How to Cope With a Coworker Who Interrupts

you're doing your introduction. Yeah, I've learned, um, that I am an interrupt or. Well, first of all, I should say, when we had a meeting to plan this episode, Um, you, me and one of our producers basically spent the whole meeting interrupting you other. And we all acknowledge that. Well, you and I acknowledge that we are kind of natural interrupters.

It's part of our conversational cadence. Yeah, it's just um and family upbringings I think teach you that if you want to be heard, you have to interrupt, which is an unfortunate truth maybe in meetings, but it's also part of like a vicious cycle of if you're feel like you have to interrupt, then you're always interrupting, and then people are getting interrupted, and maybe we should learn how

to have better public discourse. But I like to make myself feel better by thinking that when I interrupt, it's not so bad because I'm I am still listening to somebody and I am interrupting because I'm like so enthused about what they're saying that I just want to interject my my approval or like my follow up thought. That's nice of you, because I definitely do the thing where I'm just thinking of the brilliant thing i want to say, and I'm just so excited to say, and I can't

help myself sometimes. But maybe that means the other person you're talking to is not that interesting. No, when that when when I get interrupted in a certain way, it annoys me deeply. And I was thinking about this in preparation to talk about it with you, and I think that what what bothers me more than somebody interrupting me in let's say a meeting, is them interrupting me and then like my voice not getting heard because they interrupted me.

So someone can interrupt you, and then someone else can say like oh wait, back up. I want to hear the rest of what Francesco said, and it's just like it never happened. And I feel like that's a natural conversational thing that happens. But when someone interrupts you and then later says the exact same thing you said, but everyone else congratulates them for their insight, or they just start talking about something else, and you're like, no, no, no,

we could have had this. We could have been having a different conversation if you had just let me finish. So it's it's that feeling of not being heard, which it's not the interrupting itself, it's the interrupting and then like the group dynamic supporting the interruption. And I think that piece of it is they're a little gendered or

can be gendered. Um. We were thinking about talking about this because interruptions of women in particular husband and the news so much recently with Senator Kamala Harris being interrupted un of course, you know the classic Taylor swift to be interrupted, and it's harder for people to hear women in meetings just to prove that this isn't just us anecdotally complaining about our experiences and meetings. Um, I will just point to some of the research that was a

really interesting study in these two linguists. They recruited forty people to have conversations, and when there was men paired with women, they interrupted them on average two point one times, and when it was men and men they only interrupted one point eight times, which um. And then there's been research looking at the Senate and Supreme Court that both showed that women in these powerful groups also got interrupted more.

It doesn't surprise me at all, but I also have a hard time understanding why people do it to women so much. I mean, years of socialization, Francesca. But the other frustrating thing is that when women are maybe anyone, when you try to push back and assert yourself, women

also in particular get punished for that. We've talked about how you know, when women try to speak up, we're seen as more aggressive or I mean, there's a lot of research about how like women do things that are perceived as angry or incompetent when the exactly behavior by men is perceived as a leadership quality. Yeah, but and also like why wouldn't you been why wouldn't you be angry if you've been interrupted? Five times in a row.

By the time you get to the point where you have to say, like, guys, please quiet down and listen to me, maybe you're right in having a slightly angry tone. There was a Times article that solicited um all these women who had said they had been interrupted, and one of the women quoted in the article said that she had to wait until she was interrupted five times before bringing up because if she did bring it up sooner

than that, then people would get mad at her. It's like you're speaking out of turn if you just expect to be heard all the way through the first time you say something, yeah exactly, oh yeah, yeah yeah. Getting interrupted isn't just annoying. I mean, it is annoying and frustrating, but by affecting who gets to speak in meetings and whose voice gets hurt, it also impacts business decisions. And that's exactly what our guest today has written an entire

book on. Chris carp Wooz is the co director of the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University. He also co wrote with Tolly Mendelberg, The Silent Sex, Gender Deliberation and Institutions. Thanks so much for coming on. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. So what made you decide that you wanted

to study the gender dynamics in group meetings. Well, I've been interested in how small groups make decisions together, how they talk about politics, and how they make decisions together for quite a long time. And as Tolly, my co author, and I started talking about this project, we first sort of got into, um some findings by other scholars, and we noticed some very interesting gender dynamics, and that made

