Women at Work: Make Yourself Heard

NICOLE TORRES: Let’s go back for a few minutes to the 1990s. More women were in the office, increasingly working alongside men or above them, not for them. Deborah Tannen, a Georgetown University linguistics professor, was concerned about these women being heard and respected by their male colleagues. Here’s Deborah in her 1995 workplace training video, Talking 9 to 5.

DEBORAH TANNEN: For example, have you ever said something at a meeting, had it ignored? Then someone else said the same thing and it was picked up as a great idea? Have you ever told someone to do something, and then it wasn’t done? Or it was done wrong?

NICOLE TORRES: She knew from her research that the way women tend to talk at work can put them at a disadvantage. [MUSIC] You’re listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I’m Nicole Torres, associate editor.

AMY BERNSTEIN: I’m Amy Bernstein, editor of HBR.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I’m Sarah Green Carmichael, executive editor.

NICOLE TORRES: Our show’s about what women experience at work. And our first episode is about being heard.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And those couple work place scenarios, being ignored in a meeting, not getting credit for ideas, seem just as on topic now as they did back in the ’90s.

NICOLE TORRES: So, we sat down and watched Deborah’s video to hear what women of the ’90s were up against.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Oh, right. My landing gear is down.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Your landing gear?

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Oh, every time I put the headphones on, I feel like I’m in a cockpit or something.

AMY BERNSTEIN: [LAUGHS]

NICOLE TORRES: As you’ll hear, Amy and Sarah did not hold back.

DEBORAH TANNEN: A ritual that men often use, which women can take literally is ritual opposition. Just as little boys want to play with their friends, often spend time play fighting much more than little girls do, as adults, men often use an oppositional stance to get things done.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I find it so confusing.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: For example, to explore ideas. Rather than supporting somebody else’s ideas, they’ll try to point out the weaknesses, they’ll challenge it, as a way of helping somebody explore the idea.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And that makes me run away.

NICOLE TORRES: But listeners, we need you to stay with us because we’re going to talk to Deborah Tannen about the power of talk which she wrote about for HBR in 1995. Then, Sarah, Amy and I have our own observations and stories. And after that, we’ll talk with two experts who’ll give us practical advice on how we can communicate more effectively. First, our conversation with Deborah Tannen. We started by asking her what, if anything, has changed about how women are speaking and being heard in the workplace.

DEBORAH TANNEN: My impression is that not much has changed. I have been giving talks to various organizations, corporations, companies pretty much non-stop since back then. And whenever I do give these talks, I get the same response. That’s exactly what’s happening to me. I experienced that just yesterday. You’ve just told the story of my life. So that’s the basis for my saying that not much has changed.

NICOLE TORRES: So, if women are still struggling to be heard for the same reasons today, if not much has changed, we want to get a better understanding of where that comes from, what’s driving that.

DEBORAH TANNEN: I trace the way women and men tend to speak at work and it’s very important to say right at the beginning, tend to. Nothing is true of all women or all men. We have many influences on our style other than our gender. But there are tendencies that girls and boys tend to learn as kids playing in same-sex groups. Girls tend to talk in ways that downplay their authority. If they talk in ways that play up the fact that there may be a leader in the group or that they think they’re good at something, the other girls will criticize them. She’s bossy, she thinks she’s something. She’s stuck up. That can press with the way boys tend to maintain their position in the group. Talk up what they’re good at; maybe even make it into a game where they’re trying to top each other. And the leader of the group is someone who tells the others what to do and gets it to stick. If we move into the workplace, a person in authority has to tell others what to do. And frequently, women will find ways to do it that doesn’t seem too bossy, that downplays their authority.

I was actually speaking at a college and talking to the president of the college and she told me of this experience. She had said something to her assistant, like, Could you do me a favor? And then went on and asked her to do something. The member of the board took her aside and said, Don’t forget, you’re the president. He had heard the fact that she started with could you do me a favor. Literally, as if she really thought she didn’t have the authority to ask her own assistant to do something. She was quite certain that she knew the assistant had to do whatever she asked her to do, so she was saving face for the assistant by asking it in a way that was in her view, simply polite. Could you do me a favor, she didn’t mean that literally.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: One of the ways that I have noticed that women will try to make not just requests, but all kinds of sort of leadership maneuvers less direct is by phrasing things as questions. You know, you might see a woman in a meeting saying something like, I’m not quite sure I’m following. Can someone recap for me? If they think that the person running the meeting should have done that, but didn’t in the beginning. Or, Can someone please explain what the Q3 results mean? Even if they themselves know, but they think someone else in the group needs that information.

