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The other day, I had a conversation with a woman who said she had quit an evening class she enjoyed for one frustrating reason. Another woman joined in and did not remain silent. She spoke over and over again, usually about herself, regardless of the subject or time or the occasional polite effort to stop her cruel chatter. It made the entire class an exhausting mess.
“Why doesn't the coach tell her to shut up?” I asked.
The answer was, “He can't.” “He seems to have no idea how to do it.”
Listening to this story, my first thought was that the teacher had nothing to do with running any kind of meeting. But it was also a reminder that the ability to interrupt the chatter that makes business meetings miserable is a greatly underrated skill.
If you think this is an irrational problem, you are wrong.
Researchers estimate that workers attended about 55 million meetings a day in the US alone in 2015 and more than 80 million in the lockdown year of 2020. By 2022, it is believed there will still be at least 62 million.
It is difficult to accurately count how many people are hurt by tired speakers, because the way we conduct meetings depends on whether we call them in or not.
As American meeting expert Professor Steven Rogelberg writes, meeting leaders consistently rate their meetings higher than non-leaders. And if you talk a lot in a meeting (as leaders often do), you're more likely to think that everything went well.
However, Rogelberg's studies have shown that 15 percent of workers overall consider their meetings to be “poor or very poor.”
There are several meeting pitfalls that can account for this: constant lateness, passive dumbness, an idea-crushing critic, and, most boringly, a routine meeting that was never needed in the first place.
But even if only a small portion of the 15 percent hold this view because their meetings are overwhelmed by too many speakers, that still translates into many thousands of meetings ruined by unnecessary chatter or sidetracked. This perhaps helps explain why there are a growing number of books on how to conduct a meeting.
Amazon offers titles including How to Chair an Effective Meeting for 2022, Hold Successful Meetings for 2021, and Death by Meeting for 2004. Rogelberg's comprehensive book The Surprising Science of Meetings arrived in 2019, and he followed up this year with a guide to one-on-one meetings called Glad We Met.
These books make me eternally grateful that I work at a newspaper, where tight deadlines generally keep meetings short and life is difficult for a drone. Journalists are also often asked to moderate panel discussions, where tactful interruption skills are honed.
One of my colleagues likes to get on stage and announce that he has a loud, obnoxious phone alarm that will go off as soon as any panelist has finished their allotted speaking time, a trick he says works remarkably well.
Others simply apologize to speakers in advance for the fact that they will brutally interrupt their speech if they go on too long, boring the audience and stealing time from the rest of the panel.
Back in the office, more precise methods are needed.
The best meeting leaders do something many avoid: set a specific deadline for when the meeting will end and see if dominant speakers are preventing others from contributing. This makes it easier to interrupt offenders by reminding them that time is ticking and then saying something like, “That's a great point but I'd like to hear Alex's opinion.”
Some leaders prefer the so-called jellyfish rule, where anyone in the meeting can interrupt the meeting if they feel the discussion is getting off track or drifting, as jellyfish do, simply by saying “jellyfish.” This is claimed to be fun and effective but it reminds me of a scene from The Office and is clearly not for everyone.
However, other boycott strategies abound, even for non-leaders. They can politely ask: “Sorry, but can I make sure I understand?” Or “Can I share to add something to this?”
Obviously, all of this becomes more difficult if the meeting leader is also the main chatterbox. Here a degree of cunning is necessary. Attendees should indicate in advance that they will need to be elsewhere soon. This allows them to check their watch, sigh, and utter those wonderful words of welcome: “Oh, look at the time, is there anything else we need to cover?”
pilita.clark@ft.com
