From the course: Teamwork Foundations

The right amount of talking

From the course: Teamwork Foundations

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The right amount of talking

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- How much should you talk and how much should you listen? You've probably heard that thing about we have one mouth and two ears, so we should use them in that proportion. And that's a pretty good starting point. But I think it goes further than that. The more people there are, the less each one should talk. If you're in a team of four, you should do about 25% of the talking maximum. Do you keep to that? Or after a meeting, do you walk away with your own voice ringing in your ears, because if this is the case, then maybe you've overdone it. The ideal team player would speak up and do their share while deliberately trying to be a good listener. And being really careful not to take up more than their share of the air time. Not too much talking and not too little. So if you're a naturally talkative person, I've got a little challenge for you, a game for you to play. In any meeting or whenever you're working with others in the team, even if there are only two of you, see if you can manage to only be talking for 10% of the time, so the others will be talking for 90%. It only takes 10% for you to make a brief comment, and then ask the next question. And then you're listening to them again. Try this in the next meeting. It's a great habit to get into. And to help you listen rather than talk, the key is in the questions that you ask. We all know about open and closed questions. Open questions are things like why and how. And closed questions are ones that have a yes or a no answer. But the best questions of all are probing questions. Things like "tell me more about that," and "why do you think that," and "then what happened?" A friend of mine has a great probing question he likes to use, which is "talk me through it." So if someone says they don't like their boss for example, he'll say, "oh really, talk me through it." And then he just sits back and listens, finding out all about the other person's situation. So in the next conversation or meeting that you find yourself in, try some probing questions and see how that helps you to be more of a listener, and see how much great information you end up discovering.

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