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Considering how much time we spend in business meetings and the cost of each person in each meeting, it’s crucial to make meanings meaningful. If one person keeps talking, that can lead to less-than-the-best results, inefficiency, and stress for others. That’s what I call “mottainai” — it’s a waste.

3 Techniques To Get People To Shut Up In Meetings

1. Clarify expectations

This is the same as the first technique I suggested for how to get people to speak up in meetings.

To get people to shut up in meetings, be clear on everyone’s roles in the meeting.

What do you expect from them?

Do you want them to present information? Do you want them to contribute their ideas? Do you want them to ask questions?

How long do you want them to talk?

For example, you could say, “Could we have an update from each person for about one minute?” That helps to keep people more concise.

2. Accept and ask

You may want to avoid someone who’s talking all the time. You might think you should turn and invite someone else to speak.

Actually, accepting what the person says and even asking them to say more can be surprisingly effective.

When I was delivering a facilitation skills workshop to around ten participants from different levels in the organization, the most senior person was really challenging — as if questioning my credibility and knowledge and wanting to show his own status and expertise.

I accepted what he was saying and asked him to say more at various points.

Doing that helped to build trust and he stopped interrupting and dominating the conversation.

3. Write it up

If it’s related to your agenda, write up the point that the person is making.

You can use a whiteboard or flipchart or easel pad.

If a person sees that their comment has been written up, it tends to get them to stop going on at length.

But what if someone brings up a topic that’s not on your agenda?

Get everyone’s agreement to do one of the following:

1. Change the agenda to include the point that has just been raised
2. Write up the point in a separate space to address at the end of the meeting, if you have time, or in a separate meeting

Take care to get the agreement of the whole group rather than making a decision yourself saying, “Oh that’s not related to our current topic, let’s talk about it later.”

There you have three techniques to get people to shut up in meetings.

Which one are you going to use? I’d love to know how it goes.

If you’re keen to learn more and to put into practice communication habits for success and happiness in global business, come and join us in the Sasuga! Community Facebook group. It’s absolutely free. You can participate as much or as little as you like. Hope to see you there!

Video transcript

Hello, and welcome to Facebook Live Friday! I’m Helen Iwata from Sasuga Communications, and my mission is to help people create communication habits for success and happiness in global business.

And I’m doing something new today because up until now in Facebook Live we’ve been vertical, and today we’re trying out horizontal. And I’ll just see how this works. It’s a little bit strange because I can see that I’m looking in a different place to where I’ve been looking normally. I’d love to hear what you think about it whether it works well or not.

So this week I’m very excited! There’s lots of great stuff going on this week, but one thing I’m really excited about is that my second column in Nikkei Style’s Woman Smart has been published.

I don’t know if you can see this, let me just… Ta-da! There you go. There it is. And in this article, I talk about this experience that we often have of being really busy and feeling overwhelmed.

Do you feel like that maybe sometimes? That you have so much going on and you don’t get to do the things that are most important for you? So in this article, I share a tip of how to get done what is most important to you.

The article is in Japanese, so if you are a Japanese reader, I do recommend that you go and read it if it’s something that appeals to you. Or if you don’t read Japanese and you would really like to know what I talk about, if I get five requests to have an English version, I will create an English version.

Just email me at [email protected] and if I get five people saying “We want an English version!” then I will create an English version too.

I was really happy that as of yesterday this article was ranking number two in the most popular articles. It was being, well, I was being outranked by cabbage — an article on cabbage — so that was kind of interesting!

Now today’s topic — and welcome! I can see some people joining so this is fabulous. Wonderful!

Today’s topic is following on from last week. So last week it was how to get people to speak up in meetings. And this week it’s how to get people to shut up in meetings — a big issue for many people.

When I work with them one-on-one or in workshops, this is something that people struggle with a lot.

And we talked about last week how, you know, meetings are really important. It’s important to make them effective because we spend so much time in meetings in business. And we think about the cost to the company or to your business if you are running your own business. It really can mount up — the cost of each person in that room for all of the meetings you’re having.

You want to make them as effective as possible. And if you have one person who’s talking, talking, talking all the time and not offering any value that really is a “mottainai” — it’s a waste.

So that’s our topic that we’ll be looking at today — how to get people to shut up in meetings.

Hello Aki, I can see you joining now and I can see a few people coming in. This is wonderful.

So the way that I’m going to go through this is the same as usual — that I’ll be checking for comments and then I’ll go into talking about three — I was kind of deciding should I go with two or three? I’ve decided to go with three tips for how to get people to shut up in meetings. And then I’ll also welcome your questions and comments again at the end.

For people who are joining live, thank you for joining live, and for people who are watching the recording, you can still comment on the Facebook page on this. So I’m happy to respond to comments afterward as well.

Okay, and for people who are joining live, you can comment at any time and I’ll look at those a little bit later on. I know it sometimes takes a few minutes to write those comments in.

So tip number one for how to get people to shut up in meetings is clarify expectations.

You may remember that this is actually the same as the first tip last week for how to get people to speak up in meetings.

It’s the same for how to get people to shut up in meetings because you want to be clear particularly on the roles of the people in the meeting.

