5 Meeting Strategies That Help Introverts Share Their Ideas

Tap into the wealth of knowledge hiding in your quietest team members

Photo by fauxels

In every meeting, amazing ideas go unspoken.

While extroverts share their thoughts confidently, introverts hold themselves back. They’ve got buckets of value to add, yet they get drowned out in a busy meeting. As a manager, you need to give everyone an equal voice, otherwise, decisions will be based on half the available data.

This article explains five techniques I’ve found invaluable for helping quieter team members to share their thoughts.

1. Use a Writing-Based Meeting Format

Most meetings are a noisy free-for-all.

Confident people dominate the airtime, leaving no space for quieter people to share their perspectives. To create a level playing field, try using a meeting format that places less emphasis on talking.

Here are two simple formats for gathering ideas through writing:

Brainwriting — Pose a question to your team and ask them to write ideas on an index card. After 5 minutes, everyone passes their card to a neighbour. For the next 5 minutes, they add more ideas to the card, inspired by the existing contents. Repeat…