Introverts Lead Meetings with Quiet Authority — Even When Loud Voices Dominate

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It’s a podcast helping introverted leaders embrace your underrated, quiet strengths so you can get promoted and start earning what you deserve. I’m Greg Wanger. I have over 25 years of leadership experience, and yes, I am an introvert. My guest today is Mark Kilby. He’s an organizational coach and a long-time leader in remote and hybrid work. Over the years, Mark’s helped distributed teams collaborate better across time zones, and he’s developed a really powerful approach for letting everyone in the room contribute. In this episode, you’ll learn number one how introverted leaders can influence meetings without fighting for air time. Number two, practical techniques that counterbalance really dominant players and create space for everyone to contribute. And number three, simple facilitation tools, things like structured pauses and visible note-taking that can transform the way teams think and make group decisions together. If you’ve ever felt like the conversation is moving way too fast for you to make your best contributions, this episode is going to give you practical tools that you can start using now. Here’s my conversation with Mark. So let’s dive in. Mark, a real pleasure to have you on the show today. Welcome. Thanks, Greg, so much for having me on the podcast. Absolutely. So I have to ask, as I ask everyone, are you an introvert or an extrovert? I have long classified myself as an introvert, but I kind of reclassify myself as more of a Susan Cain described introvert. Because once I read that book, I had a completely different understanding of what it meant to be introvert. I love that answer. I have her book beside me, as always. Yes. Showing it on screen here if you’re watching on video. What I realized from Susan’s work is if you lean more into getting energized by talking about the ideas and not focusing so much on conflict and battles, other ideal with some conflict resolution as well. And focusing more on the ideas and the concepts, I get energized by that. So I would have said 15 years ago, podcasts would have terrified me. But now when I get on podcasts like yours and talk about different ideas, I get very excited, very animated. And that allows me to carry through discussing what’s most important for that particular conversation. And as part of that, even when you’re in difficult conversations, turning the curiosity up, why does somebody have this different point of view? Why are they being so passionate about this? Actually gets me more energized where before I would have shrunk away from that. Mm-hmm. I love that. Yeah. Curiosity about a situation combined with presence. Because if you’re not present and grounded, the energy of someone coming at you all upset or really passionate about something might cause you to shrink back. But if you’re grounded enough, then you can approach that with a little bit of this distance. Well, I’m okay here. I can take this in and point, wow, why are they so hot about this? Yeah. Yeah, there’s something important here. I should pay attention. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. So you had this more of a defensive posture and encountering this work sounds like that it was empowering in a number of ways. And really strengthening you in these situations. There’s also an earlier influence early in my career. I actually did some community theater. And so that idea of playing a different role was something else that I learned to do early as an introvert. Oh, it’s not me, I’m playing this role. And so that’s the first stance I took. But once I read Susan’s work, I realized, no, I can play the role of myself. The person coming with the idea is coming with the open mind, coming with the curiosity to help people explore why are we debating this issue, what’s important, what are the key points in getting the ideas out there and trying to not minimize the emotions, but not make them the main part of the conversation. Would you still advise that as a progression though? Advice that I’ve shared on the show is take on the role of leading a meeting. Just offer to do it, volunteer whenever possible, because that gets you in the practice of being a leader, embodying a leader. Even if you don’t feel like that’s your natural inclination or attitude, you got to do it. Everyone is looking at you and expecting you to act that way. Yeah, exactly because now the attention’s on you as the person leading the meeting. And maybe you’re not used to that. And it’s also getting curious about what feelings does that bring up for you. And what is the story you’re telling yourself? Because maybe there’s a different story you need to consider as part of it. But if you’ve never been in that situation, you need to put yourself in that situation and see how do you react to that, especially as an introvert. You use the word curiosity again, leading to self awareness, or just trying to increase that awareness of what does happen to me here in these situations instead of just total overwhelmed. It’s what’s helped me evolve as a leader and also help coach others as I’ve worked with not only organizations, but individual leaders on how they can improve their presence. Let’s talk about communication with authority because it sounds like this is something