us want to pursue this topic uh further. And I think in addition to those scholarly reasons, just our own experiences as men and women in groups made us fascinated by the dynamics of those groups and about how those groups come to decisions together and what happens when members of those groups start talking together. Can you tell us about what some of those gender dynamics you discovered in

the previous research were. Yeah, Well, we found that first there were, um, there appeared to be differences in the authority that men and women had within the groups, and that gets demonstrated in a variety of different ways, one of which is just the raw talk time of men

and women. And we noticed some disparities there, and we wanted to understand how changing different features of the group, like how many women or how many men are in the group, or how they were asked to make decisions, whether through majority rule or unanimous consensus rule, how those features of the group affected what happened and how exactly

did you research that. One of the places we looked to try to figure out what was happening in these group settings was school board meetings from all across the country. And the interesting thing about school boards is that you actually get really interesting differences in gender composition across those boards, and so that was one place where we could look to see how how does changing certain features of the group affect what happens within the group and what did

you find? Well, we found that it makes a big difference. So in the most common kind of group in politics today, so groups with more men than women that decide by majority rule, we found that women were far less likely to speak up than men. And when I say less likely, I mean not just less likely because there were fewer women in the group, but but less likely than we

would expect given their lower numbers in the group. So, for example, we found in groups of five people with four men and one woman deciding on a topic together by majority rule, the women tended to take up about ten percent or so of the conversation, even though they're twenty of the people in the room. So so when we say that they're speaking up less, they're speaking up far less than we would expect given their numbers. They're

already low numbers in the group. And so we found these really stark gender dynamics where increasing the number of women in the group really helped women to participate more fully. But also changing other features of the group also mattered.

So if we take that same group with one woman and four men and we said, now decide by unanimous rule instead of by majority rule, that also helped the woman who was outnumbered to speak up a little more, because unanimous rule sends the signal that everybody's vote matters and everybody's voice matters. Therefore, did you look into why it was that women didn't speak up as much. Well, we can get some clues about why that's the case.

So one of the things we found was that um going into these group sessions before they even met the other members of the group or had any you know, big interaction together, we found that UM women were less likely than men to be confident that that they could be effective in the group setting. And and we're not the only scholars who have found that. There are other scholars who have looked into this sense of efficacy or

confidence have also found gender differences there. So, so one of the things that seems to be happening is that men and women, most likely because of their experiences outside any individual group, come into the group setting with different sets of expectations and and different levels of confidence about their own authority and their own ability to make a difference in the group. Can you say more about those patterns of interruption that you mentioned, What are they and

how can group dynamics change them? So we invited both students and men is of the community to come in UM for a study about how people make decisions together. And then we told them that later in the lab session they were going to make they were going to have an opportunity to earn some money. And then we said, you get to decide together how you want to divide the money that is earned, and you can divide it

however you want. So if you don't want to divide it at all, if you just want to let some people earn a lot more than others, that's fine, but you could also choose to to to redistribute it in some way among the group members. And so we asked them to talk about that question and to come up with a principle for redistributing the money that they would feel good about for their group and that they would feel good about applying to society more broadly. And so

that's the conversation that they were having. As they were having that conversation, we recorded. We told them that we were recording it, and we and we recorded very carefully what each person said, and then we could go back and look at times in which people interrupted each other by an interruption. We meant a time where somebody was talking and somebody else broke in um and tried to

say something else. And one of the things we looked at was the fact that there are different kinds of interruptions. So when you interrupt someone else, that could either be a positive thing or a negative thing. And by positive interruptions, we mean times when someone is talking and someone else breaks into show support and solidarity. They might say something

like oh yeah, yeah, that's a good idea. And they're technically speaking over the other person, but they're doing it in a way that actually enhances the authority of the speaker. They're helping that speaker to feel good about what they're saying and to let them know, hey, people are listening to you and they want to hear more of what

you're saying. But there are also negative interruptions. By negative interruptions, we mean times when someone interrupts to say no or to take the floor and just start talking about something

totally different. UM that happens a lot of negative interruptions as well, and so we could look at the differences between these positive and negative interruptions, and one of the things we find is that as women become more authoritative and successful parts of the group, they're being interrupted in positive ways more often, and they're being interrupted by men

less often in negative ways. So in groups where there are more women, or in groups where the group has to decide by consensus, that rule where you know every voice matters, then women receive from men more positive feedback and less negative feedback. And that seems to be a really important UM dynamic because it's associated those same groups where women are being interrupted more in more positive ways. Are also the groups where women are talking a little more.

