers don't have.

By this stage the quiet people have a label. They are "not very vocal", and it goes in the appraisal. Nobody writes down that the meeting never gave them a second of silence to start in, because nobody measured that.

What it costs when the same people talk in every meeting

You are making decisions on two people's information. The specialist who sat through the whole thing without speaking knew something, and you are paying for that knowledge while running a meeting that cannot collect it.

The talkers pay too, though they rarely see it. Their ideas go untested. Nobody pushes back, so the plan leaves the room with the same holes it came in with, and the holes get found later, when they are dearer to fix.

And it compounds. A team that has learned not to prepare for meetings brings less to the next one, the talkers fill the gap, and a year on you have a team where two people know what is going on and everyone else is waiting to be told.

What the listening exercises change

Explaining any of this to a team does nothing, because they already know it. The people who talk too much know it about themselves, and the people who don't talk know it about the room.

What changes it is being put in a situation where planning your next sentence is impossible. The listening exercises in every session are built that way. You cannot compose a reply while the other person is speaking, because the only way through the exercise is to take in what they are saying and answer that. Everyone does it, in pairs and small groups, and it comes at the point in the session where the group is warmed up but has not yet done anything harder.

People come out of it able to hear a colleague finish before they answer, and not because anybody told them to. They have just spent a good twenty minutes doing it, out loud, with the people they sit next to, and found it easier than the thing they usually do.

What to watch for on Monday

The session gives people the experience. The meeting on Monday decides whether it sticks, and that part is yours.

Count the gap after somebody finishes a point. If the next voice always starts inside a second, the people who need a second are not going to speak. Notice who starts before the sentence ends, too. It is usually the same two people, and once they have heard the habit described in a session they can usually hear it in themselves. When you ask the room a question, wait longer than is comfortable. The people who plan ahead will be ready first, and if you let that pass, what comes second is often what you booked the meeting for.

None of this needs a programme. It needs a couple of hours in which the whole team practises hearing each other finish, and a manager who is willing to let a silence run on Monday. The two-hour session starts at £400, and the other prices are on the rate card.