Please Tell Me When to Shut Up (But Nicely)
In today’s New York Times, there’s advice for meeting leaders on how to stop “blatherers” from monopolizing meetings.
But what if the leader is the monopolizer?
Help your colleagues help you by giving them permission (or orders!) to interrupt you when you’re taking the meeting where it doesn’t need to go. And help both yourself and them by telling them what kind of language will get you to stop, without accidentally making you mad.*
Excerpt from the NYTimes:
Q. One or two blatherers always end up monopolizing the discussion at meetings, and running everything off the rails. How do you get them to stop?
A. Monopolizers need to be reined in because they rarely have the self-awareness to stop talking themselves, said Glenn Parker, a team-building consultant in Skillman, N.J., and co-author of “Meeting Excellence.”
It’s O.K. to interrupt a monopolizer, Mr. Parker said. But be polite about it, perhaps by validating what the person has said. You might say something like this: “I think you’re making a good point. Let’s see how the rest of the team feels about that.”
Then turn away from the talker, preferably to another part of the room, and ask someone else his or her opinion on the topic.
Similarly, he said, if a monopolizer or anyone else goes off on a tangent, you can say something like: “I may be wrong here, but I thought we were supposed to be dealing with customer complaints. If you all agree, let’s get back to the agenda.”
– Phyllis Korki, “Another Meeting? Say It Isn’t So“, Career Couch, New York Times, July 20, 2008
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