DEBORAH TANNEN: That’s a great example of how women will often talk in ways that will save face for other people. And it’s interpreted as something internal about them.

NICOLE TORRES: So, I thought that this was a really interesting take on confidence. I feel like the narrative is usually that women are socialized to be less confident. But it seems like you’re saying they’re actually socialized to sound less confident.

DEBORAH TANNEN: Yes, absolutely. Laurie Hetherington did a study where she asked hundreds of incoming freshmen at the university where she taught, to predict the grades that they were going to get in their first year. There were two conditions. Half of them were asked to do it in a public way. Either orally tell the interviewer what grades they expected, or write it on a piece of paper, but then those predictions were read aloud to a group. The other was private. Write what you expect, close it in an envelope, seal up the envelope, no one’s going to see it. The findings were fascinating because in the conditions when it was public, women predicted much lower grades for themselves than men tended to. When it was private, it was pretty much the same for the women and the men. So, what the women were doing was downplaying what they really expected so that they wouldn’t come across as too full of themselves.

AMY BERNSTEIN: I think that there might be something a little bit different going on with credit taking and women. Where for some of us, taking credit is kind of a repugnant act. Have you seen anything on that front?

DEBORAH TANNEN: Yes. I observed that women frequently said “we” when talking about something they personally had done or accomplished. I also observed men saying “I” about things that they were not individually, personally responsible for. And I think that has a lot do with our sense of what’s appropriate. So, a lot of women feel it’s kind of boastful to say “I.” The word I in itself is to be avoided. So, they’ll say “we” to be gracious about the people that they work with. But they kind of assume other people will know that they really did it. And that’s kind of similar to this more general pattern that many women felt. If I do a good job, it will be noticed. I don’t have to call attention to what I’ve done. Whereas for many men, they realize that they should call attention to it or people won’t know. A lot of these ways of speaking that women have taken for granted or assume are appropriate, it’s realistic. The phenomenon I often refer to is the double bind. We have expectations for how women should speak and if they don’t fulfill those expectations, people don’t like them. We have expectations for how men should speak. If they don’t speak that way, people will have a negative impression. It’s a challenge to find some middle ground.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Deborah, what does that sound like? What does it sound like to successfully navigate that?

DEBORAH TANNEN: I’ll give an example. A woman has to tell a subordinate to do something. If she says something like, Do you think you could do this by 4? The high pitch, the rising annotation, all of that would be polite and not too imposing. People would like her, but see her as lacking authority. She could say, Do this by 4. That would be authoritative, but would make a bad impression because it’s too assertive for a woman. She could say something like, I need this by 4; do you think you could do that? So, it’s something in between the very self-effacing and the very declarative.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: One of the things I found really interesting about the article was reading about some of the conversational rituals that women have that I had never thought about in those terms. Such as apologizing when something’s not their fault but just sort of apologizing because something bad happened the other one that really hit home to me were compliments sort of just ritualistically complimenting other people, especially other women. And then you had a great example in the article too of a ritual that was uncompleted by the other party and how awkward that was. And I was, like, yes, this happens every day to me.

DEBORAH TANNEN: Here’s an example of a conversation ritual that can backfire when the other person doesn’t do their part. Women are often told they apologize too much. They’re told, Don’t apologize; it’s not your fault. Sometimes a woman will use an apology to get the other person to apologize. I’ll give you a specific example. Let’s say there was a meeting, you’re the boss. Subordinate didn’t come to the meeting, they was supposed to be there. She might say something like, Gee, sorry you weren’t at the meeting. If I forgot to tell you about it, I’m sorry, it was really pretty important. She knows she told him about the meeting. She has apologized for A; he is supposed to apologize for B. So, he should say, and she would expect him to say, Oh, yeah, you did tell me. I’m sorry, something came up and I couldn’t make it but I’ll make sure to find out what went on and it won’t happen again. If he says, Yeah, make sure you tell me next time, it’s almost like sitting on a seesaw, a teeter-totter. You sit on your side, but you trust the other person to sit on their side. If they get off, you go plopping to the ground and you wonder how you got there. What did I do? But it really wasn’t anything you did. It’s that the other person did not do their part of the conversational ritual.

