Research: What Interruptions Reveal About Company Culture
by William Degbey, Benjamin Laker, Baniyelme Zoogah, Sanjay Kumar Singh and Ghulam Murtaza
Leaders tend to define culture in terms of values, purpose, and belonging. They craft mission statements, create recognition programs, run offsites, and roll out engagement initiatives—all designed to signal what the organization stands for, influence how people work together, and reinforce what behaviors are rewarded. But much of that effort overlooks the everyday interactions through which culture is actually experienced.
Last year, we conducted an 18-month, cross-national study involving 164 leaders across North America, Europe, and Asia. We combined in-depth interviews, workplace observation, team discussions, and employee engagement data to better understand how leaders communicate and reinforce culture.
We found that many leaders treat culture as a communication strategy—something shaped through messaging, values, and internal campaigns. But another, more unexpected pattern also emerged. Leaders repeatedly described moments where contributions were interrupted, redirected, spoken over, or quietly overtaken in meetings and conversations. These moments weren’t treated as isolated anecdotes. They were described as signals, small but telling indicators of whose voice carried weight in the room.
While interruptions weren’t what we set out to study, they appeared so consistently—across industries, seniority levels, and meeting types—that we decided to explore them further. We conducted a follow-up study with 27 participants: 11 leaders and 16 employees who had either experienced interruptions firsthand or observed others being interrupted in meetings. Participants were recruited specifically for their experience with these dynamics.
Notably, responses skewed disproportionately toward women and employees from underrepresented racial or ethnic groups. That pattern proved analytically significant, reinforcing what the first phase of our research had already suggested: interruptions were not experienced evenly across groups.
In these interviews, we focused on three aspects of each interruption: the timing, the seniority level and identity of the person being interrupted, and what happened to their idea afterward—whether it was acknowledged, ignored, or claimed by someone else. To verify what participants reported, we also analyzed meeting recordings and field observations. As a final step, we consulted researchers with expertise in minoritized identities at work—including scholars whose research focuses on Black women’s workplace experiences—to ensure that the patterns were interpreted appropriately across groups.
The Findings
Our findings echoed what participants had described in our first experiment, but with a crucial difference. 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 energizing 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. In 19 of the 27 interviews, women described being interrupted more frequently than their male peers. Similarly, employees from underrepresented racial or ethnic groups described being interrupted more often than their white colleagues. This was most pronounced for Black women. All seven of the Black women we interviewed described experiencing early-stage interruptions, or ones that cut off their contributions before their core idea had been expressed. Five reported that their ideas were later resurfaced by others in the same meeting, often without attribution.
Leaders with more positional and demographic advantage were interrupted too, but tended to describe those moments as part of the normal meeting flow. In one global services firm we observed, for example, Black women accounted for just 6 percent of senior meeting participants yet experienced nearly one-quarter of all interruptions recorded. By contrast, interruptions directed toward senior white men tended to occur later, and their points were still acknowledged or engaged with afterward.
We saw this pattern repeatedly.
The Problem
Interruptions shape culture when people change their behavior because of them. In the follow-up study, that was exactly what happened. Those who felt the negative effects of interruptions most acutely began to adapt.
Twenty-one of our 27 participants described changing how they contributed to meetings. Some said they spoke faster or more defensively to avoid being cut off. Others pre-structured their arguments, waited for an explicit invitation to speak, or stopped contributing altogether unless absolutely necessary.
Those behavioral shifts may be the most honest data point we captured. They represent what people quietly concluded about where they stood based how authority was distributed, how communication norms operated, and how consistently certain voices were allowed to finish sharing their ideas.
That’s how meeting behavior translates into culture: people learn, often quietly, whether the organization’s stated values are protected in everyday interactions or suspended when authority enters the room.
What Leaders Can Do
For leaders, the answer is not to eliminate interruptions altogether. It’s to stop treating them as isolated incidents and to start reading them as data.
1. Observe patterns.
Leaders, especially those whose seniority and identity already make them more likely to be heard, often underestimate how unevenly the floor is shared. Namely, these leaders fail to see that being interrupted is not the same experience for everyone. As our research showed, women and employees from underrepresented groups absorb more of the negative consequences, like losing their contributions altogether.
