Help others find their voice: be generous with your attention and parsimonious with your time

Difficult questions can be the best questions: they make us stop, think and learn.

One of my colleagues recently asked me a question which was both difficult and relevant to our current strange circumstances. This person had previously sought my advice on building the confidence to speak up more frequently in meetings. This was advice I was happy to give, as it is a problem I have had to deal with myself. Many people who know me today would probably say that I talk too much rather than too little in meetings, and that I have no problems being vocal and expressing my opinion. However, it was not always this way: I used to be very shy, and it took me a long while to find my voice and my confidence. So, I had some advice to give, even if no more than sharing what had worked for me. This seemed to be of some help - although not as much help as my colleague's own courage and determination.

Then we found ourselves in our current situation of social distancing and remote working, and my colleague came up with the more difficult and interesting question. They had started to find their confidence in face to face meetings, but were finding it hard to adapt to a world in which all meetings were by video conference. They felt that they had taken a step backwards.

How do you signal that you want to speak when you are just one tiny image among many others? And if you figure that out, what do you do when there are twenty people in the meeting and you are three screens over? How do you respect the contribution of others when everyone talks at once and you that have to talk over everybody else to be heard?

I must admit that I didn’t have a good answer for my colleague: however good the technology is, whatever options you have to send messages or raise your virtual hand, video conferences still lack the visual and verbal cues we rely on to orchestrate social interaction. I think that all of us working remotely through video conferences are still figuring it out.

However, I can suggest an answer to a different but related question: what can the rest of us, those who are running meetings, who are outspoken and have no problems making ourselves heard, do to help other people find their voice?

I think that we should be generous with our attention and parsimonious with our time.

Being generous with our attention means, first, that when we participate in meetings we should give them our full attention. This may seem obvious, but we live in a world of distractions and, particularly on video-conferences, it is very tempting to succumb to those distractions. This bit of the meeting seems a bit boring, why not close the camera and check some emails? Or read that message on my phone? It takes discipline to resist all of the time.

What is even less obvious is that, when we are paying attention, we do not just need to pay attention to the content and the speaker: we need to pay attention to the other people in the meeting as well. Do they look anxious? Bored? Frustrated? Do they look like they have been waiting to speak for ten minutes and are about to give up? Perhaps there is something you should do to encourage them to speak, even if that is as simple as asking them what they think.

Of course, paying attention to the content of the meeting and paying attention to all of the people in the meeting takes extra energy. And we are already learning that video conferences can take more of our energy than face to face meetings.

This is why we also need to be parsimonious with our time. If we find ourselves succumbing to distractions in a meeting, then we should be asking why we are in that meeting in the first place. Is it the best use of our time? Perhaps we would be better off declining this meeting, trusting others to take the decisions, and focusing on those meetings where we can contribute - and where we have the energy and attention to help other people find their voice.