Share of Air

Thinking intentionally about how much time you spend talking vs listening.

At the beginning of March, I discovered a feature in Microsoft Teams called Speaker Coach.

In a nutshell, Speaker Coach will listen to you during your Teams calls/meetings, give you live feedback (i.e., "Try speaking slower" or "Vary your intonation by emphasizing different words as you speak"), and, after the call, give you a summary of how long you spoke, what you did well, and what you could improve on for next time.

While the real-time feedback is helpful during the call, I've been fascinated by the "Time Spent Speaking" metric. Fascinated because it has allowed me to be very intentional about how long I am talking vs how long I am listening.

This fascination has led me to focus on what I've been calling Share of Air - or what percentage of a meeting I am speaking vs creating space for others to speak. Since turning on this feature at the beginning of March, in 1-1 calls, I've taken 48% of the airwaves.

While I'm glad it's less than half of the time, I still have room to go here - being more intentional about listening to others' points of view, asking questions and then sitting back and listening, and ensuring others are getting their fair share of air.

Here's my push: If you use Teams, consider turning on this feature. Or, at the very least, pay attention to your share of air moving forward. Once you do that, pay attention to the amount of time you spend speaking vs listening.

If your Share of Air is low, consider raising your voice and sharing your perspective more often. We want to hear from you.

If your Share of Air is high, think about how you can give the floor to others. You have good ideas, but so do the people talking to you.

The first step though, is to start paying attention.

Thanks for spending time with me in my workshop,

Eric