When good leadership goes quiet

Again they remained silent.  This was one of the most talented senior leadership teams I had worked with. Each individual an expert in their area, with experience to match. Yet the CEO lamented to me about how passive this team was in their executive meetings. Rarely did people speak up about topics and they were often so silent it felt awkward. 

My first hypothesis was that it wasn't a psychologically safe team and that people were afraid to speak up. This is after all the most common reason why teams don't have equal contribution from all members. But this wasn't the case. The CEO is one of the most supportive, encouraging and vulnerable leaders that I have met. She had laid the foundation for a terrific climate of safety, so I knew this wasn't the issue. 

My next hypothesis was that the team simply didn't have the foundations for how to interact and engage with each other effectively. Teams need to learn how to effectively debate and challenge topics once they have consciously built an environment of trust. This was certainly part of the answer. After a full day focusing on the purpose of the team, setting agreed behavioural guidelines on topics such as trust conflict and accountability, the team certainly made strides forward. Yet the silence remained. 

My other hypothesis was that the team members simply didn't know each other well enough to be able to open up fully in the team meetings. There had been some changes in the team and a couple of new people had joined. This was a small part of the answer as well and, after some intentional relationship building at the individual level, I could sense a palpable change in the level of comfort that team members had with each other. 

I was surprised then in a follow-up session 6 weeks after that team day that there still remained moments of reticence and silence in the team. The team had certainly made progress and they shared some concrete examples of this, yet that reluctance remained in the room.  

The underlying reason was both surprising and profound. 

With strong trust and vulnerability in the group I named what I saw, that there was a reluctance to speak out and asked them why. Not surprisingly this led to a long period of silence. Then each leader started to share.  

It turns out that each individual leader had their own personal reason for not speaking out. For one leader it was about not wanting to over share her knowledge and experience and a genuine desire to let others speak up first so that they would look good. For another it was fear that they didn't know the topic under discussion all that well as it wasn't in their area of expertise, so they didn't contribute. For another it was frustration that he was always the first person to speak so now I just sat back and waited. 

So here was a team that was highly effective with truly nice people and yet each individually, in their desire for wanting the best for others, were undermining the effectiveness of the team. 

In our leadership parlance we call this co-creation. It’s the leadership capacity to realise that the collective outcome is more important than the individual outcome. It’s where we are self aware enough to know that overplaying our strength – such as humility and reflection - is detrimental to others. It means welcoming the discomfort of toning down our key strength and offering some of our other strengths instead.  

In front of the group, our first leader reframed that by not contributing her wisdom she was doing the team a disservice. In that moment of public disclosure she was emboldened. Her shoulders pulled back and she said “watch out everyone!”.  Laughter broke out in the room but not a nervous laughter, rather a supportive and welcoming laughter. A laughter that spoke without words “bring it on”.  

What allowed the team to get to this epiphanic moment was a shared realisation that they could do better, that they weren’t yet at peak performance. This shared desire to improve and learn kept them searching for what they needed to do.  

In the end, each person needed to change a little. As is always the case.