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Comment by akhmatova | Hacker News Reader

Like, "Bob? What do you think of this? Would you ever use it?"

It's actually kind of obnoxious to call on people like that. Even if it may seem like a "leadership thing" -- which may explain why it seems such a favored technique among wannabe alpha manger types.

I'm with the parent commenter: if people are in the flow (and give a shit), they'll definitely have something say (and your difficulty will be in getting them to keep it short). If they're not, and you're getting crickets -- it points to a deeper problem. That cannot be solved by, in effect, throwing chalk at people to get them to speak up.

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My assumption is that if you're in the meeting, it has some adjacency to your work. This isn't about calling on the daydreaming kid in high school Spanish class who _has_ to be there to graduate. If you're in the meeting, it should be applicable to you and you should be ready to give some input; even saying something like "I'm not sure, need more info", or "don't have anything to add" is a valid and acceptable answer.

If the meeting isn't germane to your work, why are you in it?

I know people who do this because they're genuinely trying to get input from a broad set of people, some of whom will never speak unless they're asked directly. It doesn't have to be a mark of an alpha trying to beta everyone else.

>My assumption is that if you're in the meeting, it has some adjacency to your work.

This assumption does not match up with my experience.

>If the meeting isn't germane to your work, why are you in it?

I personally have gotten pretty good about declining meetings, but plenty of people aren't. Besides, I've been occasionally asked by my direct manager to attend a meeting that it turns out I wasn't actually needed at or remotely interested in for my work.

It would be nice to live in a world where meetings worked ideally and there weren't a bunch of people there wasting their own time, but that is sadly not the world we live in.

If it's not a meeting that you have any applicability to and someone asks for your input in the meeting, say so.

"Sorry, I don't see myself using this product/service/team - not because it isn't good, it just isn't relevant to what I'm responsible for/in charge of".

I feel like people treat meetings like this inescapable prison; once you're invited, you can never escape! It's bonkers. If you don't need to go to the meeting or don't have applicability… don't.

I work for a Fortune-listed company -- exactly the kind of place where attendee bloat thrives and I've never once had any manager or supervisor aggressively push back on my declines if they are valid.

But throwing chalk works. Don’t get me wrong I wish all the people I value the opinion of or need to get adhesion from were full of confidence and perfectly fine speaking in public. It would make my life easier. Sadly they are not so I sometimes have to push them in the swimming pool. Hopefully at some point they will realise they are perfectly able to swim. In the meantime, well, tough love it’s gonna be.

I think throwing chalk could just be gaming metrics. If people are interested it shows that what's happening is valuable, they benefit from what's being presented or have input that the presenter needs and they want to get that across. What the organization should care about is not that people ask questions or give feedback, it should care that time is being used well. That is we know this meeting isn't a waste of time because people are interested active participants and if people just sit quietly and wait for thing to be over maybe it wasn't that useful.

When you force people to talk you are getting the metric (people asked questions) but because you are forcing it the metric becomes disconnected from what you actually care about - was this meeting a waste of time. You haven't actually improved things you've just obfuscated the problem.

I have worked with people who will just sit quietly and wait for things to be over even if they have questions just to not have to talk in a meeting and might ask them to you later if you are lucky.

It "works", but with negative side effects whose impact you seem to be underestimating the importance of. Meanwhile it's quite easy to encourage people to speak up more (and to take risks while doing so) via other, infinitely more decent and respectful means.

It's a "leadership thing" because most good leaders have learned that it's useful to invite others to share their opinion before you do so yourself. Especially in more authority-style cultures, because you'll get better input that way. Then people aren't trying to just agree with whatever the person in a leadership role said.

The thing is there's a (not-so-subtle) difference between "inviting" people to speak and, in effect, forcing them to.

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