can I tell my incredibly verbose boss he talks too much?
A reader writes:
My boss is INCREDIBLY verbose, a disorganized speaker, and consequently pretty terrible at running meetings. If we’re doing five-minute check-ins, his will take 20. If he’s presenting on a topic, his presentation will take most or all of the meeting and will be crammed with irrelevant details and tangents, to the point where it’s genuinely difficult to pull the relevant details out (He never has slides. He might have a giant spreadsheet.) If he’s running a meeting, which he does for our weekly team meetings, he’ll spend about 75% of that meeting monologuing.
He clearly loves to talk; he is palpably joyful when chatting. I also think he uses our meetings to organize his thoughts. As a fellow verbal processor, I am sympathetic, but it’s not a good use of my or my colleagues’ time, and more importantly it makes him incredibly hard to follow when he’s talking. For example, instead of an organized description of the plan for the next quarter, we’ll get every single thought he has about our upcoming events and workflows in no particular order and with a lot of random musings. Sometimes when he talks, I can feel my brain hit capacity, and the extra words start dripping out of my ears. I’m missing important information and action items because he lost me 10 minutes ago when he was debating whether his budget column was blue or purple. (It was bluish purple and that was 10 minutes my colleagues and I will never get back.)
He’s an otherwise decent boss and I like him as a person. Is there a tactful and kind (and appropriate as his direct report) way to say, “Please organize your thoughts before you speak, and consider which details your audience needs to know”? I’ve suggested our meetings have agendas, which has often resulted in two 20-minute monologues instead of one 45-minute monologue (a genuine improvement! still a terrible meeting!). I’m struggling to find a way to describe the problem that doesn’t feel like I would be critiquing his personality. My coworkers share my feelings, but pushing back as a group on this seems mean.
There are a couple of things that you can try, but realistically you’re also probably going to have to lower your expectations about how much you can change him. This sounds like a very deeply-rooted communication style that isn’t likely to change without significant work on his side and some pressure from above.
But yes to agendas! Keep pushing to use them. Your first experiment with them helped, and you should keep going. Ideally you’d circulate a written agenda ahead of time, and quickly summarize that agenda at the start of each meeting — like, “We need to cover X, Y, and Z today, and we have 45 minutes before Jane and I have a hard stop. Can we plan on roughly 15 minutes for each of those?” And then all of you should be assertive about jumping in when your boss is rambling; try to move things along with statements like, “I want to be mindful of the time since we also need to cover Y and Z” and “Since Jane has to drop off shortly, it sounds like the action items will be ABC — does that sound right?”
Beyond that, what’s the dynamic of your relationship with your boss like? Do you have the type of relationship (and does he have the receptiveness to feedback) where you could say, “I’m struggling with how many directions our meetings sometimes go in. You and I are both verbal processors and I’ve noticed I’m missing action items because so much is coming at me. If there’s a way to do shorter and more focused meetings, at least some of the time, it would really help me.” You could even potentially raise this with the whole group at a future team meeting, framing it as, “This is something I’m struggling with / I wonder if others feel the same.” Just touch base with your coworkers ahead of time and ensure that they’ll be willing to jump in and agree with you.
Also, do you have opportunities to give feedback about your boss to his manager? Because this is your boss, you’re limited in the amount of pressure you can apply from below, but a good manager would want to know if someone working for them was struggling with this. If your boss’s boss seems like a decent manager, they’ll be better positioned than you are to give very direct feedback and coaching about this.
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