They're also the groups where women are um saying things that are quite distinct and different from what men are saying. And they're the groups where women are seen as more influential and authoritative members of the group by themselves and by the other members of the group. That doesn't mean that men and women can't ever disagree about issues UM

or shouldn't ever disagree um. It just means that really successful groups in the sense of women's authority are groups where there's a kind of underlying sense of rapport and support that even where they have um differences of opinion, they're not interrupting each other in ways at sap the authority of the other members of the group. Yeah, it reminds me of the strategy that the women and the

Obama administration used. They called it amplification, So when a woman made a point, another one would repeat it and give credit to the speaker as a way to kind of amplify each other's voices. Are there are other things that women can do like that. The example of the Obama White House is a really great example of how women can um develop strategies that enhance their authority and

their ability to make a difference in decision making. So that notion of amplifying each other and helping the other members of the group recognize good ideas that women bring forward, I think is it's just a terrific example of the kinds of things that can happen for us. We were really looking at these two factors in our study. We were looking at these two factors. One the decision rule that the group makes and too, um who's in the

room UM. And the good news is that we often have control over one or the other of those things. So if it's a group that is going to make decisions by majority rule, then one thing that UM, people who care about women's participation and authority might do is find ways for more women to be part of that group.

If that's not a possibility, if the group is meeting together and it's and it's not a possibility to increase the number of women, you might the group might might think about how to change the way they make the decision. So groups have control over that too. They might say, well, let's have some rules by which we can be sure that everyone is participating successfully. UM. And so groups with

few women might want to use consensus procedures more often. Now, there are some downsides to consensus procedures that can make it take longer to make decisions. It can be harder in some ways. But having group members think hard about the signals that they're sending to each other is a

really important thing. One of my colleagues from graduate school said that in her sorority they had a rule about um, sort of how to show positive feedback, and they would snap, um, you know if someone was saying something that they really liked. And that's kind of a silly example, but um. But you can think of lots of ways where groups can be sensitive to the signals that they're sending each other.

Other groups, I know, use other kinds of rules like um um, a rule maybe where everybody has to talk once before anybody talks twice. You know. Uh. There there are a variety of opportunities and ideas and and I think the key is for groups to be aware of what the typical dynamics are and to find ways creatively that send the signal that every member of the group matters and that everybody's voice matters. In small decision making groups like a school board, or like a p T,

a committee or even a work team. It's really important for groups to think about these sorts of core core features of the group and how they're going to work together as a group. And the good news, as I said, is that groups have control over this, and there are reasons to care about that, those decision making processes and who's at the meetings besides just wanting to be nicer to women, right, like you have said that it affects the actual substance of the conversation absolutely, and I think

this is the most important reason. Right. So, when women have greater levels of authority and power within the group, when they speak up more often and articulate their opinions, they don't say the same things as men. So it's not just the case that you know, the women in the in the room is just going to repeat what the men have said. Women have have good ideas. I mean, that's kind of so straightforward and obvious, but it's true,

and um don't say the same things as men. That's not to say that women and men always say radically different things. That there's overlapped there too, and there's diversity within both groups of men and women. But women don't say the same things as men, So you're adding you're improving the conversation by adding new perspectives and new ideas. And second, UM, in groups where women are empowered, the

ultimate decisions were quite different. So remember our groups were all about how the group would divide money that they earned. We found that in groups where women were more talkative and thus more empowered, UM, more participatory and more empowered, that the group was much more generous to those who earned the least, so they were more concerned about the poor. UM, they were more concerned about those who didn't do as well. And there were other features of the conversation that we're

also different. But but we think that's a pretty important thing when it comes to big decisions that we're making as a nation. We need the perspective of both men and women to be articulated fully and we find that when that happens, groups make different kinds of decisions. Well, thank you so much for coming and talking to us about this, UM. It was really interesting. I'm glad to be here. Thanks so much for having me so Christmas. Research found that when women are empowered more to speak,

different decisions get made. And it's interesting if you think about it in the context of all these punnies that are trying to hire for diversity, because there's all this research that shows that it's good for the bottom lines of businesses, and if the people that you're hiring, if their voices aren't going to get hurt in meetings, it

