the megaphone

Megaphones are amazing. For nearly as long as we have organized into large groups, we have rolled materials into tubes and spoken into them to help carry our voices to the back of the audience. With the advent of the transistor, handheld powered electric megaphones became practical for projecting our voices¹. Now we could reach levels we never imagined!

At what cost, though?

If you've been to a concert where a megaphone figured into the performance, a protest, a search party, or anywhere else they've been used, you know where this is going².

You lose clarity and detail.

It's louder, it sounds important, but it loses clarity, detail, and, by extension, nuance³.

One of the challenges of leadership is that we all carry around a megaphone. It's the only thing we speak through in our role, and it has its pros and cons. On the one hand, it lets you be heard in the farthest corners of your organization, whatever its size. That is a power that, as Uncle Ben⁴ would say, comes with great responsibility.

Megaphones Suck the Other Ideas Out of a Room

This doesn't have to be a literal room. It could be a space created by an email chain, a Slack channel, a Zoom meeting, or a phone call. Any space, virtual or not, has the same problem.

Once you, as the leader, express your idea, there will be a general tendency to align around it. At the right moment, this can be clarifying and useful. But if it happens too early in the process of exploration, you effectively squash all the other branches of the conversation.

And in an industry trying to innovate, this is deadly.

Steve Jobs famously fought against this with what Kim Scott calls the "Obligation to Dissent." She quotes him as telling an employee after a failure: "Well, it was your job to convince me I was wrong, and you failed!"⁵. This is one way of addressing the issue, and it may be the one that your organization settles on.

For me, it’s more powerful to withhold my ideas, and comments, until we've hashed out everyone else's. A powerful thing happens when the ideas don’t come from you. Instead of pushing, you are now empowering others by sponsoring their ideas.

The key is to ensure you aren’t shutting down the conversation or ideas. You have smart people on your team. Chances are strong they will mention the same things you would. If they do, having them come from a peer allows for better push back, better exploration of the faults of the idea. If they don’t, waiting until the end costs you nothing. But it gives you the chance to play the role of sponsor instead of instigator, which is better for you and your team.

Be patient, and remember you are the facilitator of the meeting, not a normal participant.

Megaphones Lose Detail

Think back to the last time you were part of a protest or listened to a song that features a megaphone in its recording. If it’s been a while, check the footnotes for examples². Think about that sound. What does it evoke?

For me, it evokes lo-fi urgency: rebellion, idealism, immediacy. It doesn’t evoke clarity or pragmatism. Like all idealism, it simplifies the complex reality of the problem into tidy sound bites. That’s useful when done with intent, but reductive when done without thought or care.

Losing detail can be focusing. But when solving problems, understanding the details is crucial. Think about the last time you solved a bug. The more context you had, the more quickly you could understand and address the root cause instead of just the symptoms.

Megaphones are bad for solving problems because they lose the detail needed for accurate assessment and understanding. They are good, however, at moving groups of people in a direction.

Megaphones Exaggerate Priority

This is one of the most detrimental aspects of speaking through a megaphone. Anything you say as a leader seems more important than you might intend. You might think, "Nothing is more important than what I need my team to work on right now!" But how sure are you?

• Is it worth them stopping whatever they’re doing now, wherever it is in the process?
• Could it wait a few hours? A few days?
• Have you considered the second-order consequences of redirecting them?

You’ve likely thought about the first-order consequences. But as a leader, you must also consider the second—and sometimes third—order consequences of your decisions. That’s the job.

The job isn’t to get what you want right now. You aren’t a dictator. You don’t have a divine right to direct the work of the business or your team⁶. You hired a team you trust—or you shouldn’t have hired them. Let them work.

Even so, you might unintentionally misuse your megaphone. For example, I once used mine unwisely and had to later pull team members aside to refocus them on the currently important work. They had dropped everything to address a developer experience issue that, while relevant, was much lower priority than the feature work their team was tasked with. Learn from my mistake.

Remember, anything you say is likely to seem like the most important thing—especially when you’re new to leading a specific team or organization. Use your megaphone sparingly and only with groups that will take it with a grain of salt.

Megaphones Make It Hard to Hear Those in the Back

All leaders must ensure all voices are heard. It’s critical to high-performing teams to amplify the diverse voices on them⁷. You can either use your megaphone to draw others into the conversation or push them further to the sidelines.

Remember that you are teh facilitator of the meeting and not merely a participant. As a facilitator you should absolutely use your megaphone to ensure equal engagement from everyone in the room. Use it to ensure that the conversation doesn't isolate, or push anyone in the meeting to the periphery.

If you have team members who don't typically engage, draw them in. But, make sure that you know who responds well to that. If that team member who is just present doesn't respond well to it, make a habit of getting their feedback in a smaller setting. But do get their feedback⁸.

Conclusion

The question isn’t whether our voices, as leaders, carry greater weight. That’s part of the job. The question is how we choose to use them.

Will we use them productively? Will we use them to dominate?

We each make that choice every time we open our mouths.

Choose wisely how to use your megaphone.

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