SHUT DOWN BLOVIATING BS
We can all think of typical bullying behavior: finger-pointing, name-calling, and yelling, and ridiculing, threatening, and intimidating others. But one particularly insidious form of bullying is what I call bloviating BS. This is what happens when one person, usually not the most informed person in the room, has the unearned confidence to make things up and take more than their fair share of the airtime in a meeting.
Frank Yeary, a senior finance executive at Citigroup who led his firm’s early diversity and inclusion efforts, explained to me how he noticed this playing out in a way that was destructive. He remarked that though women tended to come to meetings better prepared than men, a few of the men did most of the talking, often speaking over the women. This was not only bad for the women’s careers, he explained, it was bad for decision-making at the bank. The best prepared people in the room were silenced by the bloviating BSers.
This kind of behavior can materially harm a team’s success. Studies show that when one person does all the talking, it harms a team’s performance. In studies of team effectiveness, Carnegie Mellon University professor Anita Woolley has found that “as long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well.” But if only one person or a small subset of the team dominated conversations, the collective intelligence declined. The air time didn’t have to be perfectly equal in every meeting, but in aggregate, it had to balance out.
Project Aristotle at Google also examined an enormous body of data about team performance and found that equal participation was a more significant predictor of team success than having one superstar on the team. I am not sure why so many leaders have an exaggerated faith that it’s the ‘superstars’ who determine a team’s success and so give them all the oxygen in the room. Perhaps they read Ayn Rand at an impressionable age. But the data doesn’t bear this misconception out.
Even if you disagree with my assertion that collaboration is more important than one person’s efforts, one thing is clear: when a bloviating BSer who doesn’t really know what they’re talking about shuts everyone else down, it’s no good. It hurts the team. And it also hurts the person who talks too much. Regardless of what's driving the bloviation (bullying, nervous energy, neurodivergence), the bottom line is that others won't appreciate it. So if someone is talking too much you do everyone a favor by sharing this feedback.
In this episode, Wesley and I discuss bloviating BS with Minette Norman. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts, or here: https://www.justworktogether.com/podcast-season-2