really diminishes the effect of hiring them. Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but I liked that his book points out that you're that as a person running a meeting or running a company, you should work hard to make sure that underrepresented groups get heard, not just to make them feel better, although that matters because you want to retain people and you want people to develop in their jobs, but because you're just going to have a different outcome, you're gonna hear

different kinds of perspectives if those less typically less heard people have a chance to speak up, and he gave some examples for how to do that, although I'm not sure that they would quite work in a business world. Yeah, his consensus thing was really interesting. I mean, I liked the philosophy that if you just create a system where everyone has to be heard and has to be acknowledged in order to arrive at a decision, that's that's going to eliminate some of the kind of like natural jockeying

for power and meetings. But a consensus decision making process sounds super long and exhausting to me. Yeah, it's I can I can picture how it would go down in some of the meetings that I'm in every day that are already really long, and I can only imagine it

making them twice as long. I read about this thing back before I worked here called it was a solution to brainstorming, and how it was a similar problem in brainstorming, the extra verts and the loudest people and the interrupters, their ideas get more heard more and so they kind of outweigh the other ideas which could still be good.

So there were these researchers who said that you should do this thing, which has a terrible name called brain writing, and that you should people should write down all their ideas and then you talk about them in the meaning yeah, I love that, and we are we should give some voice of the introverts who are not in the room, since you and I are not introverts, but yes, like you, there is a thing where the people who come off as the smart ones are the creative ones are happen

to be the ones who have said the most in meetings, and that's typically not a measure of anything except how comfortable you are speaking up and interrupting other people. And introverts hate that UM and I like the idea. It's sort of matches that consensus theory of of submitting your idea as ahead of time, so that they get evaluated outside of the meeting, like everybody has to read it, read them over, and then you come in and discuss

everyone's idea. UM it eliminates I think some of that dynamic. Although if you're going to have meetings, you're always going to have people talking over each other. And you know, what we talked about earlier, and what Chris talked about in the interview about women just kind of getting hurt differently or not getting hurt at all, I think is proof that it's up to the person running the meeting.

You know, as an individual, you can't help whether people are going to interrupt you, and you can't help whether you're going to come off as sounding super angry if you object to getting interrupted. So I think it's just really important for people running meetings and running organizations to acknowledge that there's something more going on than just a regular conversation when people are interrupting and you have to kind of make sure everyone gets heard, and there are

actually meanings like that. I wrote a lot about holocracy, which is alternative management to the hierarchy situation that companies like Zappo's use, and they have these very specific meetings and they're called tactical meetings. And I went to one and is like, everyone has a very specific role and it definitely feels different than a meaning, but in some ways you are like, oh, this meeting has a purpose. What are the like what are the roles or what

kind of roles? So they have this person who's the facilitator, who's the kind of the person you're talking about, and they run the meeting and they go through and ask each member if they have any tensions that need to be processed. They go through it like that, and it's it's a whole process and there's a secretary and it's very structured and it is like do people trade off roles or you know, you're like, I'm in the facilitator Okay,

So it's kind of like a personality type. I think we want to do that, but I mean it's extreme and tele ocricy definitely hasn't worked for some companies and has worked for others, but it is an alternative way to think about meetings so that every single person in the room does get to say something. Yeah, it doesn't like. The more structured the meeting, the more you can get around some of these problems like that. It almost looks like the worst thing you can do is just invite

everybody into the room from first. So fun. That's how we have our podcast meetings. We do get derailed a lot though. Yeah, and now it's time for half big takes, halfy fake takes. You can always call in with your own half bake take at two and two six one seven zero one six six And this week we have a listener half big take, and he's responding to one of Francesco's half bake takes about how she thinks it's weird that people pose for pictures with a half hug.

Reladies love the show. Just got done listening to the half baked take around taking awkward pictures. Um, and I just want to chime in that I also really hate the like the one arm half hug and so I, when possible, try to do like the lean into it. So instead of putting my arm around the other person and making it seem like we're doing a half embraced I'll just kind of crane my neck over into their

personal space. And usually they meet me halfway, and so there's this obviously, oh, we are in each other's personal spaces, and this definitely is not normal. But at least we're a little more intimate than just kind of being put up to take a picture. And so I will avoid the awkward touching and back thing whenever possible. But I think it is possible to take a canned photo that looks a little more personal that doesn't involve all of the how we're gonna, how we're gonna do this posing.

