Do you answer too quickly?
Readtime: 3 minutes
A few years ago I did some stand-up comedy. Mainly to get better at standing in front of rooms full of people, which is a large part of what I do now.
It was incredibly hard to write the jokes. But what happened straight after saying them was tricky too.
You say the line, and then there’s often a gap before anyone laughs. On stage that gap feels about a minute long. Everything in you wants to fill it, so you start the next line, and the laugh never arrives, because you’ve just told the room that wasn’t a punchline.
The best people I trained with just stood there. And got the laughs.
The homework
I’ve been thinking about that gap because of a coaching conversation a few weeks ago.
My client is a senior leader in financial services, and he’s quick. He has the answer before you’ve finished the question, and the answer is usually right. It’s a big part of why he’s where he is.
The feedback he’d had was that he can come across as reactive. Which he found annoying, because he wasn’t reacting. He’d just already worked it out.
The homework we agreed on was small. Five seconds of silence before answering anything that mattered.
He thought that sounded enormous. Then he said something that’s stayed with me. The two most senior people he works with already do this. He’d noticed them both pausing, many times. He just hadn’t connected it to anything.
I don’t know yet how the homework has gone for him. My guess is that the silences will feel like an age to him and that nobody else will notice them at all. What they might notice is that he seems more considered.
What the speed is for
I think the speed is mostly for us.
When you’re junior, a fast answer proves you can keep up. People are checking whether you know your stuff, and the quickest way to show them is to have it ready. So you get rewarded for speed, year after year, and it becomes a reflex.
The difficulty is that the audience changes and the reflex doesn’t. In a room full of senior people, a fast answer says something different. It says you’d already decided. It can even say the question wasn’t worth much.
A pause says the question was worth considering. Even if you had the answer the whole time.
There’s an uncomfortable flip side. The reason most of us don’t pause is that silence feels like weakness. Like being caught out. And yet the people at the top of most organisations use silence freely, along with other things we avoid for the same reason: “I don’t know yet”, “what do you think”, and “let me think about that”.
The behaviours you’ve been avoiding because they’d look weak are quite often the ones the people above you use without a second thought. Maybe they can afford to. But you probably can too, you just haven’t tested it.
Who gets the silence
When you’re senior there’s a second effect, which is that your speed closes things down.
If you answer in the first second, the conversation is over. Nobody adds the thing they were about to add. The person who had a different view keeps it to themselves. Your pause, on the other hand, gives everyone else a few seconds to say something, and quite often what they say is the thing you needed.
I suspect most of us have a version of this. A behaviour we’ve watched the people above us use freely, but decided wasn’t for us yet.
What’s yours?
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn
P.S. If your leadership team could do with improving their impact in senior meetings, I can help. Reply with "impact" and I'll send you some options.