I have a good friend who is a CEO and very experiences in implementing lean. I asked him once, “When you actually start as a CEO how do you begin the journey? What do you actually do? His reply was that his first port of call was to the factory manager and he asks what time and where they hold their daily operations meetings and he informs him/her that he will attend the next day. He said he usually got the prompt reply something like “8:30 am in my office”. He was never sure whether they really did hold daily meetings but, as he said, if they didn’t then tomorrow they would certainly hold one and that would be an improvement!
I asked what then happened when he went to the meeting. He told me they usually started with the two minutes of statutory silence. I was a bit puzzled and asked, “was that a mark of respect for the lost production yesterday that could never be recovered” ? No, he said it was the silence when they assumed that I would take over their meeting. They were waiting for me “start the meeting”. He said that they eventually worked it out for themselves. I asked “didn’t you tell them to start”? His reply was “I know they say speech can be silver, but silence really is golden”.
I have often thought about this. The impact of a new CEO turning up at a meeting and then being silent for a whole two minutes must have been huge. We can all imagine the grapevine; “Well what did he say?” “What do you mean nothing?” “He must have said something?” “What nothing at all?” Why was he at the meeting then”? A simple two minutes of silence generating so many really good questions that the team themselves would have learnt from. No wonder that say “silence is golden”.
As managers we see people struggling with things and we want to intervene and help them by telling them “what to do”. We think we have the best ideas about how to “solve their problem”. Sometimes though “Golden Silence” is the best way to help even though the two minutes can actually feel like a lifetime.
