Chapter 19

DOES STAYING SILENT MEAN YOU’RE NOT CONTRIBUTING?

WHEN I WAS WORKING for a state government in the US, I once had to attend a high-level interstate meeting. There was spotless, plush carpeting in the meeting room. The ceiling was decked out in pretty light fixtures and the room was filled with other nice decor. Attendees were dressed to the nines, wearing almost regal-looking suits. There were even representatives from the federal government in attendance. Obviously, this was an important occasion—one in which you had to sit upright and act solemnly—and, embarrassingly, our team was late to the meeting!

The meeting entered into its last phase. I still hadn’t recovered from my shame and embarrassment at being late. All I could think about was quickly ending this meeting that had started off so inauspiciously and on the wrong foot. But just as I was thinking the meeting was going to wrap up and I could make my escape, my American coworker, a female lawyer, who was sitting next to me, took me off guard and suddenly raised her hand to voice her ideas. Usually, in a meeting like this where people pay a lot of attention to hierarchy, all the people who speak up are directors and managers. I would never speak up, much less expect my coworker to do so.

At the finish of the meeting, I quickly ran over to her side and asked her, “Hey, are you OK? You decided to state your piece in the meeting. We had no idea beforehand that you were going to say something. What made you want to speak up?”

I was surprised by her response. She said, “I didn’t want to speak either, but we were already late for the meeting. If I didn’t speak at any point, it would have looked like we hadn’t contributed anything at all.”

For me, being introduced to this concept of “not speaking equals not contributing” was like being startled awake with a good slap on the back. Most of the time, I like to work on my own in silence. If I know that I’m going to have an entire slot of time that I can fully devote to the task at hand without being disturbed by a meeting, a client interview, a phone call, or a random check-in from the coworkers, I’m happy to just hunker down and keep plowing ahead with my own work.

I don’t need to beat around the bush to say it: this experience had a great impact on me! In my next job, I wanted to put as much effort as I could into making sure I wasn’t boxed into a personal stereotype as the “person who’s quiet and probably doesn’t know anything.” I tried out a lot of different styles of expressing myself that weren’t so bad, but it was never magical until Facebook became a thing.