that you had already mastered. Maybe it was a little bit more as playing a role. And then it sounds like you’ve developed a very authentic communication style. And this was rooted in the concepts. So how does that work in actual practice? How can someone intentionally try to do that? So as I mentioned before, I try to focus on what are the concepts and how as a group, we evaluate those concepts, whether it’s proposing a new strategic direction or we’re looking at maybe shutting down something, a project or a product. And of course, usually in the latter case, you have more emotions involved. And so one of the things I did early on is I kind of went beyond what you suggested in running a meeting and decided, you know what, I want to really become a facilitator. I want to really understand what it means to facilitate different groups, different size groups. And that’s where I personally pushed myself. And that may not be for everyone, but I would recommend once you’ve run a few meetings, if you get a little bit of comfort with the meetings you’re always in, try getting into meetings or situations that you’re not always in, or you’re not so comfortable with the individuals that are there. Because that brings another element of learning in, I’m going to use the C word again, curiosity, has part of that. So getting curious about why is this group focused on a different set of topics than the one I’m usually working with. What’s important to them? How do they operate differently? So you get to see other ways of working and collaborating. And that was one of the first things that helped me kind of to look at how do I evolve my own practice and how do I work with different groups and helping them navigate the work that they’re doing every day, whether it’s tactical or strategic. And was that a formal role? I guess how practically how do you get into that? So initially, no, I was just the one that would raise my hand to say, I’ll run that needy, even if it was off the wall or something. I just said, I just decided I’m going to push my boundaries and try organizing and running different things. At the point that I joined that cybersecurity company, which would have been about 2014, I had probably been facilitating professionally, so paid to facilitate. And I would say probably eight years by that point. Before that, I probably raised my hand for four or five years, saying, yeah, I’ll run that meeting. Nobody else wants to touch it. Okay, I’ll go for it. You become known as the person who will sign up for that. And so people will just come to you and say, hey, would you organize this off site? Or could you organize this event for us? And oh, by the way, and when you get the by the way, that’s when you know something interesting is coming. By the way, there’s some issues that might come up. And that’s where you find out the more interesting, emotion driven issues that the group is dealing with. And what I found also is if you’re going to lean into curiosity, you might have some one-on-one conversations with some of those individuals before they all come together to get the different perspectives. And I found that helps me not only manage the situation, but also represent them when they’re feeling they’re not being heard. So if some require leaders as opposed to more vocal, I try to represent everybody equally. Try to help give that equal voice to everyone. Well, super interesting. So what you’re describing is almost a group therapy facilitation of this dialogue, their points of view, maybe the communication isn’t flowing smoothly. And some people are not having the critical conversations they need to get everything out and come to some resolution. Yeah. I look at it more of a balancing. So is there balanced dialogue or is somebody dominating the dialogue? And if somebody’s dominating, it’s like, okay, how do we shift the balance back to others in the space? Who else has an opinion? Who else has an idea? So always looking to kind of pull that balance back to a more of a center point. Now you’re in some of my… Territory Earth. I find really interesting. So how do you balance that? Let’s say you do have somebody really taking up too much oxygen in the room. What do you do? So the first thing I do is I notice who’s not speaking. So even if we’re in a remote setting, so for those on audio, they can’t tell right now that you and I are on video. But I’ve been in a space where I might have 10, 20, maybe 50 people in a virtual meeting. But even if it’s an in-person meeting, you could quickly scan and see, okay, who’s not contributing? Is it all quiet on chat? Or is there video off? That’s another way of not participating. And rather than put them on the spot, I might say to our very vocal person, hey, I just want to check. I appreciate what you’re saying. But I want to pause. And I want to see if there’s other ideas, other concepts, other concerns about this. And so sometimes by giving that pause, it gives the very vocal speaker a chance to catch the breath because they probably been talking for a while and allows others to kind of lean in. And sometimes I provide different ways to do that. So I might mention even before the meeting, if you have concerns or questions as other people are speaking, if you want to direct message me, DM me, that’s fine. If you want to signal in some other way that you have a point to