NICOLE TORRES: So, I guess I’m curious. If conversational rituals have changed because there are more women in the workplace, there are more women as leaders, they introduce their own conversational rituals. There’s more complimenting, more apologizing going on maybe. So why aren’t those behaviors, those rituals more valued now if they’re more common?

DEBORAH TANNEN: When I did this research back in the early ’90s, I was quite convinced that when there were more women in the workplace, the standards would change. So, in a way, I’m disappointed and also surprised that they haven’t. The explanation I would surmise is that a sense of how a person in authority should speak or behave is still based on an image of a man in authority. We still associate authority with men.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, Deborah, thank you again so much for joining us today.

DEBORAH TANNEN: Thank you all.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Thank you, very much.

DEBORAH TANNEN: Bye.

NICOLE TORRES: After we said bye to Deborah, Amy, Sarah and I stuck around and chatted about how we talk at the office as three women working as editors at HBR.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I have found it really hard to find this sort of happy medium between backing off some of these behaviors like apologizing that I know are undermining me and also finding a more assertive way to speak that doesn’t sound too strong.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Put yourself in the listener’s position. It is such a bore to listen to someone apologize and the endless onramps to the point. Just stop it. You’re not doing anyone any favors, particularly yourself. But the people listening to you just want to hear what you’re trying to say. They don’t want to hear all the atmospherics around it. The other piece of advice I’ll give. And you didn’t ask for it, but I’m going to give it anyway is getting over yourself. It’s not about you. It’s about the idea. And when you get to that point, you liberate yourself from all of those doubts and all of the communication of those doubts and you make it so much easier to get your ideas across. And you become so much more interesting.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Just to push back on that a little bit.

AMY BERNSTEIN: You’re wrong.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Earlier in my career, I had attempted to cut out a lot of these conversational female tics. And the advice I then got from someone who I think very much was having my best interests at heart was, Sarah, when you talk, you’re not deferential enough. Instead of just blurting out your idea, you need to say, ‘Well, this is just one idea, but…,’ or ‘I could be wrong, but…’ And I was really taken aback by that and actually told the senior male who was giving me this advice. Oh, it’s funny you noticed that, because I actually had made a conscious effort to stop doing that because I had heard that that is something young women do that undermines them.

AMY BERNSTEIN: OK. That makes me absolutely crazy hearing that. That is such bad advice. There isn’t a question in my mind that that was, it may have been well-intentioned. It may have been delivered with love. But to tell a young woman to be more deferential is so undermining. An exceptionally bright and articulate young woman does have a steeper hill to climb. There’s no question about that. But a good manager helps her climb it without stepping on every little landmine. And it is a mind field out there, we all know that.

NICOLE TORRES: The best advice I think I’ve gotten at work was a couple of years ago in a presentation. I was apologizing for having ugly slides. It was kind of a joke, so my poor attempt at being funny. At the end, Katherine, my boss was like, That was great, but stop saying sorry. Especially if you didn’t do anything wrong and you’re not at fault. And Deborah touched on how women apologize more. I feel like that’s a common refrain we hear. Have you two ever gotten advice to stop apologizing?

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I have never gotten that advice. But I also have noticed that I will apologize in absurd situations. Like someone on the street bumps into me and I say, Oh, gosh, I’m so sorry. Thank you. I’m like, what? That person just ran into me. I not only apologized, but I thanked them. And I realized that is disturbing behavior on my part. Amy?

AMY BERNSTEIN: I have not been told that I apologize too much. I’ve been told I take too much blame. I’ve only heard that a couple of times, but yeah.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: The thing that has been tricky for me in this area also is the word “just.” And I know there’s been a kind of online movement to convince women to stop using the word just. I was just reaching out. I was just wondering. I think it’s just a little bit too… as a way of, like… don’t say just. Have your opinion and just own it. Just.

AMY BERNSTEIN: It’s bad writing, it’s bad writing. It’s like the word “very.”

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: But when I take it out, I look at what I wrote and I’m like, God. That woman’s a bossy woman.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And maybe the woman who gets it is thinking, ah, finally, clarity.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Fair enough, fair enough.

