Have you ever been in a discussion with a number of people joining, but only around 2 to 3 people participate?
I know I have been in a quite a number of it.
At times, it’s because the participants are either too shy to say anything because they are afraid of making mistakes, but also at times the participants in that meeting are the incorrect groups of people.
When this happens, there is a process loss. A process loss happens when a group cannot take advantage of the different knowledge and perspectives available in its membership.
In group meetings, we usually can get to a good decision if each of the team members participate and share their unique knowledge and perspectives.
In a usual discussion, some people talk, and some don’t.
Let’s take a sample group of 6. In that group, you would see 2 persons doing most of the talking, then another 2 people talking at times, and another 2 people that would watch the other four talk.
These 2 people that do not talk are spectators, and they are primarily causing the process loss because they aren’t contributing anything to the meeting by just watching.
Here are two awesome tips that I found to be effective to improve the participation of the team in a group discussion
Think twice is someone needs to be in that meeting or not. At times, we invite people to be in a discussion just in case they might have something to add.
Make sure that the persons you invite to a discussion really needs to be there, and it’s up to you to asses that.
Another thing is to also ensure that the persons that need to be there are actually there.
I’ve been into discussions wherein we don’t have the right people. More importantly, the required people are not in that discussion, but we still continued with it.
At the end of those meetings, we usually have some questions and clarifications that could’ve been answered if the right people were there. In those instances, we needed to have another discussion.
Based on observations, once once you get people talking they will continue talking.
You could ask each person in the discussion to introduce themselves to at least make them talk.
Or you could also ask each person if they have anything urgent that they would like to raise.
You can also try out your own strategy, but the goal is clear. Make them talk.
Based on observations, what was found was that once you get people talking they will continue talking.
Remember, if one person do not participate, the group will not have the optimal outcome/decision.