raise, here’s how we’ll agree to signal me for that, because I want to make sure everyone is heard. So I even say that at the beginning of the meeting that’s kind of our working agreement, I want to make sure all are heard in this. I want to make sure that we get through the topics that we navigate this together. I really like this approach. And I think this was be a great model for leading any meeting because you really want to create a safe space for everyone to contribute and recognizing that everyone has a different communication style and these these meeting situations are not going to, you know, advantage everyone equally. No, just in terms of comfort or willingness to participate or just the pace that you think and process the information. Yeah, especially in hybrid situations where your most vocal person is with the co located group. And so they feel like they’ve got the focus there. Yeah, and that’s that’s very tempting. And because you’re in the room there and you have this high bandwidth communication and you know, there’s banter. It’s more fun. And then you’re really disadvantaged and people remotely. And if that speaker is an extrovert, they’re getting energy from that. They’re getting a great deal of energy. So it’s paying attention to, okay, you’re getting energy from that. I get that. And there’s still other voices we can bring into this conversation. So sometimes when I do those pre interviews, especially if I know there’s going to be hot topics that’s going to be discussed. I might, it might even be a quick check-in call or something on Slack or teams where I say, hey, I’ve heard you’ve got interest in this topic. Can you say a little bit about that? Because I want to make sure you’re represented. So I might know some of the other voices and their concerns even before the meeting. So that gives me another opportunity to maybe introduce some of that. So I might say something like, and let’s say I’ll just say, John is our very vocal speaker. So John, I appreciate what you have to say. I’ve also heard there’s some alternative viewpoints x, y, z. I’m wondering if somebody else can speak to those. And so that gives another opening for those other voices coming because I brought in the idea not necessarily another personality. Right. You’re do personalizing that to an extent to opening the door for someone else to step in. Yeah. Yeah. What about bringing groups to decisions? Is that different from what you’re describing? Well, if we’re talking about everyone already used to collaborating and everyone working well together and aligned, that can be a smooth process. When it’s not, it gets more difficult and what it’s remote that difficulty becomes amplified. So is is the key decision makers in a common space or are they will mode are the other people with opposing views? Are they in that same common co located space or are they remote? So that amplifies some of the challenges and whoever’s running the meeting, the facilitator, are they in that co located space or are they remote that becomes another challenge as well? So yes, it could be very different into decision space. And what about when things get really off the rails or sideways or that the temperatures raise people going back and forth? Do you have any go-tos in terms of diffusing tensions? Yes. So there’s a few things. There is if you haven’t agreed agenda upfront, if it’s not an ad hoc meeting, then you might say something like, okay, there’s a lot of strong opinions here. There’s a lot of interesting points being raised. But I wonder if this is useful right now to have these debates. Is there another way we can approach this? Do we need everyone in here for this debate or do we just need a few selected individuals? So that’s the kind of narrowing the group that’s actually kind of knocking heads. If they decide to continue, then what I might ask them to do is, let’s say I have person A, person B, and I might go to person A and say, can you do a favor for me? Can you describe the points that person B is making? They describe those points and then I go to person B and say, do they capture that? And if not, we kind of iterate a little bit. And then I flip it and ask person B to list person A’s points. Where are the points they’re trying to make? Because that slows them down. It gets them out of that kind of lean forward in attack mode. And they’ve got enough step back and think about, all right, what did I hear? And how can I move forward on that? And then the third option might be what I call the nuclear option where I just stop the meeting and say, okay, we need to stop. This is not productive. People are getting heated. I think we need to actually take a break and catch our breath before something is said that somebody regrets. And I’ve done that with executives. I’ve done that with very passionate engineers battling out different technical solutions. And one of those three will usually work. Yeah. I hadn’t heard the second one where you kind of forced them to do some reflective listening playing. Yeah. What did you hear playing it back? And so that has a possibility of giving somebody a little bit of a perspective and taking a pause there. And for that to work, they’ve got to they’ve got to want to resolve the conflict, not necessarily be the right one. So if there’s still that feeling of, I’ve got to be right, that second option may not