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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

This column marks the start of my ninth year of weekly public musings. It seems appropriate, in a hard-to-explain-exactly-why kind of way, to mark the occasion by completing the When To Keep Your Mouth Shut trilogy.

You should keep quiet, you might recall, in (1) contentious meetings, where speaking too early turns you into a partisan, eliminating your ability to construct a solution at the end that everyone can accept; and (2) negotiations, where speaking too quickly lets the other person off the hook. In both of these situations, silence can literally be golden.

So golden, in fact, that others in the room might well understand the speak-last strategy just as well as you do. What do you do then, when everyone in the room is waiting for everyone else in the room to make the first move?

Rather than suffer an entire meeting in collective silence, here are some tactics you can use to break the logjam without yielding the advantage.

The first, the Process Ploy, is superior, if you can make it work: When it’s clear nobody will make the first move, ask whether it makes sense to first discuss how the group will go about making its decision. Proposing a decision process doesn’t make you a partisan, so long as you’re willing to abandon your process in favor of someone else’s without heat or argument.

If it’s a yes/no decision, propose the “Ben Franklin” method: two columns; reasons to say yes in the first and no in the second. If you’re comparing alternatives, suggest a decision matrix in which the group evaluates each alternative according to a list of group-devised and weighted criteria.

The Process Ploy has one disadvantage: You have to respect the process too, whether or not it delivers the results you want. The good news about the bad news: Presumably, your own preference is the result of an equivalent logical analysis, so what you’re really doing is leading the group through the thought process you’ve already gone through yourself.

What makes this tactic particularly desirable is that however it comes out, you’ll get credit for breaking through the impasse and getting the group moving — far more useful than getting your way in the decision itself.

Another way to take charge without becoming a partisan is the Facilitation Gambit. It’s easy: Assume leadership of the meeting by asking another participant’s opinion. When you do so, it’s very hard to respond, “Gee, I dunno. I haven’t really thought about it much.” If your first victim does say this, just choose another.

And if everyone plays dumb? Suggest a task force to report back to the committee. If possible, recommend three members, exactly one of which is (a) looking for an opportunity to shine; and (b) thinks as you do. (Ideally, the other two will be both strong stakeholders and too busy to work on the problem.) As a fall-back, choose three people you think will do a good job.

But whatever you do, don’t volunteer for the task force yourself. Instead, volunteer to help them: “If it will help to have another pair of eyes look at things, feel free to call me — I’d be happy to give an advance reaction before we reconvene the committee.”

Before we move on, how should you react if someone turns the tables and puts you on the spot? Answer thusly: “I’m in a quandary. I can see several ways we could go on this and see both advantages and disadvantages to each of them. To be candid, I was hoping that if I listened to some of the rest of you who know the subject better, things would come into focus for me.”

Both the Process Ploy and Facilitation Gambit leave something to chance. If you can’t afford to do so, use an old standby — the ever-effective Two Cop Tactic. Yes, it’s the old good cop/bad cop routine: Arrange in advance for another participant — one you trust — to act as a passionate partisan during the discussion, pushing everyone else in the room to become a partisan as well. You stay out of the fray until the end. (Make sure you both agree who has which role before the meeting. “Me? I thought you were going to be the bad cop this time!” would be bad.)

Right about now you’re likely thinking that all three of these stratagems sound more than a bit manipulative. Of course they do. They can’t be otherwise.

Leadership means getting others to follow. Strong leaders rarely compel — most often they get others to choose to follow them.

The difference between this and manipulation is a mighty fine line.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

As a writer and as a citizen, I’m passionately in favor of freedom of speech. There are some unfortunate individuals, however, from whom it should be withheld for their own protection. Take, for example, the case of Walden O’Dell.

O’Dell chose this unfortunate turn of phrase in an invitation to a Republican fund-raiser: “[I’m] committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” Which would be no big deal if he weren’t CEO of Diebold Election Systems, the company that delivers more voting machines to our polling places than any other.

Oops. Hey, I’m sure O’Dell was referring to fund-raising and not Diebold’s software engineering. Still, he would have been better off keeping his mouth shut.

As would we all.

Next time you’re in a meeting, divert some of your attention to noticing who are the most effective participants. I did this once and noticed something disconcerting: It wasn’t me. I was too busy talking.

How about you? When a subject comes up you’re passionate about, what do you do? A lot of us act like Harry Potter’s friend Hermione, desperately waving her hand in the air hoping to be called on for the answer. Except that in business settings we don’t raise our hands waiting for the facilitator to call on us (I hope!) — we just grab the floor and talk until we run out of words or breath, or until others interrupt us with their own pithy commentary.

That’s what most of us do. What do the most effective participants do? Mostly, they wait.

Yes, I know you have a lot of knowledge about (for example) which DBMS is the best on the market. Yes, you’re doing everyone a disservice by not sharing that knowledge with the group. But it’s okay. Really.

The question you have to ask yourself is what your goal is. If it’s to share your knowledge, talking is a clear necessity. Repetition isn’t, but saying what you know once is a prerequisite to everyone else hearing it.

If your goal is more than that — if it’s to prove to everyone that you’re the smartest person in the room — talking early and often might be the right strategy. Probably not, but it might be.

But if you want everyone in the room to choose the course of action you think is best, hold your tongue. If necessary, pinch it between your thumb and forefinger and don’t let go for awhile.

There will come a time when the discussion starts to either wind down or repeat itself. That’s when it’s your turn. Here’s the formula: (1) Get the floor; (2) Summarize what’s been said; (3) Find a way to agree with ideas you don’t like that removes them from consideration; (4) Present a way out of the impasse. Like this:

“Can I say something? Thanks. Clearly, this is a complicated subject. Here’s what I think I’ve heard. Fred, you made the excellent point that Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft dominate the market. Just as a pulse-check — does everyone here agree with Jill that Microsoft’s software doesn’t scale to the enterprise as well? Yes? Me too.”

“Jim, I know you’d like us to explore open source alternatives. I have to say, I find the notion attractive myself, but listening to everyone here it’s pretty clear that using open source at the heart of our architecture is a bit too adventurous for this company. What I’d suggest is that we hold off, and look for an opportunity for a smaller scale proof-of-concept project for open source software and take it off the table here. Does that make sense to everyone? Jim, can you live with that?”

“Good. Then it looks like we have a toss-up between IBM and Oracle. We need some way to break the tie, and from everything I heard it won’t be their relative technical merits. If we expand our conversation to include which company we’d rather do business with, does that get us anywhere?”

Whether the subject is database management systems or what to have for lunch, people will follow your direction far more often if you keep your own counsel while waiting for most of the shouting to finish. Then, as a non-combatant, you can get everyone to the right answer.

Make sense? Good. I’m going to sign off now, and spend the next month working hard to take my own advice.

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