How to Speak Up in Meetings When You Are Not Running the Room

This is a video on how to speak up in meetings. It is for meeting participants and attendees who did not call the meeting. This video will help you navigate meetings when you have something to say and no obvious place to put it. There is a lot written on how to run a meeting, but very little written on how to contribute to meetings. Contributing in a room you do not control is a different skill, and no one teaches it. Search how to speak up at meetings and you get the three Cs. Be clear, be concise, be confident. Those are good things and they work, but there is more. Most advice treats this as a volume problem. It is a timing skill. You are waiting for a pause and the pause never comes. Or it comes and goes before you open your mouth and somebody else is already talking. Here is why, and it is not you. The gap between one person finishing and another person starting clusters around two tenths of a second. That is not a door to walk through. That is barely a crack. People do not wait for silence. They plan while you are talking, then they launch off the end of your sentence. THREE STEPS TO SPEAK UP IN MEETINGS 1. Pick your point before you walk in. You are prepared. That is the trouble. You came in with a list of seven things, and by the time you rank them the room has moved two topics past all seven. So stop ranking live. Write one sentence at the top of your notes, the thing you would regret not saying. Not the most important one. Ask which one gets more expensive the longer it goes unsaid. 2. Find your seam and claim it. Stop listening for silence and start listening for completion. Three openings come reliably: a speaker finishes a point and looks at whoever is running the meeting, the topic turns or the slide changes, or the leader asks a question and nobody has answered yet. Then claim it out loud with three words "One quick thing". It tells the room you have something to contribute and it tells them how long it will take, which is the reason people stop cutting you off. They never knew when you were going to end. 3. Share your sentence. Just say your main point and why it matters now, with no solution attached. Then stop talking. The silence will feel long. It is not. It is only about three seconds, and it could be the most productive three seconds in the meeting, because you gave the room something to react to.  If they want the detail, they will ask, and then you're answering a question instead of making a speech. I'm Michael Brunner. The research on how people work is exploding. I translate the research into ideas you can use to be more effective and unlock career growth. CHAPTERS 00:00 How to speak up in meetings 01:08 Step 1: Pick Your Point Before You Walk In 02:58 Step 2: Find Your Seam. Signal The Entry. 04:51 Step 3: Share Your Sentence 06:26 Your One Move MENTIONED IN THIS VIDEO Social evaluative threat, executive function, transition relevance place, turn taking, Tanya Stivers, PNAS 2009, burying the lede TRY IT Before your next meeting that you did not call, write your one sentence at the top of your notes, the thing you would regret not saying. Then do the part that almost nobody does. Write down afterward what you thought it would cost you and what it actually cost you. WATCH NEXT ‣ 4 Leadership Communication Styles (And How to Speak to Each One) →    • 4 Leadership Communication Styles (And How...   ‣ 3 Words: How to Run an Effective Meeting →    • 3 Words: How to Run an Effective Meeting   READ THE FULL ARTICLE Substack: https://wiredtoconnect.substack.com CONNECT LinkedIn:   / michaelsbrunner   Subscribe to @brunnerunlocked so you don't miss what's coming next. #Meetings #SpeakingUp #Communication #CareerGrowth #ExecutivePresence