work as well. And you might have to go with the, okay, we’re going to cancel the meeting for now. We’re going to regroup later. And that’s where I might meet with some of the, and it’s usually two individuals, two primary individuals. I meet with them separately to kind of work that out. Got it. So then then you have to be the go between to let heads calm and create an opportunity for rational thought to come back in. Yeah. But sometimes just the willingness to walk out of the room and say, that’s it. We’re done. That could be enough to diffuse because they realize, oh, I’m doing something that’s not being helpful. That’s what I’m trying to point out. How many hours are we burning of people time in this long debate that we might be having? This is not useful. Let’s be more efficient about this. Let’s just get the two parties knocked in heads to have the conversation separately. Then we’ll come back together as a larger group. That’s great. And that is a clear message that you’re sending there. And sounds like the people can often receive that even if they’re emotionally upset. Yeah. But there’s something else in there too. So even when it isn’t quite as heated like that, there’s a lot of time that has spent on aggression. And so how do you keep things on track when maybe it’s a little lower stake situation? Sure. So if we had that agenda up front, I might pause, look at the person speaking go, so is this interesting or useful to what we’re trying to achieve right now? And I might ask the individual or I might ask the room. I might ask the people involved in whether it’s a physical room or virtual space. I’ll ask that question, say, okay, let me is are we digressing too much? And if so, let’s let’s table this until the end of the meeting and figure out what do we want to do with this topic? And I won’t refer to it as a digression because that would be a little bit of a disrespect to that person because they feel it’s important. But I’ll ask them, say, can we hold on to this at the end of the meeting and then figure out, is this the right group or do we need to have another group involved to have that to talk about this topic? It could be something that they’ve been trying to bring up in other meetings and it just hasn’t happened and they feel like, I’ve got my platform now. I’m going to deliver my message. Now’s not the time for that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely. This is very interesting. Is this the right forum to discuss it? Yeah, yeah. So it’s just being very respectful as part of that. Yeah. And they might go, no, this is not, no, you’re right. This is not the right time. Okay. I have a different place where we can talk through this, but I just want to get off my chest. Great. Okay. People know about it. We’ll figure out who needs to be in that next conversation. These are really great sets of experiences as skills. Someone listening to this might be thinking, well, these are a little bit beyond me. Like these are kind of more advanced skills. Like after you’ve really built up quite a bit of confidence. So what advice would you have for someone who’s maybe earlier on, they’re not ready to battle down the shouting executive. Right. It dissolves in that, in that situation. So when I didn’t feel that confident, sometimes I would just start taking very visible notes. So let’s say we’re in the shouting executive situation. So in that case, I might throw up a document, whether it’s a flip chart into physical room or a shared, shared document that I could share through Zulu and routines, whatever. And I would just start listing. Here’s the points. Here’s the pros and cons I’m hearing. And then all of a sudden, you’ll start to see others contribute to that, especially if it’s a shared document. And then sooner or later, the two of the heated conversations start paying attention to that. They go, oh, no, that’s not right. Let’s fix it. So now we’ve turned the conversation from the battle to the ideas again. So I started doing that very early in my practices way of, hey, this is one of hearing. I’m just capturing notes. I’m just, I’m just the note taker. I’m just trying to make this visible for everybody. And I’ve used that as another way just trying to calm the battle and get it back to ideas, get it back to let’s evaluate the ideas and not make it about each other. Yeah, I’ve in the room done that with whiteboarding. You just quietly start writing on the board and people go, oh, yeah, okay. What’s that exactly? They get curious. Yeah. So you’re not shouting over the loud people here. Like this is something that’s very introvert friendly as an approach. It can be very subtle, but I make it very visible to just taking notes. I’m just trying to make sure we capture all this. There’s a lot of information flying back and forth. So I want to make sure we all capture this. So even in the age of AI, no takers, I will do this very visibly. That’s good. We haven’t gotten good AI meeting facilitators yet. I’m sure we’ll see them try at some point. Yeah. Yeah. I think there’s might be a ways off though. Yeah, probably. And then I think another experience of introverts is sometimes your brain is going faster than your ability to articulate your words. You see a bunch of things and you can’t get them out fast enough or you can’t get them out in the way that they would land right there in the