The Irish are known internationally for the gift of the gab and we have many colourful expressions for saying someone is too chatty. “He could talk for Ireland.” “She could talk the hind legs off a donkey.” “They’d live in your ear and rent the other one out for flats.” “I couldn’t get a word in edgeways.”
In Donegal, they might say “Chuirfeadh sé thart muileann” or he would put around a mill.
When it comes to work though, overtalking, interrupting, talking over people and other verbal behaviours may be more destructive than leaders and organisations realise. Even researchers who study leadership culture and communications were surprised recently by their findings on the negative consequences of some common verbal behaviours.
An international group of academics found that “workplace culture is shaped less by mission statements or engagement initiatives than by everyday interaction patterns, especially interruptions in meetings”.
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In 2025, academics William Degbey (Finland), Benjamin Laker (UK), Baniyelme Zoogah (Canada), Sanjay Kumar Singh (UK) and Ghulam Murtaza (France) conducted an 18-month study involving 164 leaders across North America, Europe and Asia. They combined in-depth interviews, workplace observation, team discussions and employee engagement data to get a fuller picture, according to their report in the Harvard Business Review.
To flesh out unexpected findings on interruptions, they conducted a further study of 27 employees and leaders. They found that women and employees from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups were interrupted more frequently, often before completing their ideas.
As a result, many participants adapted by speaking less, self-censoring or withdrawing from discussions altogether.
“Many of the 164 senior leaders we originally interviewed interpreted interruptions as signals of efficiency and engagement. They saw them as evidence of a productive, participatory culture. The follow-up study painted a different picture: the same moments that felt energising to some leaders were experienced by others as exclusionary and predictable.
“In this follow-up study, although both employees and leaders experienced interruptions, they were disproportionately directed at women and people from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups – regardless of seniority.”
Power play
Modern business leaders know that “culture eats strategy for breakfast” so they wisely spend time on getting it right, from defining the culture through values, purpose and desired behaviours to cultivating a sense of shared identity and belonging in the team.
When thinking through the implementation of a strategy, the senior management team typically focuses on mission statements, developing off-site days, employee recognition programmes and rolling out engagement initiatives. The researchers say these actions are “designed to signal what the organisation stands for, influence how people work together and reinforce what behaviours are rewarded. But much of that effort overlooks the everyday interactions through which culture is actually experienced.”
Lesley Murphy, a TU Dublin lecturer in sales and marketing, says: “Leaders need to challenge their own assumptions and realise that the loudest voice isn’t necessarily right.”
Healthy work cultures don’t happen by themselves. Well-structured meetings with clear rules of conversational engagement are essential for cultivating high performing teams. Meeting chairs who emphasise speed instead of depth and debate are losing out on the full intelligence of the group.
“If you focus on the first loud idea, you might get to a potential solution quickly but you’re greatly narrowing the range of alternative solutions in the room. Instead, you get shallower solutions and group think.”
When leaders successfully create a sense of safety, retention increases by more than four times for women and employees from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, according to a 2024 Boston Consulting Group survey.
Who gets interrupted, who gets talked over, and who gets to finish their sentence tells you something concrete about your organisation’s power structures, psychological safety levels and lived values. Interruptions are not just bad manners, they’re an indicator of how staff members really experience your culture.
Interruptions cause measurable damage to trust, inclusion and organisational performance but there are ways to make room for everyone. “Leaders can build more equitable, psychologically safe cultures by recognising interruption patterns, slowing conversations down and actively protecting people’s contributions in real time,” said the international academics.
Meeting chairs and facilitators who want to change this dynamic need to pay attention to three things:
- Who is interrupted: Are the same people being interrupted repeatedly, or does it vary? Does the pattern shift depending on who is in the room?
- When the interruption occurs: Are some people cut off earlier in their contribution than others? Does the timing differ depending on the seniority or identity of the person speaking?
- What happens to the idea afterwards: Is the interrupted idea picked up and credited? Or is it picked up without credit, or dropped entirely?
Finding your voice
In my 20 years’ experience as a conference speaker and chairwoman, board member and media commentator, I see these power dynamics all the time. I’m often the only woman or foreigner in the room and trying to get heard can be a big challenge, even after two decades. The professional women’s groups I’ve worked with – Women on Air, Women for Election, Women in Film and Television, Waking the Feminists, X-Pollinator (film), Women on Boards and Irish Society of Women Economists – have all identified the barriers and tried to help members address them.
Your voice is your power and these are my top tips for getting heard:
Don’t stop. If you are interrupted mid-sentence, continue speaking at the same volume. Raising one hand, palm out, signals that you have not finished. The instinct to trail off or defer politely to someone is understandable but you need to resist it.
Name it and return to your point. When you are permitted to continue after an interruption, re-establish your thread explicitly: “As I was saying before I was interrupted ... ” Don’t pretend the interruption did not happen; research shows the response matters as much as the event itself.
Appeal to the chair. In formal settings – meetings, committee sessions, TV shows and conferences – appeal to the facilitator or presenter: “I’d like to complete my point.” This places responsibility for order on the chair, not on you.
Reclaim your idea. If your contribution is restated by a colleague without attribution, reclaim it calmly: “Thank you, that builds on the point I raised earlier, and I’m glad you support it/ it’s gaining traction here.” Keep the tone warm and factual; the substance and facts are the priority. Do not be drawn into an emotional argument.
Use the written record. Submit key contributions in writing before meetings (email, notes or formal motions). A paper trail creates ownership. After the meeting, check the minutes and request corrections if your contribution has been omitted or misattributed.
Amplify with your network. Identify allies, both men and women, who will explicitly credit your contributions when they build on them, and do the same for them.
Call out the pattern. If interruption is recurring, address it as a pattern rather than a one-off. Speak privately with your fellow board members, a line manager, HR or meeting chair. Document specific instances. One interrupted meeting is an incident; six interrupted meetings is a culture of exclusion.
Margaret E Ward is chief executive of Clear Eye, a leadership consultancy. margaret@cleareye.ie
