Here's an excerpt from Chapter 7 of The Art of Coaching Teams which was released on February 29!

When I ask educators to name their top challenges working with teams, I most often hear, "How do you stop one person from dominating the conversation?" I've encountered this challenge many times--as a participant in a team and a leader. Initially, I blamed the individual--Why doesn't he stop talking? Can't he see how much airtime he's taking up? How can he be so disrespectful? As a member of a team with a dominator, I looked to the leader to do something about the overtalker. Then I got frustrated with the leader when she didn't do anything. As the facilitator of a team, I worried that it was my responsibility to do something, and I wasn't sure what to do.

I've come to understand that the problem in this situation is the way we look at the problem, the way we identify the challenge. The overtalker is a symptom of the team's explicit or implicit communication agreements, nestled within a larger social agreements about who has a right to speak. We can't develop healthy communication without exploring the root cause of the dominant team member's behavior and without analyzing the context in which he or she is using so much airtime.

Rather than exerting power over someone and creating more rules and consequences, some strategies for responding to a dominant team member have transformational potential. If we take an inquiry stance, we are more likely to identify those strategies. These questions can prompt reflection on the challenge of an overtalker:

• Why might that person talk so much? What does he need?
• How might we help her become aware of the impact that her talking has on the rest of us and on our work together?
• How does our broader social context support this person dominating conversations?
• How have we allowed one person to dominate the conversation?
• What does our team need to have good conversations?
• When have we discussed this and shared our needs?
• Have I been honest about expressing my needs?
• What would it take for us to have good conversations?
• Am I willing to take a risk and ask the questions that might shift how we communicate?

Simply by asking these questions, we're on new terrain.

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