situation. So if someone is experiencing that, what advice would you have? So for me, it can either be on a virtual whiteboard or a physical space. And I mean, I still use old technology paper and pen, especially sticky notes where I’m trying to capture all that. So I’ll quickly jot down an idea for sticky note. And that allows me to slow down and then start seeing, okay, is there a pattern to this information? Do I need to start moving it around? Before I articulate what I’m seeing. And sometimes I do. Sometimes I will, if I feel like I’m close to getting those ideas kind of synthesized in my brain, I’ll make those notes of his ball share them in the meeting somehow. But sometimes not. Sometimes I just need to jot notes down and straighten them out before I can put the ideas out there. So just slowing yourself down. And actually, this is where the tactile nature of paper and pen is still useful to us as humans, because it allows us to really feel through the ideas. And it was always a big help to me as an introvert. Yeah, I feel that too, that there is a difference between the ease of which you can just throw things on an electronic document versus the, you’re crafting what is happening physically on a piece of paper. It takes longer. It feels more substantial somehow. And something else is going on there. I’m sure. And what’s funny is people get to understand how you work. I’ve had this happen to me when somebody sees you kind of pausing not saying much and they see you’re taking notes, they might go, oh, I wonder what Greg’s thinking because he’s over there furiously taking notes right now. I’ve had that I’ve had that happen to me where I’ve worked with some consulting clients. And they went, kill me. He’s been quiet for a while. I’m curious what he’s thinking. And that’s when I’ve usually have my notes sorted out by this. Like, well, actually, and then I can talk through my ideas. Maybe it’s not as great when you’re the facilitator because then people are going like a runaway train and some kind of argument, but. Well, but as facilitator, it doesn’t mean you’re doing all describing. It doesn’t mean you’re doing everything. A really good facilitator will get everyone else to do the work. So can I get others to take notes? Can I get others to draw out the ideas? And then I can pay attention to the dynamics of what’s happening in the room. Got it. So you’re you’re delegating. Yeah. So it’s your heavily focus. Yeah. Is the facilitation. Yeah. And sometimes, especially when there’s excitement or emotions about some of the ideas, handing out these other tasks in the meeting can help temper some of that as well. So if they’re busy scribing some of the ideas, it’s hard to get into an argument because you’re busy doing something else. Like, oh, actually, could you write this? Could you write out your argument here? The pros and cons? Yeah. I want to make sure we all capture that. So can you write that out for us? And that slows them down. You got a lot of old Jedi tricks here. Yes. Nice. It’s again about bringing that balance back. As we get excited, we move too fast. How can we slow down so everybody’s together? Right. It’s a more equal kind of balance of contribution and the flow of communication in that meeting. Everyone is there is presumably there for a purpose. They’re there to make a contribution. So everyone shouldn’t have an opportunity to do that. Yeah. Would you take this approach for smaller meetings or smaller kind of settings as well as the bigger groups? Absolutely. So if I’m working with teams, I’m always looking at how do I balance the communication within the team? So whether it’s in the meeting or if it’s on Slack or teams or some other tool where the team is messaging each other. So for instance, one of the classic things I always come across is let’s say you get somebody new on the team. And the first thing they want to do is ask questions of whoever brought them into the team or whoever they see as the leader. And what I do is I encourage them to know ask questions of the entire team. Don’t worry about looking silly or stupid. Instead, you’re going to end up helping the team. And the next question is usually, how does that work? What happens is they’ll put a question out there like how do I connect to this service? And somehow you’ll get two or three different answers from the other team members. And then the other team members will go, oh, I didn’t know you could do it that way. Oh, that’s cool. And they start discovering little things that they do that they never really talk to each other about. So just that simple act of asking that new person asking the question in a public space can help reveal information about the team. So it’s also helping give other team members opportunities to learn and grow and make those contributions. Yeah, a new team member is always an excellent opportunity to flush out assumptions on a team. Right. There’s all these assumptions that no one questions. And it was like, well, we’ve always done it or it’s never maybe it was never articulated that well in the first place. So can we get that out there? Can we document that and maybe revisit or yeah, or individuals have kind of drifted in what their assumptions are. And they’re actually very different, especially with remote teams. Yeah, yeah, but so I want to talk about influence. What does that look like for