I stopped talking and started taking notes.
There are probably better meetings at better companies, so I want to be clear that I'm speaking from my own experience only. However, I'm willing to bet that if you're being consistently cut-off (or from the sound of it, systematically excluded from contributing to meetings—being spoken over can be a different problem than wanting to contribute and being proverbially shoved out to the fringes) because of your personality and not your role or ideas, then your meetings are more like mine than the ideal.
Most in-person meetings I've attended at tech companies are, at their essence, a combination of
- performance: demonstrating an emotion that motivates a decision. Someone is angry, scared, or excited about something and wants everyone to know this. "My customer is facing the problem we're meeting to discuss, and it's costing us money! We have to take action about it!" — not new information, but rather providing a motivated urgency.
- signaling: announcing or confirming knowledge of something without adding any new knowledge. This is sometimes constructive, for instance to confirm that something has been communicated correctly, but it's often people signaling to someone else present that they're present and knowledgable. "As I understand it this has been an issue for X months, and we haven't done anything about it because of Y factors." — shouldn't be new information if the subject of the meeting is being tracked elsewhere, but if it isn't said out loud in the meeting, how will everyone know that it matters, and more importantly that they know it matters?
- empty decision-making: agreeing to do (or not do) something, then ignoring that decision as soon as the meeting disbands and doing something else. This is the worst part, and why even when I did get a word in during a meeting, it often felt like it was pointless to do so. "Let's agree to research the Y factors further and circle back on this in a week." — a week later, because the decision was made out-of-band of how all other work is planned and budgeted, and the decision relied on people who weren't invited to the meeting, other priorities have taken over and the research is either incomplete, poor, forgotten, or ignored and some other action taken regardless.
As someone who never consistently got the hang of any of those things to the level of most tech company entrepreneurs, I started volunteering to take substantial and precise notes instead. This in part absolves expectations of me contributing in the way everyone else in the room expects — something I got consistently knocked on in performance reviews under a previous supervisor who was especially guilty of cutting others off in meetings, which was endlessly frustrating — and also tends to accomplish two important things:
- It provides a written record of the meeting that can be shared with people who could not attend or were not invited, improving accountability among the people who did attend. Fewer empty decisions are made when agreements from the meeting are both noted and easily shared. When it's at a distributed company, this also helps include people in other timezones who can't attend.
- It gives me space to form deeper questions than I can raise during the course of the meeting, and to also present those questions after (or even at the end of) the meeting to the same people in a more persistent, referenceable format (email, a tracked ticket, even Slack). At worst, I can reference it to suggest a more structured topic for a follow-up meeting or in-depth presentation.
The benefits can be good: you can help keep the people in the meeting accountable, provide context to people outside of the meeting who need it, contribute additional insight from a more unique angle, and help set the agenda for any follow-up actions.
The downsides depend on your environment: if, like me, your boss values the amount of time you flap your jaws during meetings more than the value of what you do say, you'll take a knock no matter how constructive you are for being intentionally quiet.
Again — these are from my own experiences, and my own solution. The more optimistic solution might simply be to ask those people, before and outside of the meeting, to either be more actively inclusive ("I've said plenty, what do you think about this, president?") or structured ("I've spoken for more than five minutes on this subject, we've agreed to give time for president to discuss."). From my experience, these don't seem to stick for a number of valid but frustrating reasons, like high staff turnover, or rapid and unpredictable changes enforced by higher-level decision makers.