(MUSIC)

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: From talking with Deborah Tannen more aware of how we tend to speak at work. Like how lots of us tend to be politely indirect, or save face for other people and how those speech patterns can prevent us from showing up as leaders at work. We wanted to hear more about what we can do to make our colleagues listen to us, especially in meetings. So, we called up Jill Flynn. She’s a founding partner of the consulting firm Flynn Heath Holt. She and her team of consultants work with women and coach them to be more effective as business leaders. They’ve also done research about women’s performance in meetings, which was the topic of the 2014 magazine article, “Women, Find Your Voice,” which Jill co-wrote with Katherine Heath and Mary Davis Holt. They write about why highly capably women don’t feel as effective as they could in meetings. Among the many reasons they found: their voices are often ignored or drowned out. They also have practical advice for women trying to make them heard. One piece of that advice was to master the pre-meeting. If you, like me, often feel too busy to have a pre-meeting or are just wondering what the heck it even is, here’s Jill to explain.

JILL FLYNN: The meeting. For the most part, the meeting is not where everything happens. The meeting is to usually ratify decisions, maybe discuss potential options. It’s really, really important that you know before you go to a meeting what’s going to happen. And what’s the purpose of the meeting. Depending on the focus of the meeting, we have got to prepare. And so many of us don’t do that. We just show up, do what we think we’re supposed to do and then we leave immediately. We say that meetings are really like the corporate stage. It is where you get to be seen and heard and evaluated. And we’re not taking that seriously. So, if we are trying to get approval for something, or we are trying to get a peer to join in and follow because as leaders, what we’re trying to do is make changes in our organizations. We have got to have individual meetings and find out what’s on those people’s minds, who are the key influencers, how can I get them to help me? How can I understand their potential resistance?

NICOLE TORRES: So, break that down for us though. When you’re preparing to enter a room, when you’re preparing to speak spontaneously. You’ve done all of the work. You’ve tried to get votes before the meeting. So, what do you do aside from get ready to look confident?

JILL FLYNN: You speak up pretty quickly and you go to the meeting early. One thing about that is that it helps you be more comfortable. And our tendency, many women’s tendency is we’re so busy, we book ourselves all the way till 10. A meeting starts at 10. So sometimes we come in at 2 after 10 and we’re carrying a bunch of stuff and we don’t even look like we’re ready for the meeting. Men, if you notice, particularly at the executive level, they come early. They don’t carry a lot of papers, they don’t take notes. When they get there early, they talk to each other; they do what we call “the power of the informal.” Men are very relationship-oriented too. We also say women are relational and we are, but men, especially the higher you go, it’s more about relationships. Who can I trust? Who can I go to, who do I know has my back? And so, when we come in late or right on the dot and we haven’t paid any attention to these relationships, even just casual talk, it doesn’t have to be anything about business, we’re not as ready to be part of the group and we can’t read the tone of the group as well, informally. Women tend to like more formality and more presenting. And then we also tend to not speak up if it’s not our area of expertise. So we’re quiet a lot. But the more successful people, they understand the whole business and they can speak to the whole business. You can go into a meeting and have a few questions. Good, deep-thought questions. That’s a good way to contribute. You don’t have to be the expert.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Are you saying, Jill, that, you know, you should be prepared to speak up and speak up early but speaking up can include the smart question.

JILL FLYNN: Absolutely. You’ll be in a meeting. It’s going around and around, people repeat. And sometimes it can be very helpful to just be able to say, you know, we’ve looked at this now from three different angles. We did this, we did this, and we did this. What’s our next step? Just too sort of call the question in a nice, professional way. Not accusatory, not belittling, nothing like that. We can’t away with anything like that. But to name what is happening right now. That can be powerful.

NICOLE TORRES: So, I want to ask you about some advice that I feel like women, but maybe especially young women get all the time, Speak up more. Or, Voice your opinions in meetings. What should managers maybe say instead?

JILL FLYNN: The manager needs to help the person prepare. You don’t just say to someone, Speak up more. You say, Now, we were just in a meeting and you didn’t say anything. I know you have some ideas, talk to me about this idea that we were discussing in the meeting. And they’ll say it and you say, Say it to me again in more succinct, don’t use all the acronyms or whatever. OK. Good. That’s the kind of thing I’d like to hear you say in the meeting. Also, managers, if they’re in the meeting, they can call on the person. What do you think, Amy? Amy you’ve got some ideas on this, what do you think? This is one of the main things men can do; any mentor can do for younger people, men or women.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Jill, you in the article you wrote for HBR on this topic actually had some specific phrases that women could also use that you called muscular language. So instead of phrasing your suggestion as a question, you should say, I strongly suggest… Or, instead of saying, Well, I think maybe…, you could say, Well, my plan is. Do you ever get pushed back from the women you coach where they’re just like, Oh, I just can’t say that, that doesn’t sound like me”?

