In this week's newsletter

• 5 reasons people don't speak up when you ask for feedback and 3 things to try instead
• Warm-up and check-out questions to use in your meetings this week
• Your weekly bird break

Any questions? Any feedback? When someone says that in a meeting, it is often met with silence. Last year, I started paying closer attention to this dynamic after reading Daniel Pink's post about Ozan Varol’s experience as a law professor. Since then, it’s come up repeatedly in my work with clients and I’ve noticed how it plays out in my own meetings.

Imagine you are on the finance team at a large nonprofit having just presented the current quarter’s financials to the board and no one had any questions or feedback.

You might feel disheartened, “I worked late preparing, why doesn’t anyone care?”

You might walk away missing key input, “I shared the projected deficit. I thought they would be concerned, but they must think everything’s OK.”

You might spin up more work later: lots of individual side conversations; emergency meetings to deal with the deficit; additional presentations you need to create.

Five reasons people stay quiet when you ask for questions

(And below, three approaches to generate more engagement next time you open the floor.)

1) You didn’t give enough processing time

You were at the office until 8:00 PM last night polishing the reports and deck with updated numbers for this morning's board meeting. You sent the materials before you left and presented the deck for 15 minutes first thing this morning.

Especially when you’re expecting people to ask good questions and give critical feedback, most will need more time to process complex information than a 15-minute live presentation.

2) Bystander effect

Psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley identified the bystander effect in their research in 1968. In short: the more people nearby when someone needs help, the less responsibility each individual feels to step up and do the helping. They identify two factors at play: diffusion of responsibility and social influence. While this research is about emergency response, there’s a useful parallel to the dynamics we observe in meetings.

If you’re presenting this financial report in a full board meeting, there’s a good chance board members will a) assume someone else will speak up; b) look around and take cues from other board members to figure out if they should ask a question.

3) Lack of psychological safety

Do you remember that feeling in class when you weren’t sure if you should ask a question because you didn’t want to look stupid?

That feeling persists at work and beyond, even when we are at the top of the leadership hierarchy.

Amy Edmondson coined the term psychological safety in the 1990s: “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.”

If you’re presenting the budget, but the board members don’t know each other well or trust each other enough, they may not ask many questions, even if they have them.

4) People don’t know what you’re looking for

When you say “any questions or feedback?” after your budget presentation, what do you actually want?

• questions about current performance?
• questions that test the assumptions behind your projections?
• basic questions about the organization’s fiscal year and accounting procedures?

The more effort meeting attendees need to put into figuring out what kind of questions and feedback you want, the less effort they’re spending formulating and asking the questions.

5) Feels perfunctory

Sometimes it’s the tone, or the rest of the agenda is packed, or the personality of the presenter or meeting chair, or the fact you’re already over time. Whichever one or combo it is, you’ve been there. Someone said “any questions,” but you know they meant, “please please do not ask a question right now, we don’t have time and I don’t have the patience.”

What to do instead?

Each approach addresses multiple root causes. While they can help create clearer, safer opportunities for people to speak up, they won’t solve deeper psychological safety issues on their own.

1) Make your request specific and preview when you’ll ask

Explain what kind of questions and feedback will be most useful to you, how they’ll support the meeting’s objectives, and when people will have the opportunity to ask.

Mention when sending a pre-read, at the top of the meeting during housekeeping, and throughout your presentation.

What this sounds like:

2) Create time and structure for questions

Simplest step: pause. After you ask, don’t say anything even if it’s silent. Resist the urge to fill that silence. Wait at least 30 seconds, past the point where you feel uncomfortable, and see what happens.

Alternative: Ask everyone to write down one question or piece of feedback silently for two minutes, then go around and ask everyone to share.

Variation: Say, “I’ll pause and take two questions after every section of this presentation.” Then actually hold silence until you get two questions.

3) Be mindful of power dynamics

If you hold power, and you’re concerned people may be too intimidated to ask you questions, normalize asking through humility.

This phrasing presumes there are questions and asks what they are.

If you are presenting, but hold less power, being too humble can undermine your presentation. In this case, normalize questions by being specific about the input you want and reinforcing your leadership.

Meeting Minute

Use these to start and end your meetings this week

​Warm-up question​

Use this warm-up question before a conversation that requires robust participation or with a group who hasn’t spent much time in deep discussions together yet. You might ask everyone to share one-by-one, or first split folks into pairs and then ask for a few volunteers to share what they discussed.

After people have discussed the examples, debrief some key themes. You might ask: what patterns did you notice across these examples? How did you feel in the moment when you were asked? What might it have taken for that person to feel comfortable asking you that question?

Then close this warm-up discussion with a transition, “Today when we discuss the financials, it’s especially important we get all of the questions on the table to get the best outcome for the organization.”

Allow 10+ minutes including the debrief discussion. To keep it shorter, instead of a participatory debrief, sum up the patterns yourself and move directly into the transition.

​Check-out question​

Use this when you’ve given a presentation you’ll need to repeat with different audiences. This is a sneaky way to surface questions and feedback without saying “any questions? any feedback?” because it can surface both, but it’s phrased as feedforward. It can feel easier to offer suggestions or ask questions when helping someone improve for the future. This also lets someone frame a question as something a future audience might ask, which can feel safer than owning the question directly.