In your meetings, there is likely already an established pattern around who speaks freely, who gets interrupted, and whose ideas make it to completion. You can use our study as a template for identifying those patterns. In your next team meeting, 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 afterward: Is the interrupted idea picked up and credited? Or is it picked up without credit, or dropped entirely?
Some leaders we work with like to formalize this by asking a trusted colleague to map interruptions during a meeting without announcing it to the group. Others review recordings of leadership-team discussions.
In both cases, the insight is often the same: for the first time, leaders see how differently the same conversation unfolds for different team members.
2. Slow the interaction.
Once leaders see interruption patterns clearly, their instinct is often to increase participation by moving faster, intentionally giving more people airtime, or pushing for a livelier conversation. Their logic is: if the conversation feels unbalanced, inject more momentum and more voices.
Our research suggests these strategies fall short.
Speed and forced momentum amplify inequality. The faster a conversation moves, the more it favors those who already feel entitled to the floor. They are quicker to enter, more willing to overlap, and more confident that their contributions will be received. Those who anticipate interruption, by contrast, compress their thinking, hesitate, or wait for a clear opening. Over time, this reduces not only participation, but the diversity of ideas that enter the discussion.
The counterintuitive move is to slow the interaction down deliberately. As a leader, that means encouraging people to pause and think before responding, allowing each contribution to reach completion before the conversation moves on, and resisting the urge to fill silence immediately.
This doesn’t require a formal rule, but it helps to make the norm visible. Small shifts are a good start:
- State the expectation before discussion begins: “Let’s make sure people can finish their thought before we respond.”
- Model this behavior by waiting a few seconds after someone finishes speaking before you respond.
- Reinforce this behavior the moment someone is cut off: “I want to let them finish before we move on.”
- Rotate facilitation—who moderates, sets the pace, and moves the group on—so the same people aren’t always controlling the floor.
Teams that slow their interactions are more accurate. When people can finish a thought, explore an idea before it’s fully polished, and contribute without competing for space, more gets said that is worth hearing. Risk surfaces earlier. Disagreement becomes easier to voice. Ideas that would otherwise have been cut short have room to reach their full potential.
3. Protect all contributions.
Some leaders respond to uneven interruption patterns by calling out interrupters or reinforcing meeting etiquette. This approach rarely works. It treats interruption as a matter of individual manners rather than addressing what drives it.
In our follow-up study, participants could predict whose ideas would be interrupted before the meeting had even begun. They described implicit norms at their organizations—unspoken expectations about what “professional” or “polite” communication should sound like. These norms were rarely stated explicitly, yet they shaped how contributions were evaluated in real time. Expectations around clarity, brevity, tone, and pace influenced whether an idea was perceived as complete, credible, or worth protecting from interruption.
More specifically we observed that faster, overly polished, or confident-sounding speech was often interpreted as more authoritative. Slower, more tentative, or less forceful speech was often observed as incomplete—and therefore interruptible. Because women and employees from underrepresented groups were already adjusting how they spoke in anticipation of being cut off, this created a self-reinforcing cycle: the adaptations people made to protect themselves from interruption often made their contributions appear less authoritative, which made them easier to interrupt, which prompted further adjustment.
A better approach is to protect contributions directly. When an interruption happens, don’t assign intent or try to deliver a lesson on etiquette. Rather, reset the norm before the interrupted contribution disappears. Short, specific interventions work because they return attention to the unfinished idea and remind the room that finishing your point is the expectation here. You can say:
- “Let them finish.”
- “I want to hear the rest of that point.”
- “Let’s come back to the idea that was just interrupted.”
These interventions re-anchor the conversation and help make sure the original point gets heard—without escalating the moment or putting anyone on the spot. As a result, employees begin to infer that incomplete ideas deserve space, and over time, we’ve seen that this changes participation. People who once anticipated interruption begin to contribute earlier-stage thinking. The meeting becomes less performative and more exploratory.
If you’re a leader trying to improve your culture, make sure you’re looking in the right place. Interruptions are among the most honest data available to you—unscripted, repeated, and visible to everyone in the room except, often, the people with the least reason to notice them.
The question worth sitting with is whether you are positioned to see what your culture is already showing you. And once you can see it, whether you are willing to change it.
Fonte: hbr.org
