How likely is it that someone will call out a fellow team member when they take a shortcut counter to policy, or when someone talks down to a lower ranking employee in another department? How about they know
that a new policy won’t work, but they just go along with it rather than bringing it to a discussion or the attention of a supervisor?
A study written up in the Harvard Business Review, “How a Culture of Silence Eats Away at your Company” suggests that it is more common than people self report.
The 5 most common and costly topics that people stay silent about are:
- “Prickly peers. Failure to confront rude, abrasive, defensive, and disrespectful colleagues.
- Strategic missteps. Failure to speak up when proposals and procedures are riddled with inaccuracies or faulty thinking.
- Lazy and incompetent colleagues. Failure to talk to peers and direct reports about poor work habits, incompetence and lack of engagement.
- Abusive bosses. Failure to openly discuss damage done when people in power resort to control and reliance on position to push their agenda.
- Management chaos. Failure to get clarification when people feel uncertain around roles, responsibilities, specs, and timelines.”
So, what do you do about it? It turns out that change on this must come from the top of the organization. No one will stick his/her neck out only to be chopped off by a supervisor or even more importantly by the President.
Craig Weber has a framework in his book, Conversational Capacity, that addresses this directly. He says that we are always trying to balance candor and curiosity to stay in the conversational sweet spot. If you want to draw out the opinions of others, you must ask for people to test your thinking. He says you must ask for counterpoint to your assumptions.
For example, you could say, I think we should expand to a new location. If you agree with me, I don’t need to hear your thinking. I want to hear any reasons that may come to mind for NOT expanding. In a community where disagreement is safe, the team would give you much to consider. There might not be reason enough to cancel your plan, but you would know many of the obstacles to address if your expansion is to be successful.
It just takes one incident of being belittled for corporate culture to become a go-along culture. It is up to leadership to stay in curiosity and to encourage candor. What can you do this week to encourage candor within your team?
image courtesy of thefederalistpapers.org