you? For me, it’s not so much getting your way. It’s more, how can I get us collectively to a better spot? How can I understand what is the group trying to achieve? Is there something there? I can contribute or show to get them to that better place. So for instance, that same cybersecurity company, I would facilitate the Monday executive meeting where they would all get together from different parts of the business and talk about what’s happening in each part of the business. And I was actually a remote facilitator. The majority of them were in a single location, but I was asked to facilitate remotely. So okay. And usually there might be a couple minutes of, hey, what happened this weekend or something like that. One time they came in and they were energized all kinds of sporting events happen. And they were just go and they went on for about 15 minutes. And I just let them go. And so it’s so finally the CEO stopped them all. And this, and he said, Mark, I’m sorry, we didn’t start the meeting yet. I said, yes, you did. But I said, the social connection is just as important as everything else. And they all laughter that they said, okay. And then they just went into the meeting. And so ever since then, they would spend a little more time socializing at the beginning of each meeting, just kind of recalibrated with each other. Nice. Nice. So you pointed that out for them. Yeah. Yeah. So business is not just getting task done, hitting strategy executed. It’s, are we together as human beings? Are we understanding each other? And sometimes that’s leaning into some of the social aspects. Yeah. So your influence there is go back to the seaworthy curiosity, you’re observing what was going on. They are just having fun. But you are seeing that in the larger context. And with a single statement or a single question, you kind of brought about that realization for the group. For people who are quieter, how do you build trusting relationships? They’re part of your influence. I’ve always believed that having strong relationships across an organization, constitutes it, a building blocks of your influence. People understand you, they understand where you’re coming from. And when you speak, things have more weight because they know you. How does someone build that kind of trust based influence? So for me, I build that by getting to know the individuals I work with the most frequently and what’s most important to them. So maybe it’s getting a certain product shipped. Maybe it’s executing some new strategy. Sometimes it’s, I’m done at five to get home to family. Okay. As long as I understand those different concerns and balance those, however we interact as a group. One of the first teams I work with at that cybersecurity company, I came in, they knew I was a published author, they knew I was a speaker, and they knew I had done many organizational transformations. So the first team I work with, all the engineers were suspicious. What was Mark going to do to them? So I had a one on one meeting somewhere five minutes because they were suspicious. They didn’t want to say anything. But others, they aired some grievances about what was happening in the organization because I just, what would you change here? What would be different? The one common theme that this particular group had was our meetings run too long. Okay. So my goal was to have the shortest meetings possible for that team. And every time we finish 10, 15 minutes early, I would go, I am so sorry we finished early. I believe that they all laugh just like you are right now. And they realized I heard them. And I did something to help them move together. I love that story. Mark, this time has flown by. This has been really fun. I feel like it could talk to you about this kind of stuff for hours here. If people want to learn more about you and your work, where should they go? The easiest place is my website, more killby.com, M-A-R-K-K-I-O-B-Y, very simple. And I am on LinkedIn and probably too much. But you can find me there. Is it possible? Yes, it is possible. I think so. My wife tells me it’s possible. Yeah. All right. I believe that. All right. Thanks so much for being on the show. Thanks, Brad. All right. Let’s take a moment to recap a few of the ideas we just heard from Mark. Number one, remember influence and meetings isn’t about dominating the conversation. It’s about shaping it. When you focus on the ideas, the structure of the discussion, making sure everyone gets heard, your natural authority shines through. Number two, start noticing who isn’t speaking. One of the most powerful things a leader can do is to pause the conversation and invite in other perspectives. A lot of times, the best ideas are coming from people who need just a little bit more space to contribute. And number three, use these simple tools to slow the conversation down. Visible note taking whiteboards, shared documents, sticky notes. These techniques shift away the attention from the personalities and the conflict and backed the ideas that actually matter. As Mark showed today, thoughtful leaders can change the dynamics of a room, not by being the loudest, but by helping the group think better together. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, subscribe so you don’t miss another conversation like this. I’m Greg Weinger. Keep leading with quiet confidence and I’ll see you next time.