It’s a funny thing … as researchers, we spend tremendous effort on a 50-page manuscript, but it’s often one finding that catches our eye. This happened recently while working together on a project examining the effects of speaking time in teams. We found that simply being labeled a “leader” increases speaking time by 150–300%.
The more we thought about this finding — and its important implications for how leaders interact with their team members and peers — the more we felt compelled to share it. Let’s explore why this happens and what it means for your organization.
Our Research on Speaking Time in Teams
In this study, we and our co-authors examined teams of participants completing the Everest Challenge simulation from Harvard Business Publishing. This challenge involves an interactive exercise where teams simulate an ascent of Earth’s highest peak by sharing information, overcoming challenges, and making decisions. While completing the simulation, teams (like those in a sales or engineering department) manage competing goals and priorities, sift through ambiguous information, and negotiate influence among group members.
Leaders: The Best at Talking More Than the Rest
Here’s our intriguing finding: Leaders spoke 150% more than team members and 300% more than observers.
In this simulation, each of the teams had a formal leader responsible for deciding when the team moved to the simulation’s next stage. When we examined the audio recordings from nearly 200 participants in 38 teams, we found that leaders spoke significantly more than their team members.
To help make this clearer, imagine you’re in a team meeting where key decisions are being made. During this meeting, the leader is speaking for 4 to 8 minutes more than everyone else. You’re sitting there, waiting for your chance to share your great idea. But, by the time the boss finally takes a breath, the moment has passed. This wasn’t just an ineffective meeting — it was a lost leadership opportunity. Perhaps if it’s just one meeting, it’s not a big deal. But, if it’s more than that, consider the accumulative effect. Over a week, it’s a pattern. Over a month, it sets the tone for the group. Over years, it becomes your (unhealthy) culture. When leaders talk more than others, it’s not just “talk” — they’re shaping what gets heard and whose ideas gain traction, and determining who they keep silent.
If you want to experience this effect, set a timer for 4 or 8 minutes, then simply sit in silence until the timer goes off. Then, imagine that silence was filled with the babble of a single person. Andy tried this and, along with concluding that he probably talks too much during meetings, he realized how uncomfortable he is with silence. This isn’t unusual and may explain why some leaders jump in and keep talking. It’s a fine line to recognize your own discomfort but not let it affect what might be best for the group.
Why is our study finding so surprising?
First, the “leaders” in this simulation weren’t actually leaders. They were randomly assigned to that role. So, presumably, there is no reason to expect that pre-existing individual differences — such as being an extravert — would account for this finding. That is, these were not extraverted individuals grabbing the leadership role and then expressing their personality by being more talkative. Instead, these differences emerged primarily, and arguably exclusively, simply because we said, “You are the leader.”
Second, this effect is even more surprising because these “leaders” didn’t have any of the typical ego-enhancing trappings associated with leadership. They couldn’t provide rewards or punishments, they didn’t have access to any unique information, they didn’t have any additional resources, and they weren’t connected to other authority figures. Thus, these were leaders in name or title only. Nevertheless, they took up significantly more airtime than their colleagues (team members) who had important information to share or others (observers) who may have had helpful insights about the task.
Is Speaking Time Just Babble?
No, speaking time isn’t mere babble (although past researchers have studied the “babble hypothesis”). Rather, speaking time has long been recognized as a vital team resource because it’s the conduit through which information is exchanged, ideas are challenged, solutions are proposed, resources are secured, reputations are built, and influence is claimed. In fact, some have argued that verbal communication is a cornerstone of leadership. Indeed, it’s difficult to verbally communicate without speaking.
What’s more, speaking time is rarely shared equally within teams. Past research consistently finds speaking patterns similar to those depicted in the graphic below. In this “typical” team, one member (person A) speaks more than 3 of the other team members combined (persons C + D + E). This suggests that a handful of team members are more likely to have their voices heard and garner the most influence. In our study, person A would most often be the team’s leader, with their ideas, suggestions, and influence taking center stage. That said, we suspect that there are instances where reserved or stoic team members can also be a source of influence. These “quiet influencers,” although seemingly less common, are an important area of future research.
The risk of having one individual garner so much speaking time purely due to a title or role is that their ideas may not help the team reach its objectives. In fact, there is a tendency for individuals to overestimate their abilities, appear overconfident, and thus misjudge their expertise.
