It's actually kind of obnoxious to call on people like that. Even if it may seem like a "leadership thing" -- which may explain why it seems such a favored technique among wannabe alpha manger types.

I'm with the parent commenter: if people are in the flow (and give a shit), they'll definitely have something say (and your difficulty will be in getting them to keep it short). If they're not, and you're getting crickets -- it points to a deeper problem. That cannot be solved by, in effect, throwing chalk at people to get them to speak up.

If the meeting isn't germane to your work, why are you in it?

I know people who do this because they're genuinely trying to get input from a broad set of people, some of whom will never speak unless they're asked directly. It doesn't have to be a mark of an alpha trying to beta everyone else.

This assumption does not match up with my experience.

>If the meeting isn't germane to your work, why are you in it?

I personally have gotten pretty good about declining meetings, but plenty of people aren't. Besides, I've been occasionally asked by my direct manager to attend a meeting that it turns out I wasn't actually needed at or remotely interested in for my work.

It would be nice to live in a world where meetings worked ideally and there weren't a bunch of people there wasting their own time, but that is sadly not the world we live in.

"Sorry, I don't see myself using this product/service/team - not because it isn't good, it just isn't relevant to what I'm responsible for/in charge of".

I feel like people treat meetings like this inescapable prison; once you're invited, you can never escape! It's bonkers. If you don't need to go to the meeting or don't have applicability… don't.

I work for a Fortune-listed company -- exactly the kind of place where attendee bloat thrives and I've never once had any manager or supervisor aggressively push back on my declines if they are valid.

When you force people to talk you are getting the metric (people asked questions) but because you are forcing it the metric becomes disconnected from what you actually care about - was this meeting a waste of time. You haven't actually improved things you've just obfuscated the problem.

The meta point being I don't think there are simple tricks or shortcuts to better participation.

Unless you invite totally irrelevant people to meetings, they should have some kind of view or feedback on whatever was just presented.

If you're asking someone who has literally nothing to do with that area of your work then, that's just kind of a weird situation. The key is tying the question to the area that is impacted by the person you're asking. It could be an open ended question and not even super specific.