One Simple Tool For Controlling Loudmouths In Your Meetings from Mark Murphy of Leadership IQ

What happens when you have a team and some people on those team are really loud and dominating and maybe some other people on the team are kind of quiet and passive? How do you equalize all of the voices so the quiet people speak up a bit and the loud people, eh, tone it down a bit? There's a technique called the Nominal Group Technique and basically what it's designed to do is help you equalize the voices between the loud people and the soft people and it involves you as the the leader of the team exerting a bit more control over the group. So here's how it works. Let's say that you have a decision to make about the team. Let's say you're, I don't know, debating what price to put in a new proposal or something. And some people say, oh, we should charge a million. And other people say, no, half a million, use it as a loss leader, blah, blah, blah. And the conversation goes on from there. What you could do is hand everybody a sheet of paper and say, we're going to take 5 minutes here. And what I want to do is I want to get everybody's ideas, the pros and cons. Everybody write down what you think the price should be in the contract and why. Give me your reasons for it. And then I'm going to give you 5 minutes to do that, and then you can pass it around the table and send it over to me. If you're doing this online, it works perfectly fine to do this with a chat function. If you're doing a web chat or Skype, something like that, you can do this just as easily. What this does is as everybody writes down, it's forcing them to A, clarify their thinking so they're not just kind of shouting out whatever first pops into their mind. So it forces them to take a step back and actually do some thinking before they just start blurting out ideas. But secondly, when they then take their ideas, pass them over to you, you now have the opportunity to control the discussion, which means that you can go through these items. If you're doing this in a room face-to-face with pieces of paper, you can literally go through each of them paper one at a time and say, well, let me talk about this first idea, and here are some of the pros and cons, and let me talk about the second idea. Now you as the leader get to exert a little more control over the group and equalize the voices. Also, you could, without having everybody pass their ideas to you, you could still just say, I want to now give every person 4 minutes to go through and without anybody else commenting, or 3 minutes, whatever, I want to give everybody 3 minutes to go around the room and tell us what your thoughts were, your pros, cons, what the price should be, whatever. And in doing this, what you've done is you've made everybody on your team more thoughtful. So the people that might be inclined to just give kind of knee-jerk spouting, you force them to tone it down a bit. For the people that might be inclined to kind of hang back and be passive, you force them to actually stand up and say, here's clearly what I'm thinking about. In both cases, what you've done is you've equalized the voices between loud and soft, you've exerted a bit more control over the group, and perhaps most importantly, you've made sure that you get the best thinking of everybody in the group. When the loud people dominate and the soft people don't say anything, you miss out. A, the loud people may not be thinking quite as clearly, and the soft people may have great ideas you miss out on. When you equalize everybody's voices, you take care of that problem.