by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n
I was once told that “silence is agreement” and that “everyone who has a brain knows that.” I disagree. Silence is silence. If you want to know what is behind silence, ask.<\/strong><\/p>\n It was 20 years ago. I had sat through some meeting on some forgotten topic where I rolled my eyes quietly at the, what I strongly believed, nonsense that was proposed and adopted. A week later, I presented a different idea in another meeting. It was as if I had fill-in-the-blank-with-something-horrid. I was pulled aside and firmly told:<\/p>\n You were in the meeting. You didn’t say anything, and silence is agreement<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What? Silence is agreement? Yes. Everyone knew that. I knew that, I was silent, I agreed and turned coat on everyone there. I should be ashamed.<\/p>\n Well, no one had told me that rule. Besides, that rule didn’t make any sense. How could silence be agreement? Silently nodding yes could be agreement, but silently sitting still? Agreement?<\/p>\n I recently read something about meetings and working through conflict. The advice was,<\/p>\n Treat silence as disagreement<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The idea is that if someone sits silently in a meeting, stop and ask them what they think about the topic of discussion. Ask them specifically if they agree or disagree or something else (there is always something else). No assumptions; no unwritten rules.<\/p>\n Here, now, I will write a Rule:<\/p>\n Silence is silence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n If you want to know what is behind silence, ask.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Dwayne Phillips I was once told that “silence is agreement” and that “everyone who has a brain knows that.” I disagree. Silence is silence. If you want to know what is behind silence, ask. It was 20 years ago. I had sat through some meeting on some forgotten topic where I rolled my eyes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,63,9,25],"tags":[154,183,132,147],"class_list":["post-1214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communication","category-expectations","category-management","category-meetings","tag-communication","tag-expectations","tag-management","tag-meetings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1214"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1215,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1214\/revisions\/1215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}