JILL FLYNN: Yes.

NICOLE TORRES: And what do you tell them?

JILL FLYNN: I say OK. Talk to me, tell it to me in your own words and then wait. We get there.

NICOLE TORRES: Well, Jill, this has been a really fun conversation. I feel empowered, thank you.

JILL FLYNN: Good, good.

NICOLE TORRES: Thank you, Jill.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Thanks so much, Jill.

JILL FLYNN: Well, I’ve enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.

(MUSIC)

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(MUSIC)

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Amy, you’re someone who always makes her opinion known in meetings. What did you think of the muscular-language advice?

AMY BERNSTEIN: I didn’t hear it so much as the muscular-language advice. What really resonated for me was that point about the wind up. How many times have we heard our colleagues, our female colleagues, have we ourselves started to make a point by saying this may be stupid, but, blah blah blah. Where I do think the muscular language point is important is when you’re in a debate and you’re getting a lot of push back and really there’s no win here. You’re trying to make yourself heard and make sure that whoever’s making the decision makes the best-informed decision. I do find myself using language like I recommend blah blah blah.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I’ve noticed that if I don’t phrase it that way, it’s almost like it doesn’t get heard at all. Like if I just say oh, does anyone want to do X, Y, Z? It just floats away on the wind. But if I say I think we should do this or my preference, my strong preference is that we do X.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah. It’s marching to the center of the stage and drawing the attention and saying this is what I want you to pay attention to. And it also is a very useful way to get past that thing we’ve all experienced where we say hey, how about X? No one pays attention and the guy down the table says, you know what, I think we should do X and all of a sudden it’s the most brilliant idea today.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And in those situations, I always try to say, oh, that’s great. It sounds similar to what Nicole said. I think that I’m glad that we like that idea that we’re coalescing around that.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And that idea of helping each other is super important. And it’s not just because you’re a good person that you should do this, but you want to surface all of the best ideas and talk about them. And if Nicole doesn’t feel comfortable speaking up, then how are you going to get all the best ideas out there? She’s not going to be the only one. We need the diversity of views; we need someone who is thoughtful to come into the conversation having factored in what she’s heard already, bringing in new ideas. You are missing the opportunity to get the best thinking out there on the table if you’re not as a discussion leader calling in the people who aren’t speaking up. And sometimes it’s as simple as, I lead a lot of meetings. And there are times when I can tell when someone wants to say something and doesn’t feel comfortable. She’ll look up. It’s often a woman. She’ll look up; she’ll look like she wants to jump into the pool but she’s a little afraid the water’s cold. And I’ll say, Susan, you look like you have something you want to say. What are you thinking about? Or how does that sound to you, Laura? And just because invariably what you get back is thoughtful and new.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: But what if it’s like I feel lukewarm about an idea? I think it should be on the table and I want everyone to discuss it. I just want to put it out there.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, I want to put an idea out there because it’s in the wind, it deserves some attention. Here’s the idea. And then, you don’t have to say everything all at once. In the course of the discussion, see how you feel about it and say so.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That’s good advice. Yeah. I think no one has ever been annoyed at someone who they manage to convince in their point of view. So, if the outcome of the discussion is that you think, actually maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. I feel like you can strongly, and not in a deferential way, but in a strong way say, I’m really glad we had this conversation. Now, that we’ve hashed it out, I agree with you.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: We asked Jill some questions about preparing for meetings and sort of what women can do if they’ve been given advice. Just like, oh, just speak up more. That’s not very helpful advice. I’ve been guilty of giving that advice. I’ll never do it again. I’m just curious to know, Nicole, have you ever had a meeting-coaching that was effective?

NICOLE TORRES: Something in her article: She wrote that 67 percent of women say they don’t get any feedback about how they act in meetings and they would like more feedback. And I think that’s true. I haven’t really gotten any feedback or advice about meeting-specific behaviors aside from you should speak up more because you have ideas, and you should have them heard. But something I found really helpful is when my manager says I want you to speak up in this meeting tomorrow, give us an update on this project that you’re working on. And I think that advance notice makes a difference for me personally.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I think of that as the warm call. Like, you don’t cold call someone on a meeting. We just tell them; by the way tomorrow I’m going to ask you about this.

NICOLE TORRES: I love the warm call.

