Speaking Time and Leadership

Key Takeaways:

• Individuals who emerge as leaders in informal groups speak the most, but they are not necessarily the most qualified.
• Our results, building on decades of prior research, have broad implications for future research, leadership development programs, and practicing leaders

Decades of research have demonstrated that the total amount of time an individual spends talking is a better indicator of how they will be viewed as a leader than their intelligence, domain knowledge, or even —potentially — their official role.

This may seem counter-intuitive if you expect a good leader to listen more than they speak, or to speak less but be listened to more. Nonetheless, researchers investigating qualities that might make a leader good found a surprisingly strong association between ratings of leadership quality and the ratee's speaking time.

As an example of why this association may hold, imagine a group leader who calls a meeting to order, summarizes what has led up to the meeting, provides initial thoughts on the direction the meeting should go, asks and responds to questions throughout, then states further tasks and future directions at the end. That leader may have spoken more than any other single group member but probably did not speak for the majority of the meeting. Unfortunately, research also indicates that ineffective or even counterproductive communication, if there is enough of it, may also result in impressions of good leadership.

In research my colleagues and I published last year in The Leadership Quarterly, we not only confirmed the strong association between speaking time and leader emergence, we did so in a manner that controlled for several technical issues that complicated earlier work. We were able to show that the speaking time/leader emergence association was far stronger than the association between leader emergence and a variety of common personnel assessment tests, including cognitive ability and personality assessments.

Furthermore, even accounting for the tendency of men in a group to speak more, men received on average higher leadership ratings than women — and the discrepancy was particularly noticeable for individuals receiving the most votes in their group. This apparent gender bias highlights the lack of association between personnel assessment scores and leader emergence: any potential influence of the traits assessed by these scores on leader emergence was drowned out, so to speak, by the effects of speaking time and, though a distant second in terms of strength of association, the gender of the speaker.

There is already evidence that group discussion exercises have some success in predicting future leadership performance outcomes and that increasing a group member's speaking time increases subsequent leadership evaluations — including speakers from minority categories. It may be, then, that the problem facing an organization is encouraging the right people to speak.

Future research may test whether or not an individual who voices decisions and coordinates efforts —in other words, an individual who tends to speak at times when group members need leadership most — also tends to speak the most. Organizations may be able to improve leader effectiveness by focusing training on individual initiative and ability to speak at critical moments.