Encouraging the 'Quiet Ones' to Speak Up

Most of us are not eager to attend the many meetings that clog our calendars, but we recognize that they are an inevitable part of office life. And once you’ve been to enough meetings, you start to recognize the different types of meeting attendees. 

First, you’ve got the enthusiastic ones. They’re excited to interact with colleagues, so they arrive in the meeting room or join the video call a few minutes early to lead the pre-meeting small talk. During the meeting itself, they are active participants, always ready to offer opinions or lighten the mood with a funny story.

Then you’ve got the disconnected ones. If it’s an in-person meeting, they are there in body, but not in spirit. They’re likely to be surreptitiously working on something else during the meeting. If they’re on a video call, they probably have their camera off, actively multitasking.

The regular attendees are there because they must be, but they understand the need for the meeting and want to help the team achieve its goals. They are attentive, and they occasionally participate, but they don’t dominate the conversation. They are eager to receive their marching orders and get back to work.

Finally, you have the quiet ones. They are a bit shy or introverted, so attending meetings can be stressful for them. They have good ideas, but they struggle to present them, so they usually keep their mouths shut. Even if they want to speak up, they can’t figure out how and when to join a conversation, so they defer to their “regular” and “enthusiastic” colleagues.

I’ve been all these types of meeting attendees at different times in my career. In fact, I may switch from one type to another during the same day, depending on who else is in the meeting with me and what I see as my role in that get-together.

However, I want to focus today on “quiet ones.” I’ve managed several quiet folks during my career, and I’ve helped some of them figure out how to more actively participate and present ideas. Since they often have valuable insights, helping them grow in this way can be good for both them and the team.

If you’ve got a quiet one on your team, here are a few tips to help them get a little louder come meeting time.

• Talk to them about their communication style and their concerns. Broach the topic during one of your regular one-on-one meetings. Tell them in a non-threatening way that you’ve noticed they don’t participate much in meetings and ask them about their preferences when it comes to communication. If they have specific worries about speaking up, talk through those challenges with them and work together on a plan to overcome them.
• Encourage and invite participation. Make sure you are allowing plenty of time for your team members to take part in discussions during a meeting. If some of the more enthusiastic folks are dominating the conversation in non-productive ways, gently cut them off and invite others to give their opinions. Calling on specific people and asking for their input is fine, but if you’re going to invite one of your quiet ones to share their opinion, make sure you’ve let them know in advance that you might do so and confirm that they’re OK with it.
• Establish a signal. If one of your quiet ones wants to participate but struggles with figuring out how to insert themselves into an ongoing conversation, come up with a signal they can use to let you know they have something to say. If you’re on a video call, they could send you a short message via instant messaging. If you’re in a meeting room together, perhaps they can make a subtle hand signal that you’ve established in advance. This may seem awkward at first, but if it allows you to create an opening for your quiet one to speak, it will be worth it.
• Give them time to plan, and add them to your plans. Another way to help someone who doesn’t know how to jump into a conversation on the fly is to allow them to prepare remarks before a meeting and give them a spot on the agenda. You should already be sending out your agenda a few days before you meet. Follow up with the employee to ask them if there’s anything on the agenda they’d like to address, or if there’s a discussion they’d like to lead. If so, offer them a few minutes to speak during the upcoming meeting—or a future meeting, if they need more time to prepare. If time is set aside for them and they have a chance to think about what they want to say, their comfort level with participating often rises.
• Don’t let others steamroll them. Even if one of your quiet ones has time on the agenda, one of your more enthusiastic attendees may start talking over them or try to take over the discussion. As a manager, you need to step in to get everyone back on topic and make sure your quiet one has the time they need to share their ideas. If you don’t, they’ll fade into the background, and their insights could be lost.

An effective meeting should only include the people who are needed to discuss a situation or develop a solution to a problem. Assuming that’s the case, you’ll want to get input from everyone, no matter which type of attendee they are. Working with your quiet ones will take time and effort as a manager, but your investment will be rewarded with ideas your team needs to succeed.

What types of meeting attendees have you worked with as a manager? What have you done to help your “quiet ones” feel more comfortable participating in a meeting? Please share your ideas in the comments, and let’s talk about it.