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NICOLE TORRES: So far, we’ve been talking a lot about how to make ourselves heard at work and how to help the women we work with speak up. One thing that makes this particularly challenging, though, is getting interrupted while speaking. There’s a lot of research on how women are more likely than men to get interrupted. There’s even one study at the Supreme Court that found that male justices interrupt female justices three times as often as they interrupt each other. But what do you do when you get interrupted? It’s not always easy to know what to do, it’s pretty awkward. I know I clam up when I get interrupted at work. Francesca Geno has some advice. She’s a behavioral scientist who teaches at Harvard Business School. She wrote an article for HBR called how to handle interrupting colleagues about why interruptions happen. Sometimes it’s cultural, sometimes it’s about power.

And she gives a few tips to avoid being cut off. First, try to preempt the interruption. Then if that doesn’t work, try having a private conversation with the person who keeps interrupting you. Or talk to your team about ways the group as a whole could communicate more effectively. These strategies sound pretty simple, but I know they can be hard to put into practice. Especially if you, like me, are known to avoid confrontation. To make the task of confronting colleagues seem less awkward and intimidating, we brought in our in-house expert on difficult conversations, Amy Gallo. She’s a contributing editor at HBR and the author of the HBR Guide to dealing with Conflict. Thanks, Amy.

AMY GALLO: Glad to be here.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: What should we actually say to someone who’s interrupting us? Because it’s not easy to approach someone and say, Hey, please stop interrupting me.

AMY GALLO: So, I think the key is to just do it in a very casual, relaxed confident way. Because the more discomfort you show others, the more likely they will feel uncomfortable.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, Amy, can you do that for us, model how that would sound.

AMY GALLO: Sure. Of course you want to be in the flow of the conversation, you don’t want to sort of raise your hand, make it a really awkward moment. But in the flow of the conversation, you say, I have something to contribute here. Would it be OK if I got through to the end of my point before I took questions? I have a hard time, you know, keeping my thoughts together when I’m interrupted. But I’m happy to hear your thoughts as soon as I finish. I’ll let you know when I’m done. So, you want to really own it as your issue, not project it on someone else like you interrupt me all the time, so I need to do this. But I have a hard time finishing my thought when I’m interrupted, so let me get through this. Could you please do that for me?

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Isn’t there a way though that that could almost seem likes self-undermining? Like, I’m such an irrational female that if you interrupt me, my thoughts will scatter to the winds so please let me finish.

AMY GALLO: Agreed. And I think sometimes we worry so much about undermining ourselves that we come off as non-collaborative and assertive in a way that’s not contributing. So, I think we often worry, oh my power. Where my power’s going to be undermined or I’m going to seem weak or that I’ve never seen a man do that. And the truth is they probably don’t have to do that because they’re interrupted far less as the research shows. And they don’t have to be as collaborative as we do to be effective at work. So unfortunately, yes, that is a risk, but I think it’s a risk worth taking to maintain a soft collaborative stance while also getting what you need.

NICOLE TORRES: So, what if you keep getting interrupted by the same people, by the same person, and you have to talk to them and just tell them what you’re feeling, tell them what’s going on? How do you have that conversation with them?

AMY GALLO: That’s not an easy conversation to have. Again, especially if you’re worked up angry. If you go in with the mindset of this person interrupts me because he’s a misogynist and arrogant jerk, then you’re not going to get very far in that conversation because you’re going to be projecting that to the person. So first of all, you have to go in with a curious mindset. Why is this person interrupting me? I really genuinely don’t know. They may not realize that they’re doing it. So how can I have a conversation, collaborate with this person to fix this problem together? Instead of thinking of I have to correct this person’s behavior.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, when should you even do that? Like how many times is too many times?

AMY GALLO: There’s not a golden rule. I tend to be someone who doesn’t mind being interrupted, partly because I go on and on and I know it’s sometimes very useful to cut me off. So I don’t mind it as much. Pay attention to how you’re feeling. If it’s prohibiting you from constructively contributing in a meeting or it’s changing the way you’re interacting with a co-worker, you should really take the time. It will depend on your relationship with the person, but take the time to make things right so that you’re both feeling good about your meetings together. So I would go into that conversation saying, Can I talk to you about something? Always start a difficult conversation with a question. Sort of get the person’s permission to say, Hey, I’m about to say something, are you ready? It helps them give you a little bit of permission. I’m consenting to this conversation, so to speak.

NICOLE TORRES: They’re part of it now.