What is it that you expect from them and how much do you expect from them?

So, for example, do you want them to be presenting some information? Do you want them to be contributing their ideas or asking you questions?

Make it clear what you want from people. And also, as you’re clarifying this, make it clear how long you want people to talk for if you’re asking them to present.

So sometimes if you find that people are going on for a long time, you could say, “Could we have an update from each person for about one minute?” That helps to keep people a little bit more concise.

And I can see that Bob has joined, good to see you back! Are you maybe in the middle of your commute? And thank you for the hearts, by the way. For people joining live, you can click on the thumbs up, you can click on the hearts, or the surprise, or whatever, and that helps me to know that you’re there. Thank you, I can see the hearts. Yay! Wonderful.

So that’s the first tip — to clarify expectations.

Next tip — and this one may seem a little bit — you may be a little bit surprised by this one — because if you have someone who is speaking up a lot, you may want to kind of get away from them or kind of avoid — and you might find it difficult and challenging.

Actually what is really good to do here is to accept what they’re saying and to even ask for more information. It’s also about building trust, which we talked about last week.

And this can be really, really effective.

I remember a few years ago that I was delivering a workshop, and actually, it was a workshop on facilitation skills. There was a group of people — maybe about ten and of all different levels in the organization, so some very junior people and one person in particular who was quite senior. And this senior person was really challenging. He kept asking me questions and it was as if he was challenging my credibility to test me out.

And I saw a colleague who was also in the room and he was looking and thinking, “Oh, how is Helen going to deal with this challenging person?”

What I did though was I accepted what he was saying and I also asked him more questions. And actually even got him to speak a little bit more.

By doing that, it helped build trust and then he kind of stopped interrupting and talking in the meeting a little — in the session a little bit later on — so it worked out really well!

So the second tip is to accept and even ask for more.

The third tip is to write it up. Write up what the person said.

So this could be the comments that the person is making if they’re related to what your agenda is — use maybe a white board, maybe a flip chart, also these [easel pad]. Have you seen these wonderful things?

Let me turn it around. This kind of portable whiteboard or portable flipchart is really, really handy. So you can use these to write up what is being said in the meeting.

And if a person sees that their comment has been written up, it tends to get them to stop talking and kind of going on at you about their topic.

So that’s really helpful if it’s related to your agenda, but what happens if someone brings up a topic that’s different from what you wanted to talk about?

Well, you could still write that up. Write it on a separate flip chart or a separate piece of paper and have that as the things you can talk about later if you have time or in a separate meeting.

And when you do that, what’s really important is to get the agreement of the whole group rather than making a decision yourself saying, “Oh that’s not related to our current topic, let’s talk about it later.” Some people might want to talk about that topic, so check with everybody.

If everybody agrees, you can change your agenda and bring in that new item or you can agree to talk about it later and it goes onto the flipchart or the whiteboard or whatever you’re using.

So that is my third tip.

So today we talked about clarifying expectations, we talked about accepting and asking, and we talked about writing up as three ways to get people to shut up in meetings so that you can get on and you can give other people a chance to talk.

And I can see Minako joined — thank you for joining today. Wonderful to see you there.

So I’m going to be moving on to questions or comments in a moment. If you have questions or comments please pop them into the comment section now. You can even just let me know where you’re listening from. Are you in Tokyo? Are you on a train? Whatever it is you can put those into the comments, and I would love to see your comments.

And as you’re doing that I’ll take a little sip. Today I have a different cup. I had the karate cup last week, but today it’s a Bradford cup that I received as a gift because my husband used the karate cup for his “aojiru.”

Okay, how are we doing? Any questions or comments? People being a little bit quiet today or maybe you are in an area where it’s difficult for you to comment? That’s no problem and I’m happy to receive comments afterward, too.

By the way, I actually joined my very first Facebook Live as a participant this week. It was great fun because I saw those little bars with the thumbs up and the hearts, and you can press. So I was — it was kind of like, you know, those games like it used to be Space Invaders and you click, click, click, click.

I was going heart, heart, heart, heart, heart or thumbs up, thumbs up, and it’s great to see those coming.

So what else to talk about today?

If you have no more questions or comments I will start to — I’m just going to do a time check. It’s 8:41 here.

Hello, Mike has joined. It’s great to see you there. Wonderful!

I’m just about to get into wrapping up, but Mike if you have any questions or comments please feel free to put them in the chat. And I can see there’s a number of the people joining, but not necessarily names showing. But thank you very much for joining live. I am really, really happy to see people here live.

So if we don’t have any questions or comments, let me just give you a reminder that I would love it if you would have a look at the Nikkei Style’s Woman Smart article. I hope you find that useful and also please come and join next week’s Friday Facebook Live.

And the topic is — I’m still thinking about the absolute topic it will be, but I will be talking about something a little bit special for people who have bought this book [Eigo no Shigoto-jutsu], whether you’ve already bought or whether you are going to buy it.

There’s going to be something special for you which I’ll be talking about next week.

So today, our topic was how to get people to shut up in meetings, and I talked about clarifying expectations, accepting and asking, and writing up. Hope you found this useful, and I really hope to see you next week. Bye!