A recent Centre for Creative Leadership (CCL) article “Chatterboxes in Charge: Why Leaders can’t seem to stop talking” caught my attention this week and resonated with a conversation I had with a Chief Financial Officer who was describing his approach to supporting the development of his leadership team.
And no, it was not the obvious connection, ‘said CFO is far from the kind of leader who does not stop talking!
The anchor for the CCL article is a piece of research which suggests that awarding people roles within a group / team dynamic sets up patterns of behaviour. In a simulated exercise, where roles were randomly assigned (irrespective of personality traits / background / experience), people assigned leadership roles spoke 150% more than team members and 300% more than observers. What is this telling us?
- Do people who lead believe they are expected to contribute more?
- Do followers instinctively defer to the leader?
Whatever your views on the above (and I’d love to hear them), what is the impact of this on team and group process? By definition, if the leader is talking 150% of the time, it significantly reduces time for others to contribute. The leader’s views, opinions, ideas and demands will dominate. Their ideas will gain traction, others’ ideas will remain hidden.
The article cites further research which shows that in a typical team, one person will speak 3x more than three other team members combined.
For me, these data points offer us constructive challenge:
- As leaders and facilitators, how are we consciously or unconsciously shaping the spaces we influence?
- Whilst the role of a leader is often to bring people together, to communicate & build Vision, build Purpose and foster Identity, how do we ensure that we create a space which truly enables and encourages others to contribute?
- How do we work to build mutual trust with our group / team environments such that everyone feels more able to contribute?
- If followers instinctively defer – how do we challenge that pattern of behaviour?
- How do we use that “follower expectation” by turning it on its head and creating a space where followers are invited (even expected) to contribute, where everyone has access to air-time and as a result, everyone’s ideas / contributions are heard?
Back to my CFO conversation! He was saying that his mission was to develop his management team such that they were all “candidates”, not “successors”. For him, success was a reality that all is senior managers were ready to take his job – to do this, it was clearly not about him, it was about them – career conversations, clear and constructive feedback, support, challenge and trust. I have 100% confidence he does not take 150% of the airtime in his team meetings.
Do you?
Join the conversation in the comments!
https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/speaking-time-leadership
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