AMY GALLO: Exactly. And then you really want to make sure that you don’t assign any negative intention to the person. So you might even say, and this is important because a lot of interrupters don’t realize they’re interrupting. And Francesca Gino admitted in her piece, she just was interrupting because she was Italian. It was part of her culture, right? So they may not know. So you might even start by saying, You may not realize what’s happening in the meetings, but I feel like I’m being interrupted multiple times. And I don’t know what I’m doing to contribute to the problem, but I’d love to talk with you about how we can change our dynamic in the meeting. And that puts you both on the same side of the table, doesn’t, you’re not leveling accusations, you’re not being antagonistic. But you’re saying, We have a problem, here’s what I perceive it to be, can we talk about it together?

NICOLE TORRES: So how helpful is it to bring specific examples, like, On this day at this meeting, I was trying to say this and then I was interrupted this way. Is that helpful or does that sound like I’m holding this massive grudge?

AMY GALLO: I think the way you just said it sounded like a massive grudge, but it can be useful to give examples because some people don’t even realize what they’re doing. So you can say, When I was talking about the strategy for this new project and I was laying out my thoughts, you interrupted me multiple times. I know you were eager to get your opinions heard, but it would have been helpful if you waited till I was done to do that. You don’t want it to sound like an email that you would send to HR. You want to sound like a collaborative discussion which we’re solving a problem we have together.

NICOLE TORRES: So, the other piece of advice that Francesca writes about in her article is to, if you’re uncomfortable approaching one person, just address the group as a whole. Address multiple people about this problem of interruptions. What would you say would be the best way to bring that up?

AMY GALLO: This is one of my favorite tactics and I’ve seen this happen in some of our meeting. We’ve often discussed at the beginning how could this meeting go better? It’s a natural thing to do at the beginning of a meeting, hopefully in your organization. So, before the meeting starts, just say, Hey, before we get started, I just wanted to bring something up about how this meeting is going and wanted to throw out something that I’ve seen work in other meetings for example, or that I thought might help us. And then you can say, I want to make sure we all get to finish our thoughts. Could we hold off on interruptions so that we get to hear everyone’s point of view?

NICOLE TORRES: Francesca does write about her tendency to interrupt and she says it’s because she’s Italian. And she talks about how cultural differences around pauses and interruptions are one reason why interruptions happen. Why some people are more likely to interrupt than others. Have you ever experienced those cultural differences affecting interruptions?

AMY GALLO: I’ve not only experienced cultural differences affecting interruptions, but cultural differences affecting interruptions because I was a woman. I was on a consulting project in Korea working for this large Korean conglomerate. I was one of two American women on the project, there were no Korean women. And basically anytime we spoke, we were talked over or interrupted. And it got to a point at one really important meeting where it just, I short circuited and just burst into tears. I was so frustrated, I was so angry. I left the room, I went outside, and I walked around the building. I really couldn’t get my act together, so I just left for the day. It was not one of my proudest moments, but tears happen. And I went back to the situation and thought, What could I have done differently? I talked to my male colleagues and they said, We wish we had stood up for you. We wish it had gone differently, but honestly, they just don’t want to hear what you have to say. And we came up with a strategy where if I had an important point of view or perspective, I would just feed it to one of my male colleagues and they would say it in the meeting. Really disappointing. I wish it wasn’t that way, I wish that organization wasn’t that way, but if I wanted to be heard, it was the only way to get my opinions heard. It was also OK because it was temporary. I knew I got to go home and work in a place where I was able to speak and not be interrupted. But it wasn’t fun, for sure.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, I wanted to ask you also: Is all interruption bad? Because there are times when yes, you are being interrupted because people don’t care what you have to say. But there’s also times when it can really signal excitement, lots of people talking, lots of new ideas coming out. I know I’m guilty of interrupting people when I get excited. Do you know anyone who sort of admits to that?

AMY GALLO: I have friends and colleagues who know that they’re interrupters. I work with a woman who’s in her ’60s, she owns her own business, and she is a leader in her field. She confesses to being a chronic interrupter and says, I really wish I could change it. And when I ask her, Well, why don’t you? She says, I actually think I have some of the most valuable opinions in the room and they need to be heard. And she probably does. And should she interrupt and should she make people feel that their opinions aren’t valued? Absolutely not, but she does need to make herself heard and I think it’s something, she’s in a male-dominated industry and I think it’s something she’s learned over the years to do to survive.

NICOLE TORRES: So that’s the flip side of this that I wanted to ask you about. Which is how to get better at interrupting other people? Either to help, you hear someone kind of going off and maybe they’d appreciate an interruption, or that you have something to say, but you don’t want to interrupt anyone impolitely. How do you break into a conversation?

