If someone doesn't speak up in meetings, is that the employee's fault or the manager's?

[Anonymous]

Curious what people here think.

[Anonymous]

I don’t know if it’s “fault.”

I’m a manager and I try meetings different ways to get engagement. Some people talk a lot. Some people don’t. I don’t know if there is a way to get my introvert team members to talk more than they’re comfortable with. And I don’t consider this personality trait to be negative. I don’t think extroverts should be more highly valued just because they were born chatty.

[Anonymous]

Impossible to tell. I've been in situations where it's both.

[Anonymous]

It can be either or both.

[Anonymous]

For those who have said it can be both, when would you say it's the manager's fault? I'm in a meeting where a couple of people don't just dominate the conversation, but they take up an extreme amount of time, and I think that's a case where the manager doesn't set boundaries.

[Anonymous]

It’s good practice for managers to ask those who haven’t spoken for their thoughts,

[Anonymous]

Waaaay more context needed.

I think it's pretty common for lower level staff to be uncomfortable speaking up in a meeting full of chiefs. That isn't about "fault" that's "life" - if you're the employee in that case, bring it up to your supervisor after! If you're the manager in that case, it probably makes sense to keep strong, open lines of communication with your staff and check in with them regularly so they have an opportunity to say "Hey, in that meeting the other day, the CEO said we sell Whirligigs but we discontinued that line a year ago."

You're looking for blame, so presumably something went wrong. So, first of all, that's a bad habit. What you want to do is look for ways to avoid similar mistakes in the future. Without details, that's hard to say.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don’t know if it’s “fault.”

I’m a manager and I try meetings different ways to get engagement. Some people talk a lot. Some people don’t. I don’t know if there is a way to get my introvert team members to talk more than they’re comfortable with. And I don’t consider this personality trait to be negative. I don’t think extroverts should be more highly valued just because they were born chatty.

+1
As an introverted person who became a leader I see this. I make sure to give air time to everyone. If someone hasn’t said anything I ask ‘John, what do you think about…’ or ‘Jane you look like you want to add something.’ I want everyone to say something even if it’s not much. Plus the thinkers on my team usually contribute more than the talkers.

[Anonymous]

I'm the 16:20 poster - do you mean don't contribute to meetings? Again, fault isn't the right word. That's just personality, none are right or wrong.

If you're doing some kind of team building exercise or some big group discussion and someone is noticeably not taking part, that's that employee's "fault" but they should be coached by their manager so they can improve in that area.

[Anonymous]

As a manager, I value input of people who don't speak but observe, OTOH if someone doesn't speak up because they are shy then I gently encourage them. To me, it's not a negative at all, there's nothing to be gained by mindless talk.

[Anonymous]

I think in almost all cases it's the employee. I had staff who would never speak up. During a review, I told one of them that they ought to contribute to meetings. They said they felt that people who talked in meetings were showing off. I tried to change this point of view to little success.

Another person who never spoke in two years of meetings was a Japanese-American woman. I mention this because I later read the book Quiet about introverts. It mentioned the cultural differences that can make people not want to speak up and I thought of her. My friend who is a professor at a school in SoCal with a lot of Asian students found this helpful and she decided to change her approach in class.

I think learning to speak effectively in meetings is a skill that people need to learn. By that I mean that they contribute something useful, don't waste others time but do contribute when appropriate. Unless you're in the room with an abusive and belittling manager, people should contribute when asked to.

A manager also needs to use an agenda and stick to it, listen, ask questions, move the topic along when needed, act respectfully towards the speaker and table some discussions.

[Anonymous]

Sometimes it’s context-dependent. For just over a year I was in an executive project manager/chief-of-staff-ish role for a healthcare system, reporting directly to the president and CEO. I was manager-level working with C-level and VPs, and was among the youngest. They were all more than willing to talk - a lot. In a year of weekly ELT meetings, which I attended, I think I spoke all of three times. I don’t think it was a failure on anyone’s part: I just didn’t have much to add or need to clarify at these times. I usually communicated with these people 1:1, as needed.

[Anonymous]

If someone's not speaking up at meetings, it's good for a manager to find out the why. Raise at 1:1, find out if shy, unsure, etc. Importantly, if naturally introverted, introverts are powerful in the workplace we know and often have the best feedback so in 1:1s, performance appraisals can be raised as constructive feedback. (So, yes, manager owns part of it.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:For those who have said it can be both, when would you say it's the manager's fault? I'm in a meeting where a couple of people don't just dominate the conversation, but they take up an extreme amount of time, and I think that's a case where the manager doesn't set boundaries.

If this is OP, I think you asked the wrong question. Your issue is not that come people don't say a lot, but that some people say too much. Or at least that is your perception.

Your question is whether the talkers are "at fault" or if the manager is "at fault" for not reining them in.

[Anonymous]

I say it is the Parents of the person fault.