I love the show, thank you for keeping up all the half bake takes, and will hopefully call you one garage. I love this. I think this is I think this guy is a is a genius. Yeah, great solution. It's like this sort of subtle mind control that he exercises just by moving his body in a certain direction. I like that he said people just tend to meet him halfway. It's like it's like there's a thing hypnotists do where they like grab your wrists or something, and it like

gets you. It gets you, catches you off guard enough that it sends you into a state of disorientation and makes you vulnerable to them. I think that's what he's doing. He's like moving his body in a way they don't expect, and then they're like, oh, weird. I guess I'm gonna do the same thing and take the picture this way, and it works for him. He's a he's an evil genius.

I think I'm just imagining him like the awkward of like him doing the head thing and somebody putting their arm around and oh no, yeah, but it's I agreed, too much touching. Yeah, all right, Francesco, what is your great idea that you just need to talk the world? Everybody needs to know that the most evil person on the escalator is not, in fact, the person who stands

on the left side of the elevator. Sorry, is not the person who stands on the left side of the escalator instead of walking when obviously you should be standing to the right and walking to the left. It's the person directly behind that person who does nothing about it. So my first hand experience of this is almost daily. I have an epic escalator ride from our subway station outside, which is like eleven stories underground, and there's just this

one narrow escalator that you can avoid writing. And people are pretty good in general about standing to the right and walking to the left, and if you don't walk up the escalator, you're gonna be on that escalator for forty five to fifty five minutes, so you really have

to walk. And the person who stands on the left side of the escalator, it's like, either they're just really oblivious and somehow they haven't no, just this really obvious rule, or they're total sociopath and they're just like a monster. But you you the person who stands behind them and doesn't tap them, like doesn't have the courage, is just a coward, like they're ruining it for everybody else. And it's so brave franchise. I I will always tap a person.

I always do because I'm I'm not just responsible for me. There's all the people behind me waiting to walk up the escalator, that's right, And I've even tapped a person in front of me to tap the person in front of them. This is a good like history lesson. You know, we're not just doing it for ourselves. It's for our children and our children's children. If you stand by and do nothing, you are a part of the problem. Wow. Yes, Becca, what is your deep thought? That is probably not as

deep as you think. Minus. Also, work transit is related. It's about the elevator. So you know how you walk into an elevator as it's closing, the sensor goes off and it opens again. I feel great remorse when this happens. I feel so bad and I but it's usually an accident or sometimes it's like there's one person in the elevator, come on, let me up. I think everyone needs to feel as bad as I feel when that happens, because I see a lot of totally chill people walking and

messing up that elevator sensor. It's a big deal. So you're arguing not that you should feel less bad, but that everybody should feel bad. When everyone should feel bad, they should, okay, particularly in our office building, when there's a bank of six or eight elevators and they come. One elevator comes like roughly every point five seconds, so

there's always another elevator close behind. I know that there are some office buildings where this isn't the case, and you basically have to like hurdle yourself into the elevator at the last possible moment, otherwise you'll be like fifteen minutes later for work than you would have been. But that's not here. I think. Also, I'm saying it's okay to do it as long as you feel as bad as I feel. The problem is not the person who

reopens the elevator doors. It's that like extra five seconds that they stay open after you've gotten on, because then the load time for the whole moralevator. And and it's just like feel bad about it, okay, Yeah, And fundamentally you've lost ten seconds of your day right there, That's right. Think of all the productivity I am. I appreciate it. And this has been half big takes, half baked takes.

Thanks for listening to another episode of game Plan. You can find me on Twitter at ours Greenfield and I'm at Francesca today. Please tweet at us with your half big takes or any other thoughts. You can also call and leave us a voicemail at two one to six one seven zero one six six if you like this show. Head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, and rate and review and subscribe. We got a new one recently and I cannot tell you it

made my day. We love reading your reviews. This show was produced by Liz Smith and Magnus Hendrickson had a podcast as Alec McCabe. We'll see you next week. Something terribly intelligent to say, and I'm going to carry on saying it for the next fifteen to twenty five minutes. All right, can we just we can