Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

Shut Up And Let Your Employees Speak In Meetings!

21 Oct 2022 · 1 min

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0:51

A short coaching/talk by Cameron Herold advising leaders to deliberately speak last in meetings so newer and quieter employees speak first. The central tactic: have the most junior or reserved people share ideas early, place the COO/second-senior leaders near the end, and have the CEO speak last. Rationale: when senior leaders hold back, employees grow confidence and skills and often their ideas already surface, so leaders can listen and support rather than dominate.

Chapters

One of the best ways to get all of the employees to speak up at meetings, whether it's at a planning meeting or your weekly meeting or a leadership team meeting, or even just a town hall meeting, is for the leaders, for the most senior people in the meeting, to speak last. So let's say that it's at a management team meeting where you might have all the managers and leaders and the CEO and COO are all at that same meeting together for a couple of hours. You want the CEO to be the last person to share their ideas and feedback. You want the COO to be the second last person to share the ideas and feedback. What I like to do is get the newest employees to speak first. Get some of the quieter, more analytical, amiable people to speak first. When everyone has shared their ideas, often what happens is the CEO realizes, wow, all of my ideas already got shared by everybody else. And because I don't have to share my ideas, it's growing their confidence and growing their skill set. So by shutting up and letting them speak, you're actually doing them a favor and helping them grow.