One of the dangers of being a natural collaborator in an official position of leadership, is that sometimes you can forget that your team members still view you as an authority figure. You might think that you are approachable and that people feel free to disagree with you, while your team members do not forget that you call the shots and might treat you with deference.
I recently ran a team-away session, where I was working closely with the team leader. During the afternoon session, we were all sitting around the table and the team leader was briefing the team on some updates. The team leader came to one of the agenda points and after he finished his update, he asked “Are there any questions?”. The team was silent. “Ok,” he said and proceeded to continue. Having felt that it might just take a little bit longer for people to decide to speak up, I interrupted and asked two more times if anyone had anything to say before we moved on. After the first person spoke out, the rest of the team members joined in and a half an hour discussion followed.What was interesting to me, is that I knew this team leader to be a very open, collaborative, ready-to-be-challenged kind of person – and maybe it was this which made him often forget that, in the end, he was still viewed as “the boss”.
The reason why I have come back to this story is because I have just read Ron Ashkenas’ post on the HBR Blog, ‘The Dangers of Deference’. He starts his post with what I consider a scary story. In an executive leadership team meeting, the CEO of a global company began the session summarising the company’s strategy by showing some slides. This was followed by “You’ve all seen these charts before, so we don’t have to dwell on them.” He then continued with the meeting, even though none of the executives had actually seen the slides. And here comes the scary bit: nobody actually spoke out. Nobody felt like they could stick their hand up and say “Sorry, I haven’t seen these before.”
Ashkenas goes on to point out that, if the senior executives were behaving in this way, they probably expected their own reports to behave in a similar fashion, creating a culture where communication is always hindered by the hierarchical cloud upon it. Some team members will need extra confidence to contradict a person in authority, no matter how approachable they are. It is therefore important that if we hold such a position, that we go out of our way to encourage the necessary challenges and contradictions that will make our team as strong as possible. Otherwise, we might miss out on some very valuable contributions and be in danger of our team members becoming comfortable with just saying “yes” and not thinking for themselves.
(To read more on “The Dangers of Deference”, visit the HBR Blog.)
(For an example on how to create a culture of visible accountability, where people are not afraid to speak out, read the UC post “Fomenting Transparency”.)