AMY GALLO: The Korea story, what was hardest about those interruptions is that they would never look me in the eye when they would do it, they would just start talking and they would look at the other men in the room. So it really made me feel completely unseen and unheard which was painful. I think when you want to interrupt someone sometimes, and again I admit that I tend to go on and ramble. So when someone catches my eye and gives me this sort of signal like I’m ready to talk, it’s a good sign for me to wind down. Or at least I know they’re hearing what I’m saying, they acknowledge that I’m speaking, and yet they want to speak. So you can say, Amy, can you hold on one second? I hear what you’re saying, but I want to contribute as well. Or, Would you mind if I said something now? Just interrupt with a question so that you’re getting their consent to start talking, even though they have the floor. And they might then say, Actually, I’m not done yet. Or, Yes, go ahead. So, I think you just want to engage the person in an either non-verbal, Hey, is it OK if I jump in? Or an actual verbal, Do you mind if I take the floor right now? So, let me ask you, we’ve been talking for a bit. Do you guys actually feel better equipped to handle interruptions?

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I do.

NICOLE TORRES: I do too. Having actual things to say is very helpful.

AMY GALLO: Yeah. Sample language is always the best.

NICOLE TORRES: Yes.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Amy, thank you.

AMY GALLO: Thank you.

NICOLE TORRES: Thanks, Amy.

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NICOLE TORRES: Sarah, a lot of this episode has been about how women can have their voices more heard at work and how managers can help women speak up. But don’t you think it’s also important to talk about not just how to help women succeed at work, but how to change what matters for success?

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I completely agree.

NICOLE TORRES: You know communicating effectively is not just about trying to get a word in. It’s also about learning to be quiet and to listen when you need to. And I feel like listening is much undervalued skill although it’s a crucial one. And I can’t help but think if more workplaces, if more meetings also valued the women who listen, work would run better, more efficiently, is more collaborative.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Amen, Nicole. I totally agree with that. And not just women, I mean, a lot of people from other cultures and backgrounds are not comfortable with so much talking. And yet that is in our sort of American extroverted culture. The way to get ahead is by talking a lot.

NICOLE TORRES: And I think the last thing we want are just more people speaking over each other. What we really want is people learning how to speak up with ideas and also how to give people room to voice their ideas, too.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I would love to see in performance reviews, listening created as a skill, just as much as selling your idea or talking or holding the floor, blathering on.

NICOLE TORRES: Yeah.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And I think women are socialized to be great listeners in a way that maybe men are not. A lot of the advice I feel like we’ve talked about today on this episode is about how to thrive in the unfair world in which we live. But if more women became leaders, maybe we would have workplaces where listening was more valued.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah.

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SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Thanks for listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael, and my cohosts are Amy Bernstein and Nicole Torres. Our producer is Amanda Kersey. Our audio product manager is Adam Buchholz. Curt Nickisch is our consulting editor, and Maureen Hoch is our supervising editor. Thank you to ChartHouse Learning, for letting us use sound from Deborah Tannen’s workplace training video Talking 9 to 5. This is our first episode of Women at Work and we want to know what you think. So email us at womenatwork@hbr.org.

Finally, women are increasingly being heard in other ways. We’re speaking up against sexual harassment in the workplace against unsupportive partners and about unequal pay. We’ll be talking about those topics in upcoming episodes. Talk to you next time.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Have you guys heard of this website: arementalkingtoomuch.com?

AMY GALLO: No. Tell me.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I secretly love it. And what it is it’s basically just a website that as you’re in a meeting you can have it up on your phone and when a man is talking, there’s a button that says dude and when someone else is talking who is not a man, there’s a button that says not a dude. And I have actually used it in our meetings here to make sure that we’re getting equal participation.

AMY GALLO: And what have you found?

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I have actually found that here, at least in the meetings I’ve tracked it in, it’s about 50 percent men talking and 50 percent women which is really pretty good although I also have realized that sometimes in those cases, women make up more than 50 percent of the group. So it’s maybe not proportional, but I think we’re pretty good at it. But I have found it useful because I feel like in my head sometimes, I assume, maybe because I’m a strident feminist or just a suspicious person, I don’t know. I always assume that men are talking a lot more than maybe they are. So I use the app partly as a way to just keep my own assumptions in check.

AMY GALLO: Yeah.

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