To the extent that leaders, being human, fall victim to this so-called Dunning-Kruger effect, there is good reason to “make space” for others and push towards more equal distributions of speaking time within teams. Importantly, there can also be a reverse Dunning-Kruger effect, in which highly skilled individuals tend to underestimate their own abilities relative to those of others. Because of this, they may defer to others and speak less in meetings. It’s not hard to see where that precarious and hazardous combination can lead organizations astray. Consider, for example, a situation where a lower-level employee, who’s on the frontlines of their organization, fails to speak up and thus their team and their leader cannot make an informed and effective decision.
Making Space for More Leaders to Emerge
In reflecting upon our finding and its implications, we know it’s overly simplistic to counsel leaders to limit their speaking time. Leadership roles are challenging, and leaders need to lead. Although some may equate leading with simply garnering more airtime, we suspect the leadership role itself is a powerful signal that not only invites leaders to talk more but also sets expectations for others to defer and give leaders more space.
With these points in mind, we offer 3 promising approaches for how leaders and team members can establish more equitable speaking patterns and potentially improve collective outcomes.
1. Recognize the power of roles.
If you’re a manager, director, vice president, or chief executive, our data suggest that your title alone will likely affect you and afford you the benefit of the doubt when it comes to speaking time. The onus, then, is partly on you regarding how you use that time. Rather than simply speaking less (and artificially creating “silence”), you might maximize your role by inviting others to participate. Self-managing your speaking time takes mental effort; thus, some executives focus on asking questions to engage others and limit their own speaking time. Including others (and encouraging those who may be less inclined to speak) can unearth important information that would otherwise go unsurfaced.
2. Begin to think about roles more broadly.
Our study focused on “formal” leadership roles within teams, but research also shows the effects of powerful, and sometimes competing, culturally bound roles. For example, gender is a role that comes with its own societal expectations and may affect the likelihood that a (non)leader speaks. By thinking critically about differences or roles in the team, you stand a better chance of adopting a more balanced speaking pattern during your team meetings.
3. Adopt invitational discussion and decision-making structures.
We recommend using specific structures to help establish speaking patterns that suit your team’s needs. Might this feel a bit artificial (at least at first)? Yes — and that’s the point. The goal of these structures is to not fall victim to typical patterns and to nudge yourself and your team toward behaviors more likely to help reach the group’s objectives.
As a leader, you want to ensure all voices are heard. Bringing others into the conversation, according to our research, can help create a climate of psychological safety in which it’s safe to take interpersonal risks. Other CCL research shows that when leaders listen, team members feel safer and are more likely to speak up. So, you might think of this as auto-enrolling your team in a more equitable “investment plan” for team members’ speaking time. There are many different options, but consider this tiered approach.
- Start small. Providing an agenda prior to each meeting or asking people to quietly review the relevant material before the discussion may help those who process information internally feel better prepared to voice their perspective.
- Go one step further. To counter the leader role, the team could have rotating team roles. For example, assigning someone to serve as a devil’s advocate and challenge the team’s ideas might invite new people into the conversation.
- Use a more heavy-handed structure. To hear more input from all team members, play with different meeting structures. One example is to establish, as the team’s leader, a rhythm to your meetings where you briefly summarize the issues facing the team (or coordinate in advance with other team members to do this), pose 2–3 open-ended questions, and invite others’ thoughts for the remainder of the meeting, with the goal to summarize what you heard at its conclusion. It’s important, however, to ask questions and solicit input only on issues that haven’t already been decided. Otherwise, you run the risk of being perceived as inauthentic or not open to new ideas. This structure might require some commitment and practice, but it can evolve over time with the help of others on the team.
Our emphasis here is on setting the conditions that will elicit helpful speech patterns for your team and for you as a leader. The trick is deciding what those patterns are and what structures are best suited to achieve those patterns. Hearing more perspectives, having more engaged team members, and making better decisions will provide the fuel needed to keep refining your approach.
All of This From One Measly Finding?
Yup, it’s pretty great, isn’t it? Since we’re writing (and not babbling in a meeting), we could just keep going and going and going … But, in all seriousness, we believe this a powerful finding. To us, it speaks volumes (pun intended!) about why some individuals get into powerful leadership positions and what might explain their ascent. Although our finding pertains to day-to-day interactions, we contend that paying attention to speaking time — and how it is used — may help us spread leadership more evenly across everyone, regardless of their role, in organizations and in society.
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