Speaking too little or too much in meetings reduces team intelligence

Ever felt trapped in a bad meeting where people droned on and you wished you were elsewhere?

Google’s study of 180 teams revealed: What impacted team effectiveness was less about who was on the team, and more about how the team worked together.

In the best performing teams, members experience psychological safety; they listen to one another, and show sensitivity to feelings and needs. When members feel safe, they are confident that no one will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea.

When researchers studied team performance, they noticed two behaviors that good teams generally shared. First, members roughly spoke in the same proportion.

‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’

Second, good teams have high ‘‘average social sensitivity’, they are skilled at intuiting how others feel based on their tone of voice, expressions and other nonverbal cues. They seem to know when someone is feeling upset or left out.

When we are busy managing impressions or fulfilling our own needs, we inadvertently create bad meetings. When we drone on about our opinions, questions, we deprive others of small moments of learning, and time better spent on their work, families, hobbies.

So how might we design better discussions? We can create safe spaces and raise collective intelligence by:

1. Modelling curiosity, actively seeking and listening to diverse opinions. We can nurture independent thinking and build our teams’ confidence, instead of dominating discussions with our views, and limiting possibilities.
2. Framing the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem.
3. Starting and ending on time. Limited bandwidth leads to poorer decisions and impairs our ability to resist temptations. Discussions that only involve 2 people should take place outside group meetings.

Tip: When your colleagues have a glazed look in their eyes and are numbly checking their emails and phones, you know the discussion has run on for too long…

Over time, as we learn how to create safe spaces and guide our teams to think more deeply, contribute more ideas, and get off work on time, we will be better equipped to tackle the complex challenges and disruptions ahead.