Increase Input & Participation From Your Whole Team (Not Just Extroverts)
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How do you get input from people on your team who might stay silent, be reluctant, or are slow to share their thoughts?
When looking for input or feedback form a team, it’s pretty common for the extroverts to be the ones to talk first, and sometimes take up most of the space in a meeting. Of course, you want input from everyone on your team, including folks who are more introverted or just take longer to share their thoughts — these people often times have really profound, meaningful things to say.
Here’s my advice with four different ways to accomplish getting everyone to share their thoughts in a more thorough and meaningful way:
1. Give people a minute to think
If you’re presenting something and want thoughts from others, give everyone a couple moments to think and reflect about their questions, feelings, comments, etc. People who are more extroverted can sometimes jump to start talking because they may process thoughts and feelings out loud. More introverted folks will appreciate having a minute to collect their thoughts.
Some people just need time to process and sit with it. If you don’t give people time to do that, you can miss out on their insight — which is often extremely valuable. Give everyone time to think about their responses. Allowing a few minutes of silence and reflection is a great way to do this after presenting an idea or sharing what you’d like input on. That could be actually setting a timer and/or giving people a few prompts and then allowing for 2-5 minutes of silence for reflection.
2. Give prompts: Be clearer about what you want from them
Depending on the context, whether it’s proposing a possible change or brainstorming ideas on how to go about something, etc. it can extremely helpful to let people know what kind of input you are seeking from them. The prompts can be things like:
What’s you initial gut reaction to this? What do you love/dislike about it?
What are the pros and cons that you see?
Where do you see that we might encounter pitfalls with this?
Are there any ways we can improve or enhance this/make it easier?
It can help people to process and consider something if you give them some direction of what kind of input you’d like from them vs a general “What do you think?”
3. Call on people (but don’t make them uncomfortable)
If I know that someone on my team (let’s use Jei for instance), isn’t likely to speak up, I might call on him to invite him to share his thoughts. Something to the effect of:
“Jei, do you have any thoughts on this? Great. Kari, what about you? Great, Sydney, any thoughts?”
There’s obviously nuance here; you don’t need to corner people and force them to share. But it can be really helpful to invite folks into the conversation to share their opinion/thoughts.
As a leader, it’s important to understand the discretion and nuance between inviting someone’s input, and uncomfortably forcing someone to speak. Just inviting someone to share, with no pressure, is a great way to bring more voices into the conversation.
4. Leaders, give your thoughts last
A lot of times when leaders speak first or start the conversation by give their opinion, the rest of the team will be silent or hold back on their answers because they don’t want to be contrary or be seen as disagreeing with their leader.
It’s great to let people know you’d love to hear from them before you give your thoughts in order to facilitate more conversation from others that might have varying opinions and perspectives.
To recap, give people time to process, Be clear about the kind of input you want, invite individuals people to share, and save your opinion until last if you’re a leader.
Successfully getting more participation and input from an entire team can prove really valuable to invite and hear more perspectives, see potential pitfalls or pushback, and to gain buy-in. A useful leadership skill to add to your tool belt for anytime you